4dpencil.net

Some street lights to make the square a little less empty. Fast and easy thanks to Zbrush.  Ok, off to read my new Kung Fu Panda Art Book now..

Hey everyone.. seems I let myself get sloppy and haven’t been updating my site for awhile. Things have been a little crazy lately with projects and stuff. I’ve been working on the texturing of the creature that I modeled as well as the modeling and texturing of the mining tunnel set piece of my group film.  Been putting together concepts for a new low poly environment as well. The good news is that through lots of back and forth between Zbrush and Maya I’ve learnt a lot to help streamline my workflow.

This quick paintover (click to view full version) was the result of a mesh explosion when I was trying to change the UVs of the mining tunnel environment after lots of sculpting at high subdivision levels. I’ve tried a few different approaches to reimport the low poly and update the UVs, but at higher polygon counts Zbrush did nothing but crash on me.

There was a glimmer of hope last night when it seemed to be processing it, so I let it run for a few hours while I finally got to watch V for Vendetta. Sadly, yet another messed up model was produced. At least it didn’t go to waste altogether, I see some interesting building shapes up there I’d like to revisit sometime in the future.

Well, lesson learnt. Zbrush is pretty flexible but it’s best not to push it to that extent unless it’s absolutely necessary. Proper planning of texture map size and UV placement should be done right at the start.

Thankfully, plentiful save files at all stages let me put it back together with minimum fuss. Anyway, more updates on my stuff coming soon..

I finally got around to figuring out how Zspheres work in Zbrush. Gotta think of ways to work faster since I’ll be doing most of the creature design and modeling for my group film project.

This was a quick muck around with proportions with the Zspheres, changed it to an adaptive mesh and did a really rough sculpt of what appears to be a Rhinobatsloth.

I found that while the upper torso and fore legs were generally not that bad, the hind legs suffered badly from lack of reference. That’s where Elliot Goldfinger’s animal anatomy book comes in to save the day!