Caveman Progress - Zbrush

So, I've brought this character back into Zbrush, and encountered more cause for irritation. The short of it is that I can't re-topologize this character in Zbrush as I had planned, and wanting to move ahead on him I foolishly redid the zbrush work before getting the final word on why the retopo wouldn't work, which stinks 'cause I left some loose-ends in the re-topologizing stage that I had planned to fix later but as it turns out - the reason I couldn't couldn't retopo him in ZB is apparently non-fixable, at least until a ZB update. So, now I wont be able to fix those loose-ends without having to redo the ZB work again. Need I say more? Well, it's a learning experience I guess, and I'm happy with my work thus far anyway.

Caveman Retopo WIP

I recently decided to fully re-topologize this model. Here's how the face is so far (Update: Just added the body WIP image).

As usual, I'm experimenting with topology, ever-seeking a more true-to-life flow. Areas that have received special attention in this effort are the Nose, Eyes and Brow.

In the nose-bridge I have attempted to work out a better representation of the flow of wrinkles that result when a person crinkles there nose. And the nose-tip topology has been adjusted to better define the sometimes bulbous shape of the nose-tip, and the separation that is then present between nose-tip and nose-wing.

It has been my observation that on most people the tension of wrinkles at the meeting place between brow and forehead, in the center of the head, flows up and outward to either side, creating a shape something like the center of the letter M, but smooth. I have attempted to design the topology to be able to do this more naturally. I think I succeeded, and in this approach found a good way to usefully redirect the many edge-loops I tend to get in the center of the brow.

The eyes are where the biggest deviations from the norm are. It is my opinion that the standard topo-flow of full-loop circles around the eyes unnecessarily contradicts nature. But, I recognize the organizational advantages of it, and also the reality that in a low-poly model it may be the most viable solution. This is not a low-poly model but I have attempted to maintain at least one full-loop circle as the outer-most region of the eye topology, in-order to take advantage of its organizational properties while enabling me to get a little more creative with the rest of the eye topology. While I feel that what I have here is a good step toward my goal, I suspect that I will have to abandon the full-loop circle approach entirely, and adopt something more like a cross-hatch approach in order to get the kind of topo-flow that I want. In the mean time I'll probably just leave this as-is.

Zbrush Caveman

Well, it really has been a while since I posted anything. I've been really busy with other things. Including a very fun project - a book that my siblings and I put together for my parents, that I ended up being the compiler of, which included devising the bulk of the creative look for everyone's pages, which were all unique to each person (there are nine of us). It was a lot of work but thankfully I had my wife and Sister to draw on for help with the creative part, which they ended up playing a big roll in. Anyway, this post is not about that.

This piece is another Zbrush exercise. Again, I started only intending to do the head, but ended up taking it a little further. What you see here is probably about 7 to 8 hours of work (excluding experiments which did not contribute to the look of the sculpt). Notes: the dreads took a surprisingly long time, even with Zspheres. I'm also going to eventually swap out the dreads for more messy hair that would be more in keeping with the caveman idea that this is based on, namely the middle image, bottom row of this previous post:
http://fbbsketches.blogspot.com/2006/10/cavemandino-shortfilm-idea.html
Of course the original image is more cartoony, and a little more dumb looking. I may narrow the eyes on the current sculpt to bring back some of that dumb look. As for the rest - we'll see, I may just leave this where it is and move onto something else.

This project has served me well as a subject of experimentation. I thought I'd give the local sub-division approach another try. In the end I came to the same conclusion as before - nothing beats proper topology from the start. In the close up on the head you can see some puckering at the borders of areas that underwent local sub-d. This led however to learning the process of retopologizing a mesh in an external editor and reapplying the high-res details in ZB. So I did a quick low quality re-topo of some area's of the model where local sub-d had been used, and much tweaking and discovering of ZB quirks later:( - got it figured out. Anyway, for all to see - here you have it.

Learning Zbrush

This is a character who's head I modeled from a sphere the first night I obtained Zbrush 3. Later On I came back to it and used it as a subject upon which to learn about subtools, transpose and stuff. I call him funny face.

