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

The summer is here, and I’ll have at least a month of free time, getting some things of the ground. To get my juices flowing I decided to finish some old projects that’s been sitting lonely for a long time, and by that be able to soon send a bunch of files to my archive drive instead of having tons of unfinished stuff in my project folder.

I dug up my old Goblin project, and had a session in ZBrush with him tonight.

The old Goblin project with some ZBrush doodling

I kinda liked where he was going now, so I’m gonna continue detailing him for a few hours and add some accesories to him and then see how it all turns out. If I am happy I gonna shade, texture and render him, otherwise he’ll hit the graveyard.

Working Music: The Concretes - In Colour

I just wanted to post a small update. I’ve had a very busy week so far, so there haven’t been so much time to work with this guy. But the modeling is starting to get in place. I need one more session with him and then the modeling should be more or less finished.

I have two more accessories left to model for him and some additional details to add to his body. I hope to be able to have that session this evening.

I make this project to improve my texturing skills, so I wanna spend the most time in that area. But I have also dedicated quite some time now to explore a new flow for my detailed modeling. I have experimented with a new method that I kinda am starting to like a lot.

LightWave 3D -> ZBrush -> Modo -> LightWave 3D.

My flow goes like this, I rough out the overall shapes I am looking for in LightWave, his body and his different pieces of clothing. Then I bring the meshes into ZBrush, one at a time, and start sketching and sculpting out the details, like wrinkles in the clothing. When I have something I am happy with, I export them out in hires into Modo. And there I rebuild the clothing from scratch again, using the hires mesh from ZBrush in the background. The Pen Tool in Modo in quad mode with a background constraint is just wonderful for this work of creating new topology on an existing mesh. So by doing it like this I get a pretty low polygon mesh, with an excellent flow of edgeloops with as much details as I can preserve modeled in, carefully laid out in Modo where I need them. And when I am done in Modo, the model goes back to LightWave to replace the first rough draft version.

Working Music: Beirut - Lon Gisland

I have another new project in the pipeline. A personal project where I want to perfect some techniques of mine. Mainly in creating lots of details in the models while keeping the polygons to a very low amount. But also to some extent texture painting.

So here is the first quick draft of a character called The Innkeeper.

This is mostly a rough draft of this character. I’ve modeled the actual body and head in LightWave to get the overall look and proportions where I want them, as well as blocking in his clothing. His robe is where I have started doing some more work.

I have got quite some details modeled into the robe, while still maintaining a very low polygon count, so I am relying on a very nice topology carefully placed where needed for the details while still having good edgeloops so it’s animation friendly.

I am using ZBrush to sketch out the details I want in his clothing to then bring the model into Modo to redo the topology exactly how I want it. Retopologizing can be a pain, but I find Modo’s tools quite quick and intuitive for this kind of work.

I’ll continue modeling this guy all day, so a new post will follow shortly with more details.

Working Music: My Spy vs Spy Remix Album (Around from an old project)

As Siggraph is this week, most companies in the industry have new exciting things to present or release. And yesterday was definitely Christmas for me. I was like a kid in a candy store with all the new toys I got. ZBrush 3.1 (Outstanding update!), Vue 6.5 and LightWave 9.3. So I kept myself pretty busy checking out all new features and fixes.

Anyway, my Destrachan project is progressing. I have finished the sculpting of this little guy, so I thought it was about time I posted a few renders.

I had a few adventures before I perfected my pipeline on how to bring my ZBrush sculpts into my other 3D applications in the best way possible. The above renders are all done in Modo. I will do the final renders in LightWave 3D, and I had thought I should do the above in LightWave as well. As LightWave doesn’t have micro polygon displacements I ran into trouble with all the details in this character. The new APS in LightWave helped a bit but I simply couldn’t get all the details I had sculpted to show up in LightWave without running out of memory. LightWave do have pretty poor memory management when dealing with high quality displacements at the moment. I really hope LightWave 9.5 will bring micro polygon displacements so these things will be fixed once and for all.

So I decided to give Softimage|XSI a spin instead. It’s a very nice 3D application in many ways, and I really enjoy how well everything is integrated, the history stack, the powerful node system and all those things. But when coming to displacements it turned out to be even worse than LightWave. Can you imagine? It takes forever even to initialize the renderer when increasing the displacement quality in XSI. Being used to the snappy workflow in LightWave I just couldn’t take it. No XSI for me at the moment.

