Evaluation of Project Two

I'll begin with the things I really did enjoy during this project. ZBrush, this program has really opened my eyes  to the world of 3D modelling, prior to this project I really didn't enjoy other 3D programs like Maya or 3DS Max. I preferred to use my tablet to do digital paintings and I saw myself getting into concept art further in life. ZBrush has really changed my outlook on that, it really is the best of both worlds to me, the functionality of a 3D package, with the flexibility of something else such as Photoshop, and the fact that it really is like painting in a 3D environment makes it so much more fun to me as I get to utilise my digital tablet, and not be bound by a mouse.
Furthermore, the fundamental skills and knowledge I had to acquire to really make use of ZBrush was hugely insightful, I had never really looked into anatomy or anything to do with the body or face in a 3D View, since I've never really worked in 3D properly. I really enjoyed learning about all of this, and I enjoyed seeing the results pay off even more.
I can really see myself using this program in the future a lot more, I'd like to start a few of my personal projects and really get stuck in!

The physical sculpt, was what I didn't enjoy, I didn't enjoy it much during the last project, although it was something new for me back then, now it really just felt like a chore for me personally. I think the biggest thing that really put me off doing the physical sculpt was the material I had to use, I've already mentioned how much I dislike green stuff, and having to do it again was just painful. On the plus side, the sculpture we had to do was significantly bigger so I could really see and focus on parts of the face that I couldn't do, during the last project.

If I were to re-do this project over again, I think I'd get the physical sculpture out of the way (using a different material preferably) first and then begin with my digital work. This is because I tend to spend much more time on things I enjoy doing, so if I were to do my physical work first, I'd have much more time to do it instead of getting so caught up in ZBrush and digital work in general. They're a few things on my digital sculpt that I've mentioned I'd like editing but all in all I'm happy with it, just not particularly proud of it. Some of the facial features like lips and eyes don't look as organic as I'd like them to look, and the hair which I struggled with so much didn't end up as I hoped, although it was better than nothing. As fore mentioned, a new design of my character also would have been beneficial because my character was just plain and boring at the start and for that to be my base I felt limited to the amount of changes I could actually do to it.

Finito!

With all the parts put together I found I was as completed as I could be for this character. I could add a lot of detail to it and I'm not too proud of what the end product was but I believe that it matches my original character designs quite well and for that I'm happy.

If I had to redesign this in the future, the first thing I would do is completely re-haul the initial designs by adding a lot of detail in the armour, and maybe a helmet or mask. Just something else on the head, since it looks rather plain compared to the torso.

The hair, oh the hair...

I didn't think I'd ever run into so many problems doing the hair, this was by far the toughest part of my sculpt for me. I tried many techniques that didn't work out too well.

First I tried masking where the hair is and then extracting, to proceed to just sculpt the hair, but it didn't look realistic at all and just looked like somebody dumped food onto his head.

I tried putting a sphere into his head and then dragging the move tool to block in where the hair is, I ran into some problems concerning topology and so scrapped that technique too.

Finally I came across the most simple technique which works really well for my hair. I just worked on top of the head, but on a new layer, using the rake brush on a big brush size and then smaller sizes to get some detail. Damien Standard also was used to just separate different flocks of hair.

This is what I eventually got to.

Get some clothes on!

I couldn't keep my character naked so it's time to put some gear on him!

I started by masking a big part of his torso and then extracting it, then just smoothing things out so it doesn't look like it's skin tight, which it obviously isn't as I mentioned I wanted a carbon body armour piece.

I started masking in my patterns, but I found I couldn't achieve a straight line let alone a curve that wasn't bent all over. So I turned lazy mouse on which just really made masking the details in so much easier for me. They're other ways of doing this such as using curves, but I found this simple and effective.

I then just inverted the mask as you can see from the images on top, and then used the flatten brush to just push in the detail slightly. I added the shoulder piece to it too and repeated the same steps of getting the pattern. Mask, invert, and flatten. As you can see from the image below, I also filled the object with the metallic texture.

Starting my digital sculpt.

After understanding the program a lot more and using it constantly just to get the hang of it, things that took me a few hours to do previously took me 10 or so minutes now. 

A good example of this are the images below. This was the start-point of my sculpt, and it only took an hour or less. I got the hang of the tools and became familiar with really basic anatomy.

This is the back view of the sculpt, you can see that I emphasised on blocking in the trapezius and shoulder muscles, this is because as my designs show, I bulked up my character quite a bit.

This is the front view of the sculpt, I was pretty happy with my face all in all as there wasn't anything that really annoyed me or I didn't like. You can see from the front the trapezius on the back clearly reflects on the front. I also wanted to show certain bones and muscles quite clearly. I focused a lot on the clavicle, chest and neck muscles.

This is the profile view of the sculpt. This view is really helpful at just generally looking at if things are in right proportion and you can get a good idea if the silhouette is one similar to an actual human. In this case I think everything was done decently, except for the shoulder, you can see on the front it looks fine, but on the profile view it is way too small.