Faerie

I haven't been able to get to this as much since my last post, but what I have been doing is a lot of tests on shaders, textures and modeling of the eyes; other tests with sub-surface-scattering for when I texture this character; making some topology tweaks in adding geo for wrinkles in the elbows and around the eyes and learning UV-Layout and Zbrush. In these screen captures taken from Zbrush you see some of the work I've done on the hair and clothing for practice and presentations sake. I intend to replace the hair with a true hair system, likely XSI's when I get a student license of advanced, but I wanted it to look somewhat presentable until then. I'm not really happy with the hairline though. I'll probably fix that later. I have to point out how much I love this Red Wax material in Zbrush. It looks so nice. I setup an environment for making some renders in XSI as well. I'll put up some of those renders too.

Well, here are some XSI renders. On the body is an incidence based shader for the color, to give it just a little more life than a flat color would, plus Ambient Occlusion on a blinn. The eyes are more involved but I'm not happy with the results. I've been doing a lot of grumbling over them. Anyway, here they are at present. I have four lights in the scene. Oh, and the wire was a happy accident in comp using PS. I included a full 8 point rotation as well because the different lighting at different angles reveals different things.

HNA

I'm putting together a new portfolio. Here are some test pages featuring some of the work I did on the film Happily N'ever After (HNA).

Recent Drawings

Concerning the Horned Animal - This was just a creative anatomy study, not that it's really all that creative. The structure is sort of a blend between horse and deer. While working on the profile I found myself wondering what was wrong with the hind legs, then it occurred to me that I had drawn the pelvic, or bum region lower than the shoulder region. Most animals of this general construction aren't built like that - except giraffes ... and bears I think. Probably some others too. Anyway, I finally decided to just go with it and take on the challenge of this particular uniqueness (looking forward to possibly doing it in 3D, animated and all), figuring it would make it just that much more interesting, subtle as it is.

Faerie Update

There are quite a few changes to report. Clothes are now roughed in. I'm modeling them with the intention of using cloth simulation. Wings are now on, accompanied by the necessary changes to the topology in the back, and for the better I think. The feet are now done, and there are lots of tweaks to the topology and form. Probably the most significant change in the form is on the nose. On a whim I squished it into the face a bit more, and I liked it.

Solair Media

Well ... irritating! When did blogger start resizing the images you upload? Needless to say that is what has happened to the image for this post. maybe it's a dimensions limit. Anyway, my apologies to anyone viewing this for the tininess of the images. I had combined them thinking that that would make for easier viewing, and now they're all too small. Anyway...

Thought I should finally show what happened with the project I was doing for a friend. Well, the short of it is that there was a bit of waffling, I wasn't sure if they were still going through with it, then all of a sudden they wanted it yesterday. So, these images are from what I was able to get together for him in a very short period of time, probably 8 to 10 hrs spread over a week. I was having trouble figuring out how to put some of the stuff together in 3D, so, given the urgency I drastically changed the plan and put this together instead. It meant needing to relearn what little I had once known about After Effects, plus learning a number of new things about it on the fly. I've included a link to a test render that I did. This is basically the end result, except that I ended up removing the "Illuminating Your Imagination" slogan, and the stars in the Background, and after delivering the product I made a shorter version that I didn't get around to giving to them. I'll put that up later, and get it to them later. Oh yeah, the sun was rendered in XSI using a customizable lens shader. Everything else was done in After Effects and Photoshop.

Click here to download the video

Clicking on the link should automatically start the download, otherwise right-click on the link and select "save link (or "target") as" from the menu that appears.

EDIT: My website expired and I haven't set up a new one, so for now this video is no longer available.

Faerie Hands

I've modeled the hands with the intention of making a wide range of wrinkles available for rigging. Personally I don't much like the idea of faking such animated wrinkles.

Unfortunately I seem to have failed in my goal of having only 4 sided poly's. I've had to resort to using 1 triangle. It's very irritating to me. I'll probably take another stab at eliminating it later.

Having completed the hands I'm left with mixed feelings. I'm rather proud of what I've done in some regards, but I'm left with an uncomfortable feeling over a few things, mostly the sheer density and especially the resultant need to integrate the hands into the arm in such an abrupt and inelegant manner as I have. Ah well, at least where I've ended them on the forearm, just before the wrist, is a region that should normally undergo very little deformation so I don't think any problems should arise.