Review - Gnomon Head Sculpt and Texturing by Mark Gmehling

GNOMON - HEADSCULPTINGANDTEXTURING

Areview by Mark Gmehling

In this Gnomon workshop, the founder himself, Alex Alvarez gives an indepth look at the creation of a detailed character head using the hypetool of these days - the groundbreaking software ZBrush: Alex Alvarez shows the workflow of creating a detailed characters head within ZBrush as we know from forums like pixolator.com (http://www.pixolator.com) or pixologics website (http://www.pixologic.com).

Beginning with primitive shapes derived from Zspheres (which are a fantastic tool to block out even more complicated forms very fast), the primary forms of the head are quickly blocked out to determine general proportion and design. After that the resulting low/res mesh is refined more and more by subdividing and intuitive pushing/pulling and scratching the mesh, which counts about 2 million polys at the end.

Alex then refines the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and horn regions before moving into Projection Master to create surface details, like skinfolds for example. He demonstrates different techniques and tools to detail the skin surface with wrinkles/folds/pores etc. He shows the workflow to insert edgeloops to refine polycount in areas where more detail is needed or in this case to simply to block out additional geometry to extrude horns.

All these processes cover the use of masking areas to protect them of affection or to hide areas to fasten performance.This entire process from beginning to end covers a highly detailed, wrinkled head. This is shown without time lapsing. The DVD's contain over 8 hours of lecture!!! Once the highres geometry is complete he takes time to demonstrate the creation of custom tileable Alpha libraries with ZBrush or Photoshop, and even talks about using and "gettying" reference material for modeling and texturing tasks.

Before painting the different texture maps, the UV Setup is done which is a lovely simple thing in ZBrush. He starts with painting a bump map, which is a nice process in Zbrush because of the realtime redraw on your mesh using a bumpviewer material. This texture map is followed by a specular and a colorchannel where some of ZBrush’s different powerful painting tools and their attributes are demonstrated. While painting the color and specular map the movie is time lapsing while Alex is giving comments to his workflow, but don't worry, all he's doing is covered in the lectures before and you'll miss no information on that. These are the only lectures that are timel apsed, because you have to know the workflow beforehand and are able to follow even if it’s running fast. Before he renders all the created maps and the exported .obj file back in Maya, he demonstrates ways of combining the different maps by using photo-

GNOMON - HEADSCULPTINGANDTEXTURING

Areview by Mark Gmehling

shop. In conclusion, Alex shows how to integrate geometry, displacements and textures using Maya's native renderer and Mental Ray. There's no need to worry if your render and animation software is not Maya. I'm using CINEMAand with R9 it’s no big deal to render ZBrush’s 16bit displacement maps with the CINEMArenderer. As the Maya setup part is not the focus of this DVD package, it’s worth its money even for users of other applications:

Take a look into the DVD topics here:

DVD1 Lectures:

Introduction Zspheres Defining Form Eyelids and Symetry Refining Forms Refining the Ears and the Nose Refining the Mouth and the Neck Adding Horns Refining Eyes Projection Master Detailing the Face Inflate and Pinch Detailing the Neck

DVD2 Lectures:

Refinig the Horn Reestablishing symetry Adding Asymmetry Uvs and Bump Material Bump Tools Overview Bump Map Part 1 Bump Map Part 2 Specular Map Color Map Displacements Combining Textures Conclusion with Maya for not native english speakers. I can't agree with that- Alex speaks MUCH and faster than Meats did in his ZBrush DVD series. Everything he says is very interesting for understanding some global things and learning from his experiences as a CG Artist not only using ZBrush. The one thing that's a little disturbing is that you have to adjust the volume often, because the audio peak is varying from lecture to lecture.

I give a 5 out of 5 Attack Points again without any doubt. This characters head developing process contains so much information about handling super/high/res meshes in ZBrush, output maps to render its maps onto low/res geometry back in your software and finishing a project from scratch to final render. Furthermore, it's just a super addition to the other ZBrush related Gnomon workshops as: Sculpting Human Anatomy. Eight hours of professional information for a fee of $89 is quite a bargain. Also notice Gnomon’s offers for students and schools! Just visit their site at: http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com

Qualified students, faculty and schools are eligible for a 29% discount on all Gnomon Workshop DVD titles, bundles and scene files. Educational orders can be placed either online or via mail-order. An order for a single DVD would go from $69 to $49. An order of five DVDs ($69/each) would go from $345 to $245.

As a students you just have to fax a dated students ID and a dated personal ID to get 29% off!

Btw: Most Zbrush resellers are offering Zbrush 2 with a Wacom tablet as bundle for very nice prices these days. The Z-Fun really comes up using a pressure sensible tablet.

Hope to see some traffic in 3D Attack’s ZBrush corner too! CU onboard!

Visit the GNOMON WORKSHOP:

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com