So for the renders above I ended up using Modo. With Modo it just works and it simply rocks with displacements. Modo didn’t even stop to think for a second when I added my high resolution displacement map and cranked up the quality. Without any real time difference Modo just rendered this guy out with all the details like a breeze. Amazing. If Modo just would have had animation, volumetrics, hair and nodes I would definitely use it as the backbone of my pipeline.

Anyway, as Modo doesn’t have those things at the moment, I had to work out another solution for my current and future projects. And luckily ZBrush 3.1 was released yesterday, where among other things the missing Normal Map exporter was added again. And boy, did that fix everything for me. Combining a displacement and a normal map in LightWave from ZBrush just gives me excellent results, with a very low rendering time. So now my pipeline is complete again. And after all experimenting the last few days I have found a very efficient workflow now I hope. We’ll see shortly.

Alright, to end this post, here is some screenshots from ZBrush of some of the different stages from the sculpting phase.

Well, I just started painting this guy tonight, and that shouldn’t take to long, so I will probably have him painted shortly in a new post. And I’ll probably end it this project before hitting the final render in a scene with adding a basic animation rig. I mean, this guy needs to breath some life as well. Until next time…

Music Tonight: Slayradio

Let’s see, things are moving forward, so here is just a quick update. I’ve been working on finetuning my sculpting and get some finer details in place. Here is a render of where I am at the moment.

I made the render above in Modo by taking my low resolution base mesh and exporting a displacement map from ZBrush of all the details I had sculpted.

I do all my sculpting using my Wacom Intuos 3 tablet. By using a pressure sensitive pen I get the exact control and the feeling of working with real clay as close as possible for a digital environment.

I think I am almost satisfied now. I have a little cleaning up left to do and some additional finer details to add, but not very much. Then the sculpting phase is over and I can move on to the next steps in making this guy come alive. I will post a couple of images from different angles as soon as the sculpting is completed, with some additional step by step images.

On a related note. I do record some of my sculpting sessions to video. And I am about to get my server space extended ten folded this summer as well as the bandwidth. So as soon as my space is upgraded I’ll start posting some video sessions in the blog now and then to go with my posts. And other than recording my sculpting sessions I’ll also be able to more sporadically post animation tests and so on. This will be fun!

And to end this post, I had a little mouse adventure. My trusty Logitech MX 610 Mouse died on me last night. The LMB was worn out, but it had served me well for over two years. And fortunately I don’t use my mouse while sculpting in ZBrush, I only use my Wacom tablet with the pen for that, I can’t see how one could sculpt with a mouse? But I do all my LightWave work with the mouse, so I would need a replacement immediately. Luckily, one of the nicest persons I know came by me this morning and dropped of a brand spanking new Logitech MX Revolution mouse as a replacement. Wonderful mouse, perhaps the best one I’ve ever had. Amazing precision and the grip is excellent. And lot’s of programmable buttons. I’ve already configured it for LightWave, like this;

Forward = Select Loop, Back = Drop Selection, Search = Single View On/Off, Thumb Wheel Forward = Expand Selection, Thumb Wheel Back = Contract Selection, Thumb Wheel Click = Expand All, Mouse Wheel Tilt Left = Hide Selection, Mouse Wheel Tilt Right = Unhide. Wonderful setup and gives a great boost to the workflow. I am in love with it already!

Working Music: Beirut - Gulag Orkestar

Time for a new Destrachan update. Another completely unrelated project with a tight deadline came in between, but today I’ve continued working on my Destrachan creature. The project that came in between is finished, and I’ll be able to post about it in two weeks when I’m allowed to publish it.

Anyway, continuing from the last post, where I had modeled the base mesh in LightWave 3D, I’ve now brought this guy into ZBrush and started sculpting. I’ve worked my way from subdivision level 1 and are currently sculpting at level 4 and are working with around 90.000 polygons at the moment.

At level 4 I’ve got enough polygons to start getting finer details sculpted into my creature like veins, tendons, skin folds, muscle definitions and the like. I intend to keep sculpting all the way up to level 7 to get this creature extremely detailed down to pores and skin texture, before I export it back as a low resolution mesh with a displacement map to use in LightWave. Oh well, I just wanted to post this update tonight, and will continue sculpting for a few hours now and will hopefully be able to post the final sculpt tomorrow, so I can start painting my little cute and cosy darling.

Sculpting Music: Lasse Lindh - (Self named album)

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