Justin VS ZBrush - a sketchbook
polycounter lvl 19
It's time for me to get serious about sculpting. I've gone about 7 years in the industry without having to use ZBrush but I don't know how long that will last. Hopefully keeping a sketchbook will motivate me to work at it on a daily basis.
here's tonight's sketch. I probably should have a character in mind instead of just sculpting a generic person :P
4/15/2015
Latest
here's tonight's sketch. I probably should have a character in mind instead of just sculpting a generic person :P
4/15/2015
Latest
Replies
Just curious, how do you manage to avoid zbrush? :P
Justin, it's good to see you taking this on, it's quite weird actually, i've seen a bunch of mobile/indie devs who were all doing handpainted stuff moving on to a zbrush pipeline to help get a more stylised look while still being handpainted, i know big blizzard uses zbrush on WoW now too for helping to generate gradients and stuff (i think there's even an art-dump here on how they did it for Cataclysm).
Anyway, i think your biggest challenge here is going to be the program itself, you already have a solid foundation in form, it's just a case of applying that to a new toolset. So don't hesitate to ask for tips about the UI, also don't be afraid to customize the UI to make it closer to what you want it to be. The default zbrush UI is garbage in my opinion and once you've shifted things about it can become incredibly powerful.
Being familiar with Mudbox I found that this ui has helped me out a lot in clearing out the clutter.
I also locked the camera axis to y just like for maya/max. I found it was only just messing with my head most of the time.
Any brushes that I use without a key binding I can just drag into the lower taskbar.
here are the links to download the UI, matcaps, and brushes:
http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/UserInterfaceLayouts.zip
http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/Materials.zip
http://crazyferretstudios.com/public/BrushPresets.zip
all three of those go in your Zstartup folder
You're also a 3D Coat master dude so you'll probably have no issues with it. I use the stock Zbrush interface just cause I used to teach it and it was easier than teaching customizing the UI. I really need to take some time and do a custom one. Having 6 common brushes at the bottom is great. I'm used to hitting B, then T, then D or whatever for the brushes.
Can't wait to see your work evolve with it.
Wtih organic stuff, you can get away with the stock interface. However, if you want to start doing some hard surface stuff quickly, I'd highly recommend a custom UI. The time it takes to navigate through the brush/stroke/tool palettes quickly adds up.
My rule is if I use a tool more than 5 times in a sitting, I add add it to my custom UI.
Also, go to Preferences > Interface > Ui > Uncheck Wide Buttons. I don't think they're necessary and they end up eating up space.
@Boozebeard: Pretty neat Custom UI with all those shelves on the side.
Also custom UI cause why not.
I had a killer headache yesterday so I didn't touch it but this is what I tackled today. I referenced hazy memories of anatomy classes and an anatomical skull model I have at my desk. Unfortunately the model is missing it's teeth & lower jaw:
I still need to try my hand at a bust, so far my biggest challenge has been getting eyes to look right and clothing, especially lapels and things like shirt-tails, those crisp 90 degree angles always end up looking smooshy :P
There are a few good brushes for this. If you check out the Lightbox (,), there are brushes that Zbrush doesn't load by default that are handy.
Also, two brush sets I highly recommend.
MAH set (for hard edges)
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?75050-Zskiff-a-licious!&p=1006730&viewfull=1#post1006730
Selwy's Cloth (self-explanatory)
http://www.selwy.com/2009/zbrush-clothes-tutorial/
I began sculpting off of the skull I created earlier but I wasn't happy with how it was looking so I retreated to my safety zone: stylized, ugly, grizzled mugs only a mother could love
yikes, almost 3 months since I last opened zbrush!
(update: painted eyes)
can I use it for my avatar? I wish it had teeth.
since I barely have any experience sculpting, retopologizing and baking I tried it out with substance designer. Frustrating and disappointing!
Keep it up man! You're learning very quickly
Frank's Monster by Eric Yan: concept
I have to scrunch the face in some more and do some other adjustments
Yup, I'm going to recreate the whole thing. This is what I got done today
<edit> did a few more hours of work on it
I'm actually in the same boat as you are; I'm also a handpainted artist who only really started to delve into Zbrush just now. :poly136:
As for mister Frankenstein, I think some of your bevels on the metal parts are looking a little bit soft, particularly the nipple bolts. One brush I like a lot for doing chunky, rough-hewn bevels is TrimDynamic. It allows you to shave off edges while maintaining a crisp, chiseled look.
