Zbrush quick sketch.....kinda

Like you read on all art blogs "haven't had much time for my own stuff lately..." Took about six hours.

realistic bust.... no not that kind

For future work I thought I should lay out a generic human male bust UV'd painted and all as a starting point.

Skinny cow

A test on the skin shader for mental ray I've been noodling with. The eyes are a work in progress. As always click = big.

Metal Omar

This is div 6 or 7 of the bust I'm currently on, just knocking off some rust....no pun intended.

Omar maybe?

Playing with ZB 3.5r3, thought I'd do a quick bust to try some of the new features. This is a wire of division 2.
As always click to see large.

Shave me

A test render of the hair... from now on all characters will just have helmets, I'm halfway serious... what a pain. A real killer on the rendering times and you can't do shave in a separate render layer, so no raytraced shadows or final gather. Crazy.

Hair Today...

Splines, Splines, Splines... they hurt my brain. Initial pass with shave and a haircut. Can't raytrace these suckers I'll have to do it in post I guess. Found out that long hair is very difficult to pull off, no wonder everyone always design their characters with short hair. Won't do this again.

Woman Sitting

Yessss there are things you can make art with that don't involve Senor Wacom, col-erase and ink.

Mr. Meeting

Cleaning out my closet and came across some rough concept stuff and thought this was funny... must have been frustrated at the time or something...

To shell with you

About it for the shell.... digger.... thingy. Might put a light in the exhaust or something, but other then that I don't think I'll be putting much more other then rendering. And wow.... mentalray can be a fussy little critter.
Initially this was a way to see what I could get out of zbrush as far as a non-organic shape with displacement, normal and bumps.

Peek Tweek

Some lighting today, trying to get the best out of the sss shader and the 16 bit displacement map.
The 16 bit out of Zbrush 3.5 seems to hold detail a little better then the 32-bit as long as you get the gain settings correct. This took about a half hour to render.... the hair is going to kill my processor.

Peekaboo first pass

Yes, I fell off the face of the planet. It's been overdue for a long while, but hopefully I'll be more active with posting progress. So, that said here's a first pass on the face with misss_fast (quite the pain)

First Pose

Been away doing a lot of under-the-hood work in mental ray lately but things are moving in the right direction. So I was going the do the pose with transpose master in zbrush but I was having a little problem with the masking because of all the parts in the sub-tool. So I ended up just doing a quick rig in maya and did a little weighting work and have my pose for first pass. Still some work to do on the hands which I'll do in zb, but it's a start. She'll have hair so that's why no ears.

The Claw

This is the first pass at integrating the claw and the flesh, right now there's too much meat and not enough metal but this will progress. Basic shader on the claw... will do something more special when the time comes. Click for large.

Smash puny humans 2

Heres a closer look at the face.

Smash puny humans

So along with this tank thing I'm working on there will be a character climbing out of this thing. Yeah I know the arms and fingers look way long but that's on purpose. You'll see later on. First polypaint... lots too do.

Non organics in ZB 2

Now here's the near finished major shape edit, following this I'll do another pass for a bump map and poly paint. Click for bigger...

Non organics in ZB

So here's the initial finalized base for the sub-tank-digger with all the groups. Had to use Max for the shading groups in the obj, maya couldn't seem to translate

Metal claw in zbrush

I'm guessing that some fear I've fallen off the face of the earth.... nope. Lost my son too a long illness so I'm trying to figure out where exactly I left off, here I think. Zbrush render first pass, needs detail work and paint. Click to see big.

First pass...

This is the first pass on peek-a-boos upperbody, there won't be a bottom because she'll be coming out of her shell. I'm mainly interested in the torso at this point, the hands and arms will change as will the face to some extent. Click for larger as usual... cheers.

peek_a_boos home

Still a bit more work on this before Zbrush, but this is basically it. It's like a submersible, conch, cyber, digging... machine..... thing.... Looks a little confusing right now but it will make sense later, I hope.

Next, some tech articles...

The left arm is going to be severely deformed with cybernetic support..... I know its been done to death, but hey it's what the concept calls for.

Onward...

This is the base mesh that I'll be using for the organic part. Yes I know no ears.... that's ok hair is going to cover them any way.

Something new

So... moving on to my next personal project. It will be based on a concept by Yasushi Nirasawa. First up, hands in Maya. Click to view larger image.

Done with this

This was never intended to be a finished piece, just an exercise to get familiar with some of the tools in Zbrush. But this is it for this character.

Vampyre torso and head work

So this is probably as far as I am going to take this guy geo wise. I'll do some transpose work and polypainting but getting him all uv'd and ready for mentalray would be too much work because of the zsphere geo mess I made. Cleek to enlarge.

More Zbrush

Haven't had as much time as I'd like, but things are moving forward. This has been good practice, at times I've almost put it aside but I'm trying to finish things I start.

Some sculpting

Starting to flesh out some of the shapes for the anatomy. Notice how much more poly resolution there is in the legs.... needed another zsphere in the torso. Having fun though.

Like I said...

This is the zsphere mesh, It's at this point that I decide this is just going to be a sketch. You can see the topo inconsistencies in the chest and hands. There's always the option of re-topology if I get something that I like later on, But the hands are a mess. The fingers out weigh the main part of the hand by 3 to 1. Yeah.... looks pretty lame at this point but we'll see just an exercise anyway.

Zsphere biped

I've never used Zspheres in Zbrush so I though it was about time to to give them a try. There a little awkward at first, but after some trial and error (emphasis error) I worked out a decent biped. Hands and face are still an issue, the topo isn't very consistent in these areas and the hands have some definite weirdness. I saw a post somewhere about making quad hands correctly using zspheres. Next time I'll probably do more tuning but for a first time..... eh, not so bad.

Teeth sculpt

Worked on some teeth, don't know what's going to use them, wanted to play around with poly-painting in Zbrush

What is this krap?

Greetings...