Been chugging away at some more anatomy stuff in between projects. Working on my understanding of the torso mostly, drawing inspiration from some of Scott Eaton's exercises. Good fun!
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This week I've been getting more into creating expressions as I build on my FACS knowledge. Just been sculpting a head as per usual, then simply setting a morph target inside ZBrush and pushing and pulling until I get a suitable look to the face. I'm thinking for the remaining five weekdays of January, I'll continue to do a sculpt with expressions each day, but drop these over February to focus more on my rigging abilities. Originally, I set a time limit of two hours to sculpt these heads, but gradually these have started to take three to four hours as I try and squeeze polypainting, rendering, and compositing into the mix - eating into time I need to be spending elsewhere.   Slow start to the new year after being sick and taking a couple of weeks off to rest, but back into it now. I'm doing the usual five head sculpts a week while working between a few other projects - including learning the Facial Action Coding System, a collection of rigs for a games project in the Unreal Engine, and a rig for a character I recently made. More updates on those soon... for now, here's some more busts... 
Just completed a schmick new character to practice more cartoon-style rigging and deformation with! The piece is based of a concept by the very talented José Manuel Fernández Oli, who you can see more of at nibbledpencil.com/index.php Took me about three weeks to do working on and off between other projects. Went for a diffuse only texture, following the workflow presented by Valve for texturing DOTA assets (http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterTextureGuide.pdf). Only major detour I took from the workflow was using primarily ZBrush to paint on textures, before baking the vertex colours out of xNormal and integrating into my main psd. Was a fantastic workflow to get into - I'm thinking for my next character I'll follow a similar style, but tackle a more simple model that can be built faster so I can put more focus back onto my technical skills...   More work with head sculpts. Started experimenting with fibermesh inside ZBrush, pretty fun stuff. For shorter hair, it feels pretty easy to get something decent in a few minutes, but still haven't got the hang of longer stuff. Sculpted a few female heads using fibermesh for the hair, but all of them looked like they'd just climbed out of bed with the mess that was happening up top. Working on a stylized character to put all this facial sculpting into practice, and to build my toon rigging skills! Aiming to have the character model finished before new years, see how it goes...    More sculpts! Been having fun with these, pushing out into some more diverse territory and creating some busts from concept art instead of photo reference. Also started using Marmoset Toolbag to render the sculpts again. I had tried this with the first few busts I did, but it was kind of like trying to polish a turd... why bother wasting time in Marmoset trying to spruce it up when it looked terrible to begin with. Now that I feel I'm at a somewhat decent level, I'll probably continue to use Marmoset to render instead of plain old zBrush screen grabs since it does look a whole lot more presentable.     Also had a crack at hard-surface work in zBrush and found it to be extremely time consuming, but I'm glad I have an idea of the workflow required now. The robot bust took 5 days to do, working for about 3-4 hours each day. Rendered using BPR in zBrush and composited in Photoshop. Followed Ben Douglas's fantastic YouTube series to arrive at the final result You can check out Ben's tutorials at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB1ZZHlDT7o Highly recommended for an introduction to hard-surface with zBrush!  Been keeping myself busy after finishing my honours year (phew!) by doing some more head sculpts. Monday to Friday, I've been starting the day with a two hour sculpt to get me warmed up. Recently I've been getting more into polypainting and facial expressions to keep myself interested. Thinking about developing one head further, and doing a base sculpt plus a sneer, smile, frown and so on, and turning it into a blendshape facial rig to tie my love of sculpting and rigging together. Think I need some more practice first, but its definitely on the cards! Also I'm still terrible with female faces, but I'm working on it...  Hey! Just finished updating my portfolio website, needed a bit of a makeover to accommodate for the new work I wanted to post up. I'm not much of a web developer so Weebly (shameless plug) has been a great tool for me to create something presentable with little effort. Here are some sculpts I've been doing over the past few months to get the artistic mind brewing. I've done just under 50 head busts, most of them are absolutely terrible, so I've cherry picked a few of the juiciest ones. No females, but hopefully next time I update this I'll have a few that aren't an eyesore to show. For these, I've grabbed some reference images off Google/Pintrest and then gone to town trying to get a likeness in ZBrush. They don't end up looking a whole lot like the original reference but eh, gotta start somewhere.  |
Author3D artist and rigger from Brisbane, Australia 
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