Late Night Doodling in ZBrush

Well, now I guess I’ll catch the late night run of Stargate SG-1 or something on the telly and see if I can get some sleep at last.

Til next time…

Doodling Session in ZBrush - Muscle Guy

I had some time to kill today while waiting for renders to finish, and it has been some time since I had a doodle session, so I sketched around in ZBrush for a while and created this character. Nothing special, I just wanted to brush up a bit on male muscularity. Well, the renders are done, and this is how far I got, but it was a fun session. I just a draw out a few ZSpheres and then I worked almost exclusively with the clay brush. I just love that brush. The image above is a screenshot from ZBrush (cropped just above the nudity limit ), I didn’t bother to make a render of it as I was just having some sculpting fun.

Todays horror moment; when I started up ZBrush my license file had been corrupted somehow, so it shut down. That sent chills down my spine, for real (I found out later that this is not that uncommon that it happens). But a quick call to Pixologic sorted it out and I was up and running again. Gotta love companies with great support. I just hope this doesn’t happen during non office hours while having a deadline, I guess it was good it happened today, so I can prepare and have a backup plan ready if that would ever occur.

Until next time… cheers!

Elly - Click for render and breakdown

Alright, it was time to wrap this baby up. I could go on and on to keep detailing and refining her, but I felt I’d reached the point where I’d accomplished what I wanted with this project, mainly researching some new techniques for my workflow and touch some base with FiberFX in 9.6.

The final render can be found in my 3D portfolio together with a breakdown. (I’m so happy I finally got my act together and fixed the framework for my site last week so I can start adding new content without any hassle)

Well, this was the first darling to get completed, I have a couple of more dusty projects I’m resurrecting and completing and this first one was simple enough to get my feet wet with, and it was a great opportunity to explore some of the new LigthWave 9.6 goodies.

Now it’s time to move on towards some more complex characters, and theoretically I should increase my speed some on the next one, as I don’t think I’ll spend any time to do research for new techniques as I did now. I’m in the mood for just using my current arsenal of techniques and do a straightforward project from A to B.

I have a busy week coming up, but I will get the next one started towards the end of it. Until then, cheers!

Fifth WIP of Elly (Click to enlarge)

Here’s another update of  this CG model, I spent some time with her last night. I modeled a new earpiece for her, fixed the clothing to make them a bit more fitting for her and also did some final tweaks to the skin texture and shading, which I am pretty happy with now.

But the major part of the time I spent with her last night went into the hair. Or hair guides to be more specific. The hair in the render to the left is still very temporary, the shading is not correct yet and looks way to shiny, and the shadow has low quality.

I dedicated my efforts towards finding an effecient workflow for styling hair guides. Guide styling can be quite tedious, and I’ve decided that I will take all time necessary for this one to find as good flow as possible for that part of the process, as I’ll have so much use for having a speedy workflow in the hair styling department for all my other characters.

I’ll continue this process tonight and hopefully get were I want to go with her hair, and when the styling is in place, and I have documented a good workflow for it, I’ll fix the hair shading in FiberFX.

If nothing unexpected happens, I’ll have the final image ready by tomorrow, and hopefully be able to post a small breakdown of the process of this character.

Improved Shading and Textures (Click to enlarge)

Here’s a quick update to the character I worked with last week. I have been really busy, with work and also updating artstorm.net with some improved design and new features (like the turntable function), so I haven’t had time to pick her up for work again until yesterday, where I got some more things done to her.

The image to the right is the latest render of Elly with a few changes since the last post. I haven’t worked anything with the hair yet, so it’s still the same as in the last image, but I did work quite a bit with the skin shading and also tweaked the textures a bit more. The deeper I dig into the simple skin material in LightWave 9.6, the more I like it, it’s pretty capable. Other than the skin and textures I have also updated the eye shading and eye lashes as well.

