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.