Continued ZBrush

I've been taking the ZBrush class from FuturePoly for about a month now. I've continued to work on polishing my last two ZBrush sculpts and I'm also currently working on a low poly model to make into a third ZBrush model.

Here's the female head after some more tweaks and polypainting. The next step will be using Topogun to remake a lowpoly for the hair so I can paint it in photoshop. Thanks so much to Will Patrick and Joe Pikop for the instruction. I'm really happy to see what is possible with ZBrush.


I've also started working on a low poly model for this character I sketched in the style of Labyrinth. Joe has suggested that I start with the head as it's a pretty complex model and we don't have a lot of time left. I agree, although I'm a bit nervous about having another head in my portfolio. Hopefully in time I can finish the whole character. For now I want to make sure I can get through the whole process using Topogun and painting a low poly model based on the ZBrush model.


I also found a sketch I had been working on and have been motivated to continue to try to make an interesting painting out of it.

I really want to take the best parts of what I'm nostalgic about and fuze them with the technology available to create amazing art that keeps the epic and mysterious feel of days when we still weren't sure what the bounds of science fiction and fantasy were.

One of the games I enjoyed was Warsong for the Genesis. I loved the art and often used Garett as my avatar online. So I decided to update 8-bit art of Garett into something more epic. I took this picture here and blew it up and sketched over it on a lightbox to make a starting sketch. I'm currently in the painting stages and hopefully one day will be done enough I can add it to my portfolio.

What! Me UI?

Over the past year or so my Team Adorkable, a mixed team of DigiPen junior and senior artists, has been working on our game Bear Pile. Since our artists have graduated most of them haven't had much time to work on the game. However, the graphic user interface was still in desperate need of an update.

I had previously finished the art assets to make the vault door (viewable in my modeling portfolio) destructable in game. Now I moved on to the HUD, Paws Menu and Main Menu. Here's the current look of the Main Menu and the HUD with an open Paws Menu. In game the game world will be showing behind these icons. The Bear and Johnny's head are 2d art assets created by Talon Jennings that I wanted to keep in the UI.

If you are interested playing Bear Pile please come try it out. It will be at PAX at free play and an updated version will be available to play at the DigiPen booth. Of course our game is also available for free from DigiPen's website. We will continue to work on making this game better and preparing for competitions such as IGF and IGC.

Seminar Follow Up

Just a quick update. I've continued to work on the head from the zbrush seminar. After several attempts I finally figured out how to do hair in a way I like. I use a brush like Clay Tubes (with smoothing) or more recently Trim Dynamic to try to establish the shapes and volume and then use Slash 2 to make hard cuts and smooth them back as necessary. I'm really liking the Trim Dynamic brush.

I have often run into a problem when I brush geometry with sides too close together. The brush can collapse your two-sided geometry into itself. To fix this problem you can go to down to a low subdivision and then use the move tool to pull the object's sides apart again, then continue to go up in subdivisions pulling the sides apart. Alternatively I find the Inflate brush makes solving this problem quite easy.

At this point I'm mostly finished with the hair sculpt. I threw on some quick base colors for show. Next up: poly-painting.

ZBrush Seminar

I just finished a ZBrush Seminar taught by Will Patrick, a DigiPen graduate now working at Monolith. It was very enjoyable and Will was very helpful. Luckily, it was a fairly small group of people and he could work with people individually.

I started by coming up with a quick head concept. When I finished I liked the overall design but didn't feel it was realistic enough to make good use of ZBrush, so I redid the facial anatomy, using facial reference, until I got something I really liked.

I scanned in my work to Photoshop and then used it as reference in 3ds Max. I used the Joan of Arc tutorial with a few modifications to build the head and laid down hair planes that I later converted into solid geometry in most places. The front locks over the forehead and the curls on the side will be cutout planes. Here's the low poly head.

I'm currently working on this in ZBrush: high poly sculpting and experimenting with poly paint for the first time.

I also made this fellow (MONSTRO!) while messing with zspheres and this painting while messing with quick sketch.

Sketches

Here are some sketches from a facial expressions book. I wanted to draw faces from different angles and with different expressions. These are some of my favorites. Sometimes you just want to keep a library book indefinitely, but you can't.

Unearthing old Art

Having recently moved to a new apartment I've come across a lot of old art that I thought had disappeared long ago. This is mostly traditional pencil or value work. I'll post some periodically.

Prudhon Artist Study (NSFW)

Website

Portfolio and Employment Materials

I've been working as much as possible with Rachel Rutherford, Karen Wheeler and Lisa Knight to get an internship or 3d artist position. Rachel, especially has made a lot of great suggestions, such as transferring my digital photography to a dedicated site. Facebook has not been working well for me for a variety of reasons. I am currently in the process of populating this website. Here is my new free stock photo website shot by me in various places around the world:

http://s1016.photobucket.com/home/mgriebner

Website

Meanwhile, I'm working on how navigation works on my site and trying to work around the limitations of Simple Viewer. I'll add more about myself as well within the next couple weeks so that anyone who visits and wants to know what sort of artist I am and what I'm passionate about can read about me.

ZBrush

Learning ZBrush

I worked through numerous tutorials on the pixologic website and learned a lot about ZBrush. I finished the sculpt of my low poly martian zombie for the personal project class. I had to cut back my plans for this a bit because of GDC, company day and game team projects. While I had already concepted it, I also worked a lot with an animal anatomy book while creating this. Here is my finished character, the first thing I've made in ZBrush so far:

I'm looking forward to taking ZBrush classes from DigiPen and FuturePoly. Unfortunately, FuturePoly put the class off for another month citing a lack of enrollment and DigiPen is still not giving us hard plans for when the class will be. Ah well. I look forward to learning about baking and painting in ZBrush.

Webpage update

After working quite a bit more on the texture I've reuploaded my Ronin Duck model to my website www.theancientstory.com.
I just got back from GDC and I'm preparing for company day and trying to learn to unwrap in Maya as well as I can unwrap in 3dsMax. I'm hoping to have my Martian Zombie model unwrapped and textured to fairly finished quality by career day at DigiPen which is Friday a week from now. Unfortunately we're moving from the old apartment to the new one over the next week too.