Understanding ZBrush

When I first used ZBrush I was blown away at all the features it had, I simply had no idea of what anything did. As I studied it further I started to learn the basics of it, and even though they're basics, they're still hugely important.

Here are just a few of the brushes I find to be essential.

So when I start a model on Zbrush, this brush is so powerful, I use this towards the start just to get the right silhouette of the model and also a few basic anatomical marks such as the zygomatic bone and the jaw.

These two are the next step for me personally, I use these two brushes to block in forms and planes, cheekbones, the brow, chin and so on. I just messily block in forms and then use shift to smooth things out and blend them into the face more naturally.

Dam Standard is such a good brush for cutting in forms, areas like inbetween your lips, eyelids, and generally just sharp pinches or cuts. I haven't found a limit of the uses for this brush yet.

Getting stuck in there

As mentioned in my previous blog post I had already dabbled around with ZBrush, this made it a lot easier for me to get my head around some of the tools I need to complete my finished sculpture.
But I wasn't convinced I had enough skill or knowledge that I would please me enough for the end product. This led me to do several practice models just so that I can work comfortably instead of googling each problem I encounter when I do the final sculpt.

Before starting the actual model work we were told to form a moodboard, and as dull as this was I later realised how useful reference and idea generation can be.

As you can see from my sketches, I've taken a lot of inspiration and ideas from these. Both the sword images were helpful, the top left one for the actual blade, and the bottom one for the handle, which again was   futuristic and something I liked a lot. The body armour on the right was important because of the actual material used and how it looks, how the curves look like and how it's shaped. My shoulder pad was majorly inspired from the image on the bottom left, I really liked how it sat on top of the torso but also looked like it fits in perfectly.

Furthermore, a good orthographic will be hugely beneficial to a 3D sculpt since it covers all views and you can get a good feel for proportion, so I did this quick orthographic in photoshop using a tablet.

Here are a few examples of my earlier work:

As you can see these models weren't up to standard, not even close, in fact it's rather embarrassing looking at these sculpts now. The first two on the left were my first go at sculpting my character design, and I didn't really have any idea of what I was doing, I knew what I had to do I just didn't know what tools did what and how to achieve what I had visualised. The ones on the right and the bottom left were an improvement but still not quite what I was looking for.

One thing struck me, in each of my practice sculpts, the anatomy was completely off. So I went ahead and started to understand and learn the facial anatomy. I started to watch as many videos as I could of Ryan Kingslien. He was a former developer at pixologic, so obviously understood the program, but what I enjoyed most about his videos is how in depth he gets about anatomy, certain terms that I had never heard before started to become common terminology for me.

This was the outcome of studying facial anatomy, even though I wasn't great at using the program, the knowledge of anatomy was so helpful, this sculpt could actually pass as a human!

Adjusting.. to the Apocalypse.

So, back in the summer holidays when we were asked to do a character design, I had no idea what would become of this design, so I really was forced to make decisions and changes with my character to better adjust it in the world it's living in, which of course, is that post-apocalyptic scenario.
I had to consider extremely important factors which would change my character design, things like survival, originally my character looked harmless, and he didn't belong in that world at all. He'd probably be killed on sight without a fighting chance. That meant one thing, 'manning' up my character.
This involved changing clothing and body build. If my character was a fighter, he'd need clothing appropriate to fight in, and take hits in, but also he'd have to be strong enough to do more than a scratch on whoever he may fight.

These were my original sketches and ideas.

This was my original orthographic for my character, as you can see he is only wearing a t-shirt and trousers, with a strap for his sword. He is rather thin, and doesn't look like he can handle himself at all. 

This was a later design of my character posing. As you can see I've added more utility to his clothing such as several pockets and a belt too. It's also apparent that he's bulked up a bit. I thought this was important if he was going to survive in a post-apocalyptic world at all. I hadn't changed the sword but I feel as though the sword was fitting in fine to the earlier designs but as this character becomes more menacing and powerful, the idea of him wielding an 'elegant' sword is becoming slightly more and more out of place.

These ideas led me to re-sketch my character design.

Finally this is what I got up to, you might notice at first glance that he looks a lot more sinister and perhaps evil. This was intended, so that he becomes a more feared character. I completed changed his torso so instead of a t-shirt, even though it is following the same silhouette, it isn't the same material at all. I was thinking it may be carbon body armour. The second thing I've changed on the torso, is the strange patterns all over it, I thought this might add a bit of an ancient feel to it. Even though this is the future, the apocalypse should surely knock back the humans generations a little, that savagery, It was inspired by ancient hieroglyphs and ancient Mayan patterns and tablets. He is also a lot more bulky, even more so than the previous design. As I mentioned before, about the sword, I've slightly changed it to match his attire, so that it'll actually blend in. It looks a lot darker now and the handle is much more mechanical than before, because this is still the future.