Tag: Zbrush

New Reel is Online!

Wow, Finally! After months of rendering, compositing, After-Effecting, compressing and re-coding my new reel is live. This is only the first reel as I will also be adding a VFX reel in the coming months, though that will be significantly less work. The 2011 reel is removed but I might add it again at a later date, we’ll see.

A change to the site is that I took the gallery down as that only contained very old work and never saw any additions. Most of my recent personal work can be seen on this blog, and will eventually find its way onto the reel, so a gallery section was not needed anymore. Take a look at my new reel at the homepage and let me know what you think!

Cheers

Zbrush Head 04

A new sculpt made in Zbrush. I started again with a dynamesh which I retopologised with Topogun half way through to get better detail. Especially with eyelids this can make a big difference. Hair, clothing and crown were also made in Zbrush. Making the crown gave some challenges as the workflow for hard surface models feels a bit different then for organic stuff, but it came out good enough for a first try.
Below you can see a quick making-of of this sculpt.

Zbrush Head 03

While waiting for reaction on a job at work I made this quick sculpt. Made in about 1,5 hours, started from a dynamesh, not retopologised.
I’m really starting to like Dynamesh and definitely starting to see the benefits of the SubD-leveled workflow. I could have finalized this with more wrinkels and skin texture, but it is too much fun to start a new one 😀

Zbrush Head 02

Another Zbrush sculpt. This one was started from a dynamesh sphere. I’ve tried sculpting with dynamesh before but was never a fan of it as it tended to destroy your sculpted details when re-aplying. When you disable Blur however, it will keep the same shape during re-meshing and that makes a big difference. It really is only for low to medium detail sculpt as because of the unified mesh re-mesh method the polyflow is horrible and that gives smoothing and sculpting problems.

A good workflow is when you reach medium level to retopo your mesh and reproject the sculpt. I didn’t do that for this sculpt. These sculpts are for learning to concept in Zbrush from scratch and not make a final piece. It went a little bit better this time, I still miss Sculptris a lot but I also see the advantages of working only in Zbrush. One thing I noticed is that sculpts from Zbrush seem to have a more defined quality then the ones from Sculptris. I’m not sure, but I think the subD-leveled workflow might have something to do with that. Anyhow, on to the next one…

Zbrush head sculpt


I found I was becoming too dependent on Sculptris when sculpting concepts. Sculptris is a really great program in which you can make incredible sculpts but it is also a bit limited to use in a pipeline because of the way it works. Besides, Zbrush is the industry standard and I’ve seen enough jobs for Zbrush artists but none so far for Sculptris. Anyhow, it is not that I don’t know how to work in Zbrush, but whenever I want to doodle around I reach for Sculptris. The main reason for that is the ‘Subdivisionlevel-less’ workflow.

To get just as comfortable doodling in Zbrush as in Sculptris I’ll try to do my next batch of sculpts all in Zbrush. This not-so-great stylized head is the first result. A one hour sculpt, made from a box in Zbrush.

My new reel is in the compositing stage. Should not take more than a couple of weeks before it is finished.

Sculptris Head 2

The head was sculpted in Sculptris and retopologised in Topogun.
All the fine details as wel as some structural change were done in Zbrush.
The texture was hand painted in Zbrush, no photo’s used.