Brad Reynolds's ZBrush Sketchbook Thread

system · July 5, 2019, 12:23am

I’m a medium-time lurker of ZBrushCentral, never a poster, mainly because I started using ZBrush about a year ago for my 3D organic modeling class in grad school. Back then, though, we spent half the semester getting a perfect mesh in Maya before jumping into ZBrush. I was convinced back then that organic modeling was something totally out of my realm of interest, especially since it took so long and was so boring starting from just a cube in Maya.

Right about the time that 4R2 came out, a friend of mine that works at Lucasfilm introduced me to retopology tools and workflows. Suddenly, a light went off in my head, especially with the addition of Dynamesh, that made me look at ZBrush’s potential in a whole new light. After working with that, I was able to go from a concept sculpt to a fully realized model in a matter of days rather than weeks. Since then, I’ve tried to devote a few hours each week outside of my school schedule to just work on my digital sculpting skills. (My background is in industrial design, so my mastery of anatomy is limited.) I just thought I would try posting a few of my latest creations here and maybe get some feedback from other digital artists.

My latest creation was for an advanced organic modeling class I’m taking this semester.

John Malkovitch - Rendered in ZBrush. Composited in Photoshop.

Our school doesn’t have the latest version of ZBrush in their labs, so I’m stuck doing most of my work for that class in ZBrush 4. I did the stubble and eyelashes in Fibermesh (still trying to figure out what the heck the settings do), then exported them as OBJs to import back into ZBrush 4. A little backwards, I know, but that’s what I’ve got to work with right now.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post more as I work on my projects throughout the next few weeks.

Attachments

system · July 4, 2019, 10:22am

We’ve been focusing lately in class on just the anatomy of the head, so I have been doodling around with some practice heads:

This guy’s forehead head seems to large to me now that I look at it again.

I tried doing some more cartoony proportions on one and played around with Fibermesh. This was when I had no clue what all of the settings did.

system · July 4, 2019, 10:22am

I haven’t had the chance to do any full figures lately, so I thought I would try doing a more muscular character. This will be some sort of barbarian/celtic warrior in the end. There are some things that I need to fix, like where the trapezius meets the skull. Right now it seems too low or something.

I started off using an older mesh that I had previously used for another sculpt/retopologize exercise. Mainly this was to get a better grasp of full figure anatomy. I’ll be using Transpose Master to pose this guy before I add a skirt to him.

system · July 4, 2019, 10:22am

Just working on my full figure skills. This was a two-day project mainly to brush up on anatomy. I have a lot to learn about morphology and sculpting cloth.

I may revisit this in the future. We’ll see when I get a moment.

system · July 4, 2019, 10:32am

I have been hard at work finishing off my modeling thesis for my MFA Classes. One of the classes I have been taking is an organic modeling class in ZBrush. For our final in this class we had to create a figure of some sort. I decided to try and do Felica Day’s character Tallis from the web miniseries Dragon Age Redemption.

I’m thinking maybe I’ll revisit this to work on the face some more. I had a lack of good reference images to use as an underlay for the face.