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STAGE ONE | Designing Stage
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I’ve always wanted to incorporate what I’ve seen in my design. Back when I was living in Kyoto for a year, I was really impressed by the juxtaposition of their heritage and modern culture. So this mecha will be something based on that.
As always, I don’t want to get too much details going on, just the rough outline of the character.
Getting some silhouettes going
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STAGE TWO | Detailing
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Now that I know the limitation of my computer, it’s time to plan properly before starting. Each major part of the body will be divided into subtools. I’ve broken them down to the head, torso, arms, hands, pelvis, legs and feet.
Separating the body into several subtools
At the moment, I still have no idea on how to achieve the smooth look that Mike or Dilblo achieved, so what I did was just get the rough shape going without worrying too much about the rest.
Moving onto the legs
First level of detailing
As you can see, the model is still very organic at this state. But instinct told me they’ll be fine. I hope I’m right. Haha.
Roughing in the hair
Learning from what Dilblo did, I painted over the model to get a rough idea on the positioning etc.
USEFUL LINKS:
Halo Elite (New Armor) by Mike Jensen - Awesome hard surface sculpting using ZBrush then retopologized to look even smoother in 3DMax. He explained some of his workflow in his replies.
Scouting Mech: Drone 04 by Mike Jensen – Most of the smoothing in the Halo Elite are done in 3DMax, but this time, it’s 100% ZBrush. Absolutely amazing.
After finishing my previous renders, my girlfriend showed me her work and asked me to model it. 12 am in the morning. So here it is! 2 hours work. I enjoyed modelling it a lot in the end tho. After getting the base mesh right using ZSphere, I detailed the skull using the claytube brush and slowly gave form to the cute penguin. The flippers are sculpted on.
I don’t plan on exporting different mats and compositing them in Photoshop yet. So I only doubled the size of the document then exported it out with AA Half Sized. Also another render in Flat material for masking in Photoshop.
some photoshopping
His hair is too distracting, so here’s a render without hair.
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STAGE Three| Adding More Details (Continued)
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Detailing the hand-wraps
Hard Surface Sculpting Take 2!. After plenty of trial and error, the brushes I used to sculpt this are dam standard, smooth, flatten and Planar Line Thin. Still very far off from what Mike Jensen did with his Elite tho. But this will have to do for now.
Another go at hard surface sculpting
Got really excited about hard surface modelling at this point, so I rushed myself into finishing this model. Retopologized a ZSphere and roughly did the hair using SnakeHook brush. Note to self: don’t rush next time. The result aren’t really that awesome. But at least I managed to achieve what I originally planned for this model. Subtools and cloth.
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STAGE Three| Adding More Details
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Not satisfied with only one hard surface object in the model, I added an air filter in it for more practise. Built with ZSphere and a Sphere3D.
Adding an air filter
Using the belt to practise sculpting cloth.
From here on in, its all cloth. I started practising with the belt, getting a grip of it before moving to the rest. I enjoyed sculpting the cloth very much. you can hardly go wrong here. I used some photo reference for some of them. Took a photo of myself with my prop (bath towel.. … …) around my shoulder etc.
Moving onto the rest
It’s basically subdividing it to a high level, drawing out the main folds with clay brush, smoothing things out, then defining them with dam brush (with LazyMouse on), smoothing out the planes. Rinse and repeat.
In the previous posts, I mentioned about utilizing more subtools and adding cloth to my model. So, this time round, I’m going to try and design a character that fulfills all those above.
The subject of the day is: Design And Model A Male Character!
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STAGE ONE | The Base Mesh
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Again starting from the SuperAverageMan, cropped the head, and started detailing. After getting the rough facial feature that I wanted with Move and Inflat tool at Subdivision 1, I subdivided into a much higher subdivision and start giving rough details to the face with the Clay Tube brush without any Alpha selected. After that I smoothed them out before refining them again with other brushes (Dam Standard, Inflat etc).
Sculpting the head from base mesh
Appended eyes to the head, subdividing it once more for finer details.
Detailing the head
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STAGE TWO| The Body Mesh
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Again using Alex’s human base mesh, I appended it to the head and start Moving things around. This rough body mesh will be used as the foundation and guide for other subtools. Rigged a ZSphere and retopologized it to create the shawl.
I tried it on the waist. In my first few attempts, I tried using some of the planar tools. Didn’t really like the way it came out. Tried to sculpt it with dam brush using LazyMouse. Not really that satisfactory. In the end I used the Layer brush with Z Sub to draw the lines. Not really that spectacular but it works, for now at least.
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STAGE ONE | Adding Details
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Next I rigged a new ZSphere to the head, edit its topology to match parts of the head and then extend that topology to cover the whole head thus creating the base mesh for the hair. Increase its skin thickness then make an adaptive skin before appending it back to the main tool.
Retopo the hair using ZSphere.
Here I sculpted the hair using Dam Standard brush with a custom alpha (something like Alpha 38) for that sharp edge look. Take a look at Scott Eaton’s Digital Figure Sculpture. I just so happens to have bought a copy of 3D World featuring him as well. Watching him sculpting his cloth inspired my to add cloth to my next model as well.
Now that I’ve warmed up, lets try something harder.
The subject of the day is:
Model A Female Character!
Snooping around ZBrush central I found an interesting post by Eldrice Waliyar on modelling his Miranda Lawson. It’s always fun to learn how people goes around modelling their stuff. As I have already started modelling this female model when I found this post, I’ll try out the stuff I learnt from his post in my next model.
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STAGE ONE | The Base Mesh Sculpting
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Quickly grabbed a free human base mesh from Gnomon website (link can be found at the bottom of this post) and starts deforming it using Inflat and Move tool.
Human base mesh by Alex Alvarez
Pretty soon after that, I’m already into refining the shape of the head. And while I’m at it, I discovered how to append a subtool to the main tool (Yay! Pretty excited about that).
