Sketchbook: Ray Frenden

Ray

Hi, all.

I'm a freelance illustrator (purely 2D) trying my hand at 3D with the eventual intent to make indie games of my own or to land a gig making games professionally. I'm definitely open to critiques and am a total greenhorn.

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I made tall and skinny and short and squat cartoonishly proportioned zsphere armatures last week and started my first Zbrush sculpt after.




I'm following the (very easy to follow) Scott Spencer intro to Zbrush 4 videos from Gnomon.

I've only ever made one low-poly model in Blender (yikes!) before now, but immediately clicked with Zbrush. I'm hitting a wall with some of my anatomy knowledge, but sourcing reference as I go. I think sculpting is going to shine a spotlight on exactly where I need to learn which is great for my eventual 2D work too.

I'm loving 3D. It feels like cheating after years of having to describe form with line and mass to just slap it together and place the forms where they go. I think I'm hooked.

I'll update this thread with my progress. Thanks in advance for whatever help you can offer. I'm a total noob!

Ray

At this point, I had sculpted myself into a topological corner and was running out of polys in the face. I thought my zsphere armature would've mitigated poly distribution problems a bit, but I was at subdivision level 8 to get any detail in the face and had a model whose lower levels looked like this:




Without being able to go much further, I took the advice of someone on the boards and turned my sculpt into a dynamesh. I miss being able to jump to lower subdivision levels to correct the broader strokes of my form, but I continued on. At least I could edit the face!




Now I'm trying to get better at knitting together my forms from the start instead of polishing it all later. I did a quick doodle to see what I'd learned and how I might apply it to a new sculpt (instead of this original, 1st sculpt which I made foundational mistakes on). This was about a twenty minute speed sculpt and it should give you a better idea of how I'm approaching form:



With the learning I've done, I went back and am doing a final pass on the zombie redneck sculpture (and self portrait, natch).




I still have the legs and hands to tackle. After that, I hope to use the model as an opportunity to learn more about rigging, animation, texturing, and all that good stuff. I am going to create clothes and accessories and eventually, hopefully, an environment for him to be standing in. I have a lot to learn.



Any tips or critique welcome!

Jeremy Tabor

Hey man, I've seen Some of your progress through your Google+ postings. Its cool to see you branching out into 3d Some nice stuff you've got going on.

You mentioned that you're focusing on getting good forms, and I usually make heavy use of masking and the transpose tools / move brush in that stage. Some people really dig the clay tools for that, and it can definitely produce great results, but I normally wait until the mid-level stage for the things like 'clay build-up' just because of the nature of those brushes - building on top of what is already there. I find if much easier to mask off a muscle group like the calves for instance, and pull those subtle angles out in a nice and deliberate fashion, than build them up from a stick, essentially. I find I can get some really clean forms this way when I hop up the subdivisions, since I don't have to do any clean-up through the assistance of the program's interpolation algorithms.

Just another workflow to experiment with as your learning, but you've seem to have success with the clay-tools already, so really it's whatever works for you. I don't know what it's like to have a 2D background, so there may be other methods which make a ton more sense to you than me lol.

But I look forward to creepin on your G+ feed as you churn more of this stuff out, and you're right, it's a lot of fun

EDIT: I just saw your post over in P&P, and I quoted myself over in that thread too since there is a 'Building of Form' discussion going on over there and it might spark some more opinions.

Ray

Thanks, Robat. I replied to the P&P thread earlier, but think I will keep to this thread from here on out. One place to post all my meandering learning sounds good to me! :P

I tried to apply the advice given. The legs are pretty untouched at this point, still.

Ray

Reworking the chest. Giving him a slight case of moobs.

Ray

I worked on refining my major forms yesterday and started to extract subtools from masks on the model this morning. I extracted from the head and made this hat, but the app has been crashing (hard locks) with every other subtool I've tried to extract since.

The model is at about 1 million polys (I retopologized it with dynamesh thinking the app was crashing because it was too high poly), so I don't think the new mesh would be too much for my computer to handle or anything.

Advice?

Ray

Working now. Weird.

Ray

Ray

Having a lot of fun with the stylized beard. (Way not finished, but, I dig where it's going.)

Ray

I'm having a little trouble finishing this sculpt. I'm not sure what cap I should put on the detail. I don't have any experience to base that decision off of. Am I close to finished? Should I bother putting pores or the like onto the surface? Is that overkill?

I have the eventual goal of dropping him into Unity or the like.

Advice would be greatly appreciated.