It's been one of those weeks. But I did manage to get a bit more progress made. I'm still procrastinating the torso, so I've been working on the legs. I'm sure having an actual arse and hips, when I finish them, will make the torso easier to judge.
There's a lot of small inaccuracies I want to fix. I've been mainly using the front, sides and diagonal views, since most references use those; I want to train my eye to match them and understand it properly from those and not be too dependent on 360 degree rotation. It's not terrible as it stands, though; feels like the parts I've done so far are in need of refinement rather than totally busted. Soften things a little here and there, tweak some angles. And then of course, once I'm done with the torso and head, move onto the tertiary forms and rendering.
I think it's been a good exercise so far; I got a bit better at observation. Sculpting like this feels very much like Hard Mode; I reckon sculpting in A-pose with symmetry will be quite easy after this. For now though, my next point is I need to finish blocking in the structural masses of the right leg, then clean it up a bit.
Had a bit of time today to block in the back. It's not good yet; I got distracted with details and didn't focus enough on the main contours, and some of it is just fucky. I'll fix it.
Well, I'm getting my shit pushed in by a heatwave, but I did find a little bit of time to sculpt today. Improved the back a little; I still need to smooth the back out a bit, and generally just make it a little more accurate. The smoothing is an issue, though; not to the extent of finishing it, but muscles just don't have such solid distinctions between them when they have skin. I was a bit harsh on them. Finishing the front of the torso is a priority, though.
So, I don't have an update right now. Had a couple of stressful weeks. You know what I do have? A rant about ZBrush!
I decided in a little free time I had today between things to play with my brushes again. So I started diving into more settings, and it's so frustrating and stupid. Someone tell me, exactly why does ZBrush think everything needs to have a radial falloff? Why? Why would you give me alphas that define the radial falloff from the point I'm brushing at, and then just ignore that and multiply it all by your shitty radial fading focal shift?!
Why would you even bother including square alphas when you're just going to make them round anyway?! Why is nothing in this program sensible? Why on earth would you call sculpts tools when you could have called them literally anything else and had it be more intuitive? Why would you call what are essentially layers in the first place subtools, and then have your layers be essentially morph targets, but then have another thing that's called morph targets with only a few difference between them?
Why would you have a UI that looks like it was designed by someone who's never seen a human being in their life?! Why the fuck is Slime Bridge apparently more important and deserving of height in the incredibly stupid list than options for masking and polygroups which users are probably going to need a hundred times more often?!
Why would you put your camera and grid settings under Draw than literally anywhere that makes more sense for the user?! Who the hell is like "Yes, I want to adjust my camera, it makes perfect sense for it to be under Draw"?????
How have you still not an actually decent camera that doesn't weirdly distort perspective?!
The whole bloody program is like it's been designed by people who think Comic Sans is a good font because they believe graphic designers are just The Man getting in the way of their brilliance.
My recollection is that ZBrush started out as a totally different software, and built by one guy. He had this idea of pixels all having depth info, so the early artwork was all these colored-displacement-looking things.
Then he added the ability to load meshes, rotate/scale them, and stamp them down onto the displacement canvas. Then people got really excited by the meshes, so that took precedence.
But the software was all built around 2D with depth, and his 2.5D rendering technique was how he could get insanely good performance with high-poly meshes. It's also why the later-added "perspective" view was so weird, because it was a hack on top of his ortho renderer.
Anyhow, it was all designed by one guy. And once it took off commercially, the momentum probably prevented a serious UI redesign.
I've been using ZBrush because it's very commonly used and I want to make sure I'm familiar and proficient with it, and for its advantages in performance and sheer amount of features. But I'm feeling a lot lately that I want to jump ship when I'm done with my projects.
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Well, I'm getting my shit pushed in by a heatwave, but I did find a little bit of time to sculpt today. Improved the back a little; I still need to smooth the back out a bit, and generally just make it a little more accurate. The smoothing is an issue, though; not to the extent of finishing it, but muscles just don't have such solid distinctions between them when they have skin. I was a bit harsh on them. Finishing the front of the torso is a priority, though.
My recollection is that ZBrush started out as a totally different software, and built by one guy. He had this idea of pixels all having depth info, so the early artwork was all these colored-displacement-looking things.
Then he added the ability to load meshes, rotate/scale them, and stamp them down onto the displacement canvas. Then people got really excited by the meshes, so that took precedence.
But the software was all built around 2D with depth, and his 2.5D rendering technique was how he could get insanely good performance with high-poly meshes. It's also why the later-added "perspective" view was so weird, because it was a hack on top of his ortho renderer.
Anyhow, it was all designed by one guy. And once it took off commercially, the momentum probably prevented a serious UI redesign.