My 3D Sketchbook

fattkid

Greetings Polycounters.....I'm a new member here and I'm gonna be hanging out here in an attempt to improve my 3D skills. This will be a sort of an ongoing 3D sketchbook (with a little 2D maybe) of whatever I happen to be working on in my free time. I'm hoping for some feedback, critiques and maybe a little tough love from the talented folks on these forums. I'm primarily focusing on character type work with ZBrush at the moment.
Thanks.

Here's a few of my latest ZBrush head sculpts. A basic base mesh in Max, sculpted and polypainted in ZBrush, and final tweaking in Photoshop.....

Indecom

Not bad, i like the detail, the anatomy is pretty good but to me it gives off a slightly cartoonish feel.

fattkid

Here's a W.I.P. of some sort of elegant queen type character. I'm sort of following an art nouveau/mannerist inspiration with this one. I kind of envision a flowing, high collared outfit with some flowing lines and details. I'll update this image at some point. I plan on partaking in the Dominance War as well and posting that work here too.

Zephir62

General anatomy and facial layout seems to be extremely similar piece to piece.. try mixing up your method when building the lower-poly subdivisions to get more varied results.

EricElwell

on that note, I recently changed the way I build faces just to see what would happen. Instead of starting from the base cranium, I started from basic skull structure of the mouth, and found that my heads were much more dynamic. I've also tried blocking out completely random silhouettes and filling them in later. You'll get a very wide range of facial structures and dynamic poses that way, but it is also key that you have an understanding of facial anatomy before the randomness part. Generally speaking, these pieces all have large and wide eye placement. Wider and larger than what feels natural to me. Faces can vary a lot. However considering all of the faces you've shown so far have this trait, it seems to be more of an issue of your understanding of facial anatomy. I think the best thing you could do is simply to sculpt from visual reference.


I like the old man model quite a bit. The mesh is looking very nice in profile, but it seems to lose a lot in the texture. A great deal of that being tonal values. (for example, the eyes integrate well tonally in the zb shot, but when you've textured them brightly they are popping forward, in a bad way) I'd be interested in seeing the texture. It seems like you've painted dark lines in the creases of the forehead. If I were to guess, you could flatten the values of the texture and the whole piece would read a lot better.

fattkid

Wow! Thanks for the great feedback!

Indecom - yeah, now that you mention it, they do seem a little cartoony. I never noticed that before, but I'd have to agree.

Zephir62 - Ya know, only a few people have seen these models, and your the second person to mention that the anatomy layout and structure are repetitive. I would say it's official now.

EricElwell - I don't quite understand what you mean when you mention starting your model from the mouth structure/area as opposed to the cranium. If you have the time, it would be cool if you could elaborate. I realize now my approach is maybe a little stagnant. I am using the same generic base model on all these. Thanks for the crits on the texture and taking the time to reply.

Gracias folks.