Bulgarov Vitaly made a post on ZBrushCentral on how he render his images using ZBrush and Photoshop.
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.
Sans hair
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.
Rough in some hair...
hmm... the hair...
Subtool Practise Male from kit on Vimeo.
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.
Then the shawl
and the top.
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.
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
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.
Continuing the body
Midway through this, I found another awesome post by Mike Jensen on hard surface sculpting that he did for his Halo Elite armor. I’m really amazed by how he did his Elite armor so I tried to practise it on some part of the model.
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.
Added a few more objects to it.
Trying to sculpt hard surface
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.
Done. For now.
USEFUL LINKS :
Scott Eaton’s Digital Figure Sculpture- Scott Eaton’s tutorial on sculpting in ZBrush. Highly recommended for all.