My focus over the last several months has been to learn Zbrush. It's been a slow process, only because my time gets divided with so many other things in life. But I finally have my first project completed and a temporary Zbrush turnaround on my demo reel. I ran into some issues with getting things to render out correctly in Maya/MentalRay but I've worked through those issues and will, hopefully within the week, get a Maya turnaround rendered for my demo reel. I have much more control over the speed and rotation on the Maya turnaround then the Zbrush one.
This project really has been a learning process, which is good because I definitely know what I will not do and what I will be sure to do next time around. Because this was my first Zbrush project and I stumbled my way through learning, this project took much longer then hopefully all of the following Zbrush projects will take. I started learning Zbrush with a great tutorial I found.
Learning Sculpting in Zbrush (Beginners to Advanced) by Jason Welsh. This was incredibly helpful to get started in how to navigate around Zbrush and get familiar with the tools and such. I don't think next time I would approach starting a new character in Zbrush the same way, only because I ended up having to go back and spend a bunch of time retypologizing my character in Maya so that the typology was correct. However the tutorial did serve it's purpose for the time and I am very thankful I found it and was able to use it. I'm sure I'll probably go back and reference some of the points every now and again.
The thing I liked about this tutorial vs other Zbrush tutorials I've found online is this really did start at the beginner level. This assumed the viewer was a brand spankin' new Zbrush user and had no idea how to navigate around the software, which was the case for me. I wasn't able to really find any others that had this approach even though they may have claimed to be for a beginner. Most everything else I found came with the approach that you were already familiar with the software. And while those do have their place, it was nice to have this completely novice tutorial as well that was free.
Ok so here is the final turnaround and then I'll post images of the process going through it.
The very beginning of the sculpt I posted in
Pipe head and learning Zbrush, this is the part that I was following along the tutorial. Then I decided to do a complete full body and take the pipes off of the head for a realistic sculpt of a man. I wanted to show that I could do a sculpt with realistic anatomy. I will go back and do a another sculpt with this guy and then I'll bring back the pipes and give him a full outfit with a lot of hard surface sculpting. It's going to have a steampunk feel to it. I want to be able to show a range of what I can do. However, I think before I do that I am going to go back to a previous project I never finished
In flight and on paper and bring the hummingbird geometry into Zbrush. I want to really get into the detail of the feathers and do a full texture painting in Zbrush to learn what I can do with materials and textures in Zbrush. I'm sure that will take some time as I'll be in the learning phase of color within Zbrush.
Ok onto the images. When I did the initial layout of the muscles in his stomach and back everything was much harder and more defined. After having to retypologize the geo in Maya when I re-imported it back into Zbrush it softened the projection back onto the geo, which I realized in the end looked so much better.
12-10-11
As you see in this next image everything gets a whole lost softer here. Plus he now has hands and simple feet. I also unified his head to his body. All of which next time I will do first in Maya before I ever go into doing any finer detail.
02-09-12
Here are some images of some of the detail I worked on for his fingers and the simple progression of it. The final images being the typology of his hands and detailed skin textures.
Here is a close up of his chest before I started putting skin texture on. I ended up having to do the veins twice just because of loosing information on the re-projection.
His face actually changed through the process. I thought I had everything done (this was before I retyplogized) when I realized I couldn't ignore the typology in his head and that he really needed more typology around the ears, eyes, and mouth. I ended up bringing it into Maya and retyologizing his head... when it got projected back into Zbrush I lost so much detail that I had to re sculpt his face... which ended up making him look a bit different. The first image is the before, the second the after. I must admit I like the second one better because there is much finer detail.
Before
After
I love the detail you can get in Zbrush, the texture of skin!
I could go on posting all the random maya screen grabs I got when I was having issues with trying to get the normal and displacement maps to render correctly but perhaps I'll save that for the next post once I get the Maya turnaround finished. In the meantime here are the final turnarounds for my dude.
