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)

Here we go. I finished painting my little guy in ZBrush the other day. So here is the final result rendered in LightWave 3D.

When I was at it, I also created an animation rig for him. So I can pose and animate him. Nothing fancy but all the basic controls needed are there. Some Inverse Kinemtics controllers for the legs, arms and the tail and just a Forward Kinematic for the body and head.

As he is completed now I have started working on a scenery where I can put him, and also make a short animated sequence in. Stay tuned for the next and final update of this project.

Working Music: Detektivbyrån - Hemvägen

Just a quick update, I’ve done the first pass of painting on the little guy, so I just wanted to post a progress image.

It’s getting decent, but I need one more session to work on him before I am happy with the textures and shading. I have done all painting of the skin texture so far in ZBrush and haven’t had any need to bring it into Photoshop so far. I will probably do some minor touch up in the end there I guess, but ZBrush has been just great to paint textures in. The above render is made in LightWave 3D, I didn’t bother to turn on the displacement map for additional details for this test render.

Well, I’ll continue painting this cute little pet today, and then he should be finished to be let loose in some scenery.

Painting Music: Gogol Bordello - Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike

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

When I was halfway through the sculpting phase I decided to improve my UV Layout for my darling. Originally I had settled on letting ZBrush create the UV map for me, using GUV tiles. But then I thought Nah, they don’t look very pretty. ZBrush GUV tiles does create a very nice distortion free UV Map, so it’s technically a very good UV Map, but not very easy on the human eye if you want to take the UV Canvas into Photoshop for further editing after you have left ZBrush.

So I went back to my base mesh in LightWave and had a proper UV unwrap session with it instead.

As can be seen, my unwrapped UV Map is so much easier to paint on than the abstract ZBrush generated map if I decide to paint or do other work on the maps down the road. To create my UV Maps in LightWave I use a very nice free plugin called PLG UV Tools which just rocks for UV creation.

I have always thought of creating UV Maps as the most boring and uncreative part of the 3D process, but the PLG Tools has completely changed that for me. It just gives me great UV Maps in no time so I can concentrate on the more creative parts.

In less than no time I had decided on where my seams and cuts shall be and generated a more or less distortion free UV map out of it. Then run the Relax UV command and follow up with the Pack UV Chart to get as effective placement in the UV space as possible. Here is the base mesh with an UV Checker pattern applied after I had finished my new UV Layout.

Gotta love how easy it is to swap out an UV Map in ZBrush for a new one in the middle of a sculpting session.

Anyway, the checker render above is the last render of the base mesh. Now there is only the fun parts left, sculpted and painted versions of this guy!

I have an UV Layout that I am very pleased with. And the sculpting is almost finished. I’ll continue sculpting in the finer details tonight and shortly be back with some images of the final sculpture so I can move on to the painting phase.

Working Music: Camera Obscura - Let’s Get Out Of This Country