If an edge has gone soft and you want to bring it back, here's one thing you can do:
-Draw a stroke along the edge using a small standard brush (for a subtler effect) or the Dam standard brush (for a strong effect). If you need to, use lazy mouse to get a steady stroke. Build it up a little higher than you think you need.
-Using the clay brush at a low setting, lightly brush on either side of your initial stroke to fill in the valleys.
-To finish off, smooth on either side of the ridge, taking care to not soften the ridge itself. This is easier if you reduce the focal shift on the smooth brush.
I hope that helps! The specifics of the brush behavior can be a bit tricky to get into in the beginning. It's especially frustrating when working on something you know how to do really well when painting, but the sculpt just isn't behaving the way you want it! :polytwitch:
The teeth shapes aren't just cubes and should be moved up a little bit , especially the first one and some of the others need some rotation.
The bolts and screws have a bevel and the screw which is in his head has a little space before it goes into the skull
Also this might be extreeemely minor but the staple things ( I don't know what they're called) in his neck from the concept are are 7 and you have 11 , again , might be extremely minor but wanted to point that out anyway.
But I really like this so far , good job man.
about 40-50 hours of work
That was a conscious decision, I thought they were too small and would just show up as visual noise and didn't fit with all the big chunky shapes. I can add them in later if needed though.
My current game plan is to retopo, bake out maps in substance designer and try out the 3DCoat 4.5 beta for some PBR paint tweaks. My only baking experience is on really really low spec stuff - 128x128 textures and under 1k tris so I'm kind of winging it here.
Unfortunately I thought I could retopo and bake it today and finish it up tomorrow but the retopo isn't going so great. I'm not used to using more than 2k for a character, I feel like I should start over on the majority of it.
Any help would be appreciated
Substance bakes nice though
since I'm going to bake him out in Substance Designer, does anyone have a lead on a good skin substance?
The tubes themselves could stand to have more stacks, especially where they bend sharply. These days, you can afford to use enough polygons where you avoid a lowpoly silhouette. This bust could be 10K polygons or more and noone would bat an eyelash.
On mechanical parts where you used smooth groups, consider using thin bevels and it will bake nicer.
Also, be sure to break and space out the UVs wherever you have smooth group edges, because otherwise the normal will show up with thin black lines along these edges.
<edit>updated for newer substance test
complete node chaos
Gonna up the loops on the pipes and fix some other errors I've found, I'm just baking stuff as I go to see if I'm giving it enough geo. I hate to go so high but it does look like it's going to be around 10k, I guess I can go crazy if I'm doing PBR. It's feeling like a chore now, if I can't finish by Tuesday I'll probably take a break.
I also forgot to mention, early on I realized I made a major mistake in my interpretation of the concept. What I thought was his shoulder in the concept was his trapezius muscle; the concept is almost all neck! I was so far along I didn't want to throw all my work away so I kept on trucking.
I didn't want to bother with exploding the mesh so I just split out troublesome parts as separate bakes that all get composited back together
Next step is see about painting up a sub surface skin layer, figuring out how to make the chest glass look better, figuring out what proper PBR values should be and getting it all into marmoset. How's one more day's worth of work sound?
Boozebeard: Yup, polypainted in zbrush and then tweaked through various masks in Substance
So with the skin, i think you may have the translucency cranked up a little high, it's coming across as very gelatinous right now, and while that's cool for some stuff you can see there's muscle here, and muscle isn't made of jelly! Something else that's not helping that particular feeling is that the skin is extremely shiny, he's covered with all these little nicks and scrapes and scars... use those to show variation in the glossiness of skin. scar tissue has very little porous surface and is therefor smoother than the rest, so maybe lower the gloss on the non-scarred skin.
Similarly, staples are used on fresh wounds, maybe try to bring that out a little in the texture work, have those cuts weep a little or something, add something more to it.
I'd say the metal could do with a little more variation in roughness too, can't quite put my finger on it but it just feels "wet" rather than metallic? that's a shitty crit because i can't really advise more there =/.