ZBrush Making of Sculpture

After Effects Painting to Reveal Layer

by Ralph Reinle, Turkey Email: ralphreinle@gmail.com

Introduction

Being a 3D enthusiast for many years, I’m always watching closely the CG communities and forums for inspiration and information. I find the workshops, running in some of those communities/forums, especially at CGTalk.com, a wonderful opportunity as learning experiences and pushing the artists’ skills further. The only problem I usually have, working full time and doing my fine art bachelor degree, is finding time to participate of such workshops. But one in particular that picked my attention was the 3D Sculpting Workshop – Motion, at CGTalk moderated by Rebecca Kimmel. There were some suggestions that we could pick from. I saw the Corneille Van Clève’s Polyphemus Sculpture and I thought that would be a great exercise to start with. At that time I had done only some tutorials and modeled a bust on Zbrush. So I didn’t know that much of Zbrush and this project was a real challenge.

Since it was one of my first’s models I learned a lot, but had done lots of mistakes that I wouldn’t do in the same way today.

References

The first step for me is always to look for as many reference pictures as I can get, from all sides I can find. I found these at the site of the Louvre: Click Here.

Basemesh

The basemesh was a kind of Frankenstein. I picked parts from different models I had done in the past in Maya and started putting all together. I had a poly hand that looked beautiful in Maya, but later on I realized that, because of the so many details on the fingernails I had modeled in Maya, it brought me a lot of trouble in Zbrush. So if I have an advice would be, if you start with basemeshes, start it simple.

Pose your Model First

Another mistake that made me lost a lot of time, was trying to pose the model AFTER I had done some details. He had a complicated pose and it was very time consuming trying to adapt what I had already detailed in the right pose. Even the hand is important to be positioned first before detailing it.

A good tip is trying to pose him at the very beginning with the basemesh at level 1, or, if the pose is too complicated, maybe trying to use some maquette models just to experiment and find the right pose of your model. At Ryan Kingslay’s blog Sculpt. Paint. Create. there are some great maquette models to download.

Detailing the Hair and Beard

Another issue that I had was the amount of detail on the beard and hair. Because I was using a basemesh with a head that I’ve done in the old fashion way, in other words bald, when I started detailing those areas the resolution was not enough and if I had subdivided the whole mesh once more, the total poly count would be too high. The solution I got was to subdivide only the regions of the hair and beard and the rest of the mesh was hidden. The resulted mesh was not really what I wanted but it did the trick. I think the best solution is to predict where you will have more details in your mesh and prepare a basemesh with this in mind.

Modeling and Detailing

There is actually no secret for the rest of the modeling and detailing. It’s just a game of patience and observation. I picked a subject with lot of details and props. So you can’t really do it fast because at some point, after hours looking at the object, my eyes started getting tired and you didn’t see the things right. When that happened, I stopped and tried again the next day. Take your time!

After finished the render, now I ready to composite the renders in XSI. In this session I only used 3 render pass, they are color pass (with shadow), ambient occlusion pass and specular pass. The Alpha pass I used it later in Photoshop for color correction and other tweaking.

Exporting and Rendering

Well that was probably the most time consuming and boring task of the whole project. For one side because I had to learn all the technical aspect of bringing the details from Zbrush to an external 3D package (the one I chose was 3dsmax because I wanted to render with Vray), the other side because I couldn’t find a well documented default procedure for rendering the details on the low-res model. I had to do a lot of tests and searched all over the place for information. I only found my way when I saw a thread at Zbrushcentral.com that the artist was exporting the mesh in a mid-level resolution and using normal maps instead of displacement maps. The material and light setup was very basic.

That’s it and my final image is ready, in upcoming pages check out the model from different angle and close up.

In Feb2008-Apr2008, your mission was to create a 3d image on the theme “Ancient Times” and sponsored by Pixologic, Craft Animations, iZ3d, N-Sided, Hyperfocal Design, ambientLight, Polyboost and Noesis Interactive.

Nitin.D.Mahale, India