I took a few hours tonight and had another speed doodling session. I worked from my imagination with this one, with a goal set to as fast as possible get a decent looking character. I really need to get a speedy workflow in modeling characters for some of my upcoming projects, so I’ll probably make a few more similar doodles around this theme.

The image above was created from scratch from the first polygon to final render in about 3-4 hours. This was mainly a ZBrush project, but I did end up rendering it out in LightWave 3D at the end. If I had spend some time on bulding a skin node network in LightWave and worked a bit on the hair it would probably have ended up pretty decent looking, but I’m saving that for the next time.

Anyway, I started this project by making a few ZSpheres and sculpted and pushed around the mesh from there, going up in level of detail now and then, trying to capture the basics of the female facial form as much as possible. Check out the image below for a few screenshots from different times in my sculpting process.

At this stage I felt I had got most of the structure down as I wanted it. As sculpting from a few ZSpheres in ZBrush doesn’t create a decent topology, I included fixing the topology to my workflow this time.
To fix that, I roughly painted out directly on my character how I wanted the topology to flow, somewhat close to what I like, and then I used that model with my paintover as a template, building my new topology on top of that. When I had my new topology in place, I projected my sculpted details back into the new mesh. Here is three additional screenshots; The original topology - My paintover - The final topology.

Alright, the third one looks much better, so to end this session I made some basic texture painting as well. I didn’t bother with painting any Subsurface Scattering, Specular, Diffuse maps and so on this time, I just wanted to get some texture down and painted a simple color map. Here is the color map rendered in ZBrush with a basic skin shader applied.

And to close out this doodling session, just for fun, I exported the model out of ZBrush and brought her into LightWave. I made a quick and dirty wig with some hair strands, just a few minutes worth of work, and then rendered out the image at the top of this post.

Well, that’s it for this time. I shall return.

Working Music: Markus Krunegård - Markusevangeliet

A 3 hour speed sculpting.
I haven’t used ZBrush for a while, so I doodled around in it for a few hours today, to get the groove back. The image below is the result of a couple of zspheres and then just playing around, sculpting out the basics for the female form. I wasn’t going for accuracy or realism this time, just trying to get the shapes down and having some fun with it.

I could probably go on for a few more hours, keeping on refining and improving on her looks, but that would take the speed out of speed doodling. When I ended my sculpting session I exported her out of ZBrush together with a displacement map, and made a quick and dirty render in LightWave 3D, which is the render above, trying to capture at least some mood.

Actually, I think it’s pretty healthy to do a doodle now and then, to give myself some time to explore some new tools and techniques in my applications which I might not dare trying out when I do real projects. I’ll probably try do this somewhat regular to work on my speed and nail down better techniques.

Sculpting Music: Reyn Ouwehand - The Blithe, The Blend and The Bizarre

Sunday morning. I woke up early today, and just felt like spending this lovely morning doodling around a bit in ZBrush. This is what came out after a quick session.

It’s based on the character from my last work in progress post which I’ve been working on in LightWave 3D. I just exported her out of LightWave at her current state and sculpted away for a while in ZBrush. This gave me the opportunity to get into using sub-tools, transpose control as well as polygon painting and materials in ZBrush at the same time. Well, this was just something I made for fun to get the day started. I’ll post my progress of the LightWave version of this character this evening.

Morning doodling Music: Camera Obscura - Let’s Get out of this Country

It was time! Time at last to bring one of my creations into another renderer than ZBrush. I doodled up something in ZBrush and moved it into LightWave 3D for rendering this time. Below is a rendering of my only 2470 polygons large mesh inside of LightWave with a displacement map.

It did actually take some time and experimentation until I got it right, but in the end I did find a good flow for the process of getting ZBrush data into LightWave 3D.

I started with a quick doodling session in ZBrush. The usual procedure. Draw out a couple of ZSpheres to get a base mesh, divided it a couple of times, and sculpted for about 30 minutes to get something with enough details in to work with and find my flow between the applications.

It took a few turns back and forth and quite some head scratching until it worked smoothly. I ended up working in this way. First the ZBrush part.

• Bring the mesh down to the lowest resolution.
• Group the UV tiles (It’s not a pretty UV map created this way, but it was okay for this experiment as I wasn’t about to work on the map in any other application anyway).
• Enable adaptive displacement, raise the intensity to max, enable displacement mode and finally set my output resolution to 4096 pixels and run create displacement map.
• Export my base mesh with flipped quad polygons as an .obj file and also export the displacement map flipped vertically as a tif image.

And we’re done in ZBrush, let’s move on to the LightWave part.

• I imported the .obj in Modeler and turned on subpatching, saved it as an .lwo and moved on to Layout.
• In Layout I made a displacement node flow, consisting of the displacement map image fed into a subtract node. As medium gray in the displacement map is pushed out in LightWave and it’s supposed to be 0 in ZBrush measurements, I subtracted 0.5 from it. Then a multiply node to control the height of the displacement and finally I ended up feeding it into a scale node combined with the normal spot info node. Done, a perfect ZBrush displacement inside of LightWave.

Before rendering I enabled LightWave’s APS system, Adaptive Pixel Subdivision, and set a gradient on the Angle to the camera’s Z-Axis to get enough polygons for detailing at render time without killing the engine. And for fun I also slapped on a SSS shader node flow to make it a bit more interesting. F9! And we have a scene with 2470 polygons rendered as 1.4 million polygons with lot’s of lovely details!

