Digital Sculpting Week 06

Week 6: This week was all about texture painting.  Scott gave us this very nice sculpt of an Ogre bust and showed us the techniques used for silicone mask painting and how to apply these techniques within Zbrush.  As you can see from the top image the early stages of laying down a heat map and mottling look horrific! very much like some kind of nightmare clown but once you add the next few passes the result is very cool and realistic!  The top flesh toned ogre was me sticking closely to Scott's lesson example but I started with a way tooo yellow base tone which is why the character looks a little jaundice.  The blue ogre was my later attempt having got a little better at using the painting techniques.  Trying to mimic an all blue skin tone like Avatar is very tricky but if you use the same techniques with a little tweaking the result is pretty nice!  All of this is based on Optical Mixing which is where the human eye sees two color pigments and blends them together (see Georges-Pierre Seurat's paintings e.g A Sunday afternoon)  While experimenting with this I tried to get a grey tone for the ice Ogre's lips by mixing blue and orange and was honestly surprised when it worked!! the human brain is a strange thing!
The second image was a bit of fun mixing my Intro to Modo lesson from Digital Tutors with my poly painting homework.  The end result being an ogre who is a little self conscious of his pale skin deciding that some fake tan might help him score with the Ogresses!! ;)

Gnomon Digital Sculpting Week 05

Week 5.  This week's homework was all about Hard Surface Modeling in Zbrush.  I really loved the homework for this week combining all the new things I have learnt in Zbrush with my hard surface skill set has been great!  So my character is somewhat of a combination between a Storm Trooper, Ezio from Assassins Creed and the Crysis nanosuit.  The environment was built and lit in Maya and some of you may recognize her battle knife from Day 26 of this blog!
All in all I had a lot of fun with Hard Surface modeling in Zbrush and I have improved a lot since this image which was my first attempts at hard surface modeling in Zbrush from last year:

I really look forward to working on some new Zbrush projects but first on to Week 6 Gnomon Homework.

Digital Sculpting Week 04

Week 04 was dedicated to learning to build base meshes (skeletons) with ZSpheres as you can see in the bottom image.  This can then be used as a low poly base to sculpt additional detail on top of .  The skeleton can also be used as a Rig allowing you to pose your character after sculpting! This was a very cool tool being able to pose my Hydra with a skeletal rig rather than Transpose Masking (one of the Zbrush alternatives for posing) was much closer to what I have done previously in Max and Maya.  I am so happy with the way this sculpt turned out, meshing, frog, lizard, snake and turtle concepts together worked (surprisingly!!) :D  My tutor really liked this model and saved it to his 'awesome examples' folder for future reference, feeling pretty good about that!! :D

Day 56: Recurve Bow

Day 56.  This was surprisingly straightforward as a model :) even with the organic shape of the body.  So I am planning to approach my modeling projects a little differently now.  I am no longer going to be posting a small project every day but instead will still be practicing an hour every day and submitting completed projects every few days.  I will either be working on more complex projects like this or simple projects while I learn Modo. Yay for affordable Modo indie!!

Day 54 & 55: Half Life Health Station

So I have been a little ill over the last few days and it had me thinking how nice it would be if I could just walk up to one of these and be all better in a couple of jabs :p

Digital Sculpting: Week 3

So onto my 4th week of Digital Sculpting and we are learning about ZSpheres for building quick character skeletons which can then be fleshed out into full sculpts.  Last weeks homework was to take an existing low poly bust and sculpt geometry on top of this without dynameshing the original mesh.  For me this meant keeping to humanoid characters would be easier than more wild monsters etc.  So I thought back to some of my favorite Sci Fi programs which used prosthetic makeup.  I started with Joss Whedon's Buffy and found a good reference of a Vampiric Cordellia.  I think its possible that the image was actually taken from Angel since Cordellia, as a character didn't make it far past Season 1 of Buffy.  After feeling that she came out pretty well I moved onto a couple more tricky sculpts.  Scorpius and Ka d'Argo from Farscape were so much fun to sculpt! I really enjoyed the amazing prosthetic work that the Jim Henson company does so trying to replicate that was both tricky and exciting.  Finally I finished with Aaron Eckhart as Twoface which was tricky but I think I got a good likeness.  The exposed facial muscles took forever!! I tried so many different ways trying to keep the original mesh geometry and build it up to look like muscle but in the end I gave in and used separate meshes for each muscle. It's been a really fun week and I cant wait to get going with this weeks homework!
I have also not submitted a model on my Model a day blog for a few days.  I have been under the weather in a big way but have recently put something pretty cool together that is currently batch rendering so keep your eye on this blog!

Day 53: Tricorn Hat

Day 53.  This is about the 3rd time I have tried to model a tricorn pirate hat! I tried it when I was first modeling in sketchup.... (didn't get very far)  I tried it again when we were doing a pirate themed interactive audience game at the NFTS (we wound up downloading a character) and today marks the day I finally complete one :p  It was a pretty tricky model and even now I still want to adjust it but I hit my hour mark just as I finished the inside of the hat.  The trick I tried this time was to start with 3 half cylinders for the folded parts of the hat.  Previously I had started with the half sphere in the center of the hat but found myself in really tricky situations later as my verts bunched up in the corners.  By starting with the folds I was able to avoid this and thus connecting the domed part of the hat was easy.

Day 52: Chunky Spanner

Day 52. Another prop for my zbrush project.

Day 51: SteampunkGoggles

Day 51.  The first of a few cool props I am building for a cool 3D scene I have planned for a Zbrush portfolio piece.  I am hoping to have it modeled for the end of the week.  This way when we learn texturing and lighting in Zbrush I will be able to take it to the next level :D  I went a little off reference for these goggles since I really like the attached magnifier lenses.  For me they are such a Steampunk thing I really had to add them!

Day 50: Skateboard Textured

Day 50.  I've finally hit Day 50!!! woop! It's been a pretty big day!  I have just been sent a fixed link to download the new Zbrush :D Jen and I saw Big Hero 6!! which was an amazing experience, I totally recommend it to anyone! and I have finished the day with some beautiful renders!! Jen helped a lot with getting all the settings right to make the textures pop!  She has learnt so much from her Gnomon texturing course and its only 4 weeks in!  Anyway enjoy the shininess!!