Automotive Zbrush journey

Finalhart

Hey everyone, recently i wanted to learn more about using Zbrush to proove myself that is possible to make cars with nice and clean hard surface edges with the less time posible. So i planned on making 1 car in zbrush each day until i feel confident with zbrush tools and designing cars fast and capable of making them into a low poly model later without any hard surface restrictions.

That being said, i started 4 days ago and decided i needed i really need some good critique for some of you guys who can help me get better doing this. I will only dedicate around 1-2 hours for each car, without focusing on small details that can be done as separate subtools, so by no means they are finished models but can give me a good base to make one for my portfolio once the time comes and give me good hard surface knownedge.

So here they are....

Day 1: That was pretty much what i got trying to just using hard polish brushes and smoothing but it got me to nowhere...so after that went into zbrush classroom and some videos on youtube to feed my brain




Day 2: Nothing to say much in this one, basiclly i do group loups and move things around and then polish by features to get it done.




Day 3: Pretty much the same as day 2, just felt more confident and made it faster






Day 4: Tried to make some different chasis for this one, tired of the robot face i was getting for all the sculpts made before...Also the tires should be placed before i begin to avoid what happend here, they are not matching the ground

Itholon

The car still looks pretty organic. The front is weirdly curved and the back is wavy for instance. Good ol' Sub-D is in my opinion still much better for hard surface stuff. Zbrush will make your topology a mess and cleaning the model will take as much as time as if you would do the Sub-D in the beggining. Just my two cents. But if you really want to do Hard surface in Zbrush keep at it, you will probably see some improvement in a few weeks/months.

SecretPro

You might want to take your time with this, if this is something you are serious about. I understand this are sketches. but doing it right, means you will gain a better grasp and can lead to a great portfolio piece down the line.

Block out the design with as little polys as possible.

Finalhart

Thanks for the critiques guys, i agree it can be done in a with Sub-D but wanted to test this to also improve my hard surface skills in zbrush. I saw this tutorial from Pixologic few days ago: http://pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/lesson/vehicle-design/ my models still look organic as expected.

I think the result is pretty amazing and it can be done with hard work, gonna try this for some time and find if there is a way to solve those organic surfaces i'm getting. But don't know if it looks like that because of the material or if it's really a hard surface model.

So for the next one i'm going to dedicate more hours to it so it's not so sketchy and see how it works. So it may be 2 to 3 days to make one and post it here to see where it goes.

Thanks for the feedback guys

Edit: I might try to retopology a low polygon sketch and do some hard surface stuff i found here, going to watch the video first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyFZFyK3UVU
I still don't knnow if panel loops, and polish by feautres will make the job

Finalhart

Here's an update guys, this took me a while but i think the result is better. Made a quick concept in 20 mins with dynamesh and then retopo and doing crisp edges. I don't know if i should finish this piece because is really rough and has some issues or start another one from scratch. So... here it goes:

Day 8:






Make any creatiques please, any suggestions or share your workflow for doing hard surface in Zbrush i would really appreciate it.

Aabel

Well it's definately less Mushy, but overall the surface is completely out of control and no real design intent is apparent.

I went down this same path too when the David Bentley videos came out on Zclassroom. I got hideous results, and realized that what was on display was a very talented and practiced industrial designer from the automotive industry showing what a bad ass he is by doing ok work with a tool that is completely ill suited to the task at hand.

I have to echo the others, if you want to model cars and other hard surfaces, use a tool that is better suited for it, one that won't get in the way of your artistic development by making surface control harder than it should be.

Finalhart

You are right Aabel, i think i might just go with 3ds max. But the curiosity kills me, why would a person then use Zbrush for hard surface? There are indeed pretty good techniques to explore and i've learned a lot so far with this. But i think 3ds max or other program will do a better job if i spend more time with it an practice a lot than ZBrush.

ysalex

Well zbrush has some fantastic hard surface tools, particularly if you want to do some experimental or complicated stuff, but cars aren't as complicated as they are exacting, so you need more control over wider, longer, larger more exact curves.

I would for instance never model a car in zbrush, but I wouldn't model a robot suit without zbrush, at least for experimenting quickly with the design.

Aabel

Honestly the more I learn about hard surface modeling, industrial design, and how the world around us built in general the less impressed I become with Zbrush hard surfacing. The tools are very limited and down right awkward compared to other approaches for hard surfacing. The curves are a joke, especially the clip curves with their bizarre crossing rules. The CSG modeling tools rely on dynamesh which results in a bizarre surface erosion if the resolution is too low, or a baked into the topology faceting if you increase the resolution to avoid the erosion, dynamesh can also utterly annihilate thin shells without jacking up the resolution. There is no history of the intersection so you can perform continuity blending on the booleans or make interactive edits. The surface blending that is there is based on IMM and is very difficult to use effectively as it has very similar hotkeys to navigation and you can only access it through hotkeys (more of that legendary UI design from Pixologic). Panel loops break surface tangency on curved surfaces and require constant polygroup management. And then there is the complete lack of any method for organizing and managing subtools, and you are going to have a lot of subtools.

I don't know why people use Zbrush for hard surface modeling, personal preference maybe? When you're watching a tutorial always keep the final product in mind, is the person teaching you taking the final product to engine for real time rendering? or does it wind up getting comped in Photoshop? Those are two very different types of work and they don't always overlap.

mazerius1st

If you want to focus to the automotive industry it is best to use something like 3D Studio max or Maya or even better a program designed for that sector like Alias Autostudio to give you more precise control over your designs.