Here is a tiny visual step by step guide all the way from ZBrush into LightWave ending up with an Ambient Occlusion render.

I hope this information will be found useful to some people.

Anyway, next time I will make the final step, bringing one of my 3D meshes out from LightWave and into ZBrush, sculpt details on it there and then bring it back to LightWave again for rendering.

Oh, and by the way, the swedish Göteborg blogmap at bloggkartan.se.

Doodling Music: Air - Pocket Symphony

A small update on the doodle I posted earlier today.

I wasn’t completely happy with the look I got from the default rendering settings in ZBrush, so I spent some time reading up on the different settings and how they worked. So I just wanted to post a new version of this doodle with some improved settings. I’ve turned on edge anti aliasing here to get rid of the jaggies, added some perspective, improved the shadow settings. And also just had some fun painting my sculpture for a few minutes to make it a bit more interesting. Enjoy this cutie! :)

Still listening to: Koop - Koop Islands

I’ve continued my explorations into the ZBrush universe and this is what popped out. I love the freedom to just mindlessly sculpt in this application. Hope you enjoy it.

I’ve been into improving my ZBrush skills for about a week now I can say this software is truly amazing and will for sure improve my existing workflow. It’s so nice not having to fight the software, and I’m feeling free in the application and have found myself thinking more like a traditional sculptor. Yes, I am really having fun! :)

While working on this piece I realized I have to think a little bit more about topology of the base mesh, before jumping into the the finer detail sculpting. This will be less of a problem when I get into importing my meshes I create in LightWave, as I am very careful with the topology modeling in LightWave. But this sculpt was, like my second doodle two days ago, made completely inside of ZBrush, with the base mesh built from ZSpheres. When working with the details around the eyelid area as well as the genitals I realized I didn’t have enough polygons driving the sculpt in the background to be able to work as precise as I needed to do there. I could divide the mesh another time, but then I would get a great deal of details added to areas where I didn’t need it. Waste of resources in other words.

Well, this was doodle number three, so I am still learning, and on my next ZB doodle I’ll not make this mistake again, and make sure I put denser details in the areas where I need it from the beginning. Here is some screenshots from the different stages. ZSpheres -> Adaptive skinning -> Sculpting in the details -> Render in a clay material.

Gonna read up a bit on working with topology inside ZBrush next, to have better control of my sculpts I create inside ZBrush, and see what I come up with next.

ZBrush sculpting music: Koop - Waltz for Koop

I’ve continued my exploration within ZBrush 3, and had a one hour doodling session today (I haven’t forgot about my other projects, updates will come shortly on those as well). But I am really falling in love with the intuitive way of working in ZBrush so I will continue investing time to really get confident with this package, so I can use it in many of my upcoming projects.

The ZBrush doodle I posted yesterday was my first attempt to create something in zbrush 3, and was done with blocking out the shape with a sphere brush, convert it to a polymesh and then pull, push and drag around the clay from there. It got quite messy and lot’s of stretched and overlapping polygons. It’s almost impossible to control the topology working in that way.

So today I improved my workflow in ZBrush and used zspheres instead and got into the habit of using them to create a much better base mesh to work from. Nice and controlled topology, much quicker to work with and which therefore also resulted in a much nicer result. From the zsphere created base mesh I made a few divisions to get the details I needed to sculpt out all the finer details.

And from starting with an empty canvas to the creature I ended up took about an hour. Amazing, this would have take so much longer to model and sculpt in a traditional 3D package. Can’t wait to continue getting deeper into zbrush and start exchanging data between LightWave 3D and ZBrush.

Todays doodling music: Calexico - Feast of Wire

As ZBrush 3 was recently released, I’ve finally started taking the time needed to fully learn this lovely piece of software. Lot’s of more things for me to explore in this package, but I am getting there. Here is a doodle I made this morning just after I woke up while drinking my morning coffee. This weekend have been dedicated to ZBrush.

This doodling took about 30 minutes from an empty canvas for me to sculpt. I made it entirely inside of ZBrush beginning with the sphere brush and working from there. Just having fun with the sculpting tools. I don’t know what it is really, I was just playing around. It does take some time getting used to this way of working, being used to dragging and pulling vertices for years, and now moving over to this form of almost clay sculpting.

But I love it, and I can’t wait to continue digging into ZBrush and making it a major part of my pipeline for my pieces.

Doodling Music: Slayradio

Well, I’ve continued my explorations of Vue. And I guess there will be a couple of more of these entries until I’ve learned everything about this new tool in my arsenal. New productive tools are always a joy to learn.
Today I explored constructing my own terrains by painting them with the airbrush and then constructing a river in it with some foam on the shorelines, and having it populated with an ecosystem were I explored some more about controlling placement and distribution of the objects using functions connected to the rest of the environment.

Well, have had a soft weekend, but tonight I got some time to continue playing around with Vue. I just continued learning about Eco Systems in Vue, a very powerful feature that really seems to rock.

Here is a small Eco System render I just created. Enjoy. ;)

Music for Vue’ing: Lars Winnerbäck - Live Summer ‘05