I can’t get over how amazingly fast the updated render engine is in LightWave 9.6. This character renders in just a few minutes with quite high anti-aliasing in 1K resolution on a now aging Quad Core Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz. the same render takes almost over 15 minutes in 9.5, which was pretty fast anyway. Rendering in 9.6 is incredible. I love it! And has saved my bacon on many tight deadlines already during the autumn of 2008.

I’ll continue working with her tonight, and hopefully wrap this character up to final state. I will do some further tweaking to the texturing and shading, fix the clothing and do a major update to the hair.

Todays update of Elly, added first draft of Hair.

I didn’t have so much time to work with this tonight, but since yesterday I have done a few things anyway.

I cleaned up some more of the textures, and improved the skin shading network with some additional subtle SSS added to it to get a warmer tone to softer parts of the skin. I tweaked her left eyebrow a tiny bit so they are not completely symmetrical, and finally made some hair render tests of the hair guides I’ve been working on for her, rendered with FiberFX in LightWave. I still have to do quite some more work to the guides, as well as work on the hair material. The shadow from the hair for the above render is pretty rough, so it looks a bit soft and strange in some regions. I will raise the quality of the shadow when I have all guides in place where I want them.

That’s it for tonight, a few tips will follow below, other than that, I hope I have some more time tomorrow to spend on this project.

Here is my node network for the Simple Skin material I have used on Elly together with the settings for the Simple Skin material. Many settings are driven by texture maps, which I have painted in ZBrush. I have also blended in the SSS2 shader for some additional SubSurface Scattering control. I love the SSS2 shader, so fast with beautiful quality.

Simple Skin Node Setup (Click to enlarge)

Bonus FiberFX Script

FiberFX Button

Here’s a small LScript, which simply allows you to add FiberFX to your layout menus. If you use FiberFX often like I do, it can come in handy. It’s much faster to have FiberFX attached to a button than to have to Ctrl+F8, drop down the menu, select FiberFilter then double click. This script does that, and when FiberFX is added to the scene, it opens the FiberFX panel with the button. I find it to be a convenient time saver and I have added it to my Workflow tab in Layout where I have all my most used tools collected.

Download Open_FFX.ls

Over and out, Cheers!

Second WIP of this model - Texturing and shading almost completed.

I more or less completed painting the textures, and that’s where I devoted most of the time I spent with her tonight. I ended up with a diffuse map (color map), epidermis map, subdermis map, occlusion map, reflection map, fresnel map, bump map and a normal map. Phew! With those maps fed into the simple skin material in LightWave 9.6 blended with the SSS 2 (SubSurface Scattering) shader I got the above skin material.

I also worked on the eyes, where I used the SSS 2 shader as the base for the eyeball material. Other than working with textures and shading, I added the eyelashes and eyebrows, blocked in the beginning of a top for her and started blocking out some hair guides too.

So I’m pretty happy with the progress tonight. What’s still left to do now is some final polishing on the textures and shading networks, completing the work with the hair guides and finish her top and maybe one more accessory to equip her with. If I’m in the mood I might do a minor rig to make the final pose a tad more interesting.

Tomorrow is a working day, but hopefully I’ll have some time in the evening to continue this project.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I named her as well, so the lady in the render above is called Elly, hello Elly.

What I was left with, was a couple of personal projects that have been untouched for some time, but that I’d get much personal satisfaction from to complete. And with the massive axing done, I was left with six projects (in contrast to over 30 unfinished ones) which I hope I can now have a clear focus on and finish them one by one.

With the release of LightWave 3D 9.6 around the corner, with it’s improved hair rendering and new lovely shaders and updated materials, I’m craving to take them for some serious test drives by doing some character work.

So, first out is this female character bust, which I created in one ambitious day back in February 2008. I’ve just spent some time examining the state of the project, going through the mesh and the textures. And here is a render of her current state how she was left in her project folder for almost a year.

The current working state of this model (Rendered with a slightly too narrow DOF)

The modeling is more or less done, but the textures are mostly just blocked in and need quite some more work. I will spend the rest of the day and evening with her, and see how far I’ll come.

What’s left to do to have her completed as I currently see it;

• Fixing a few edge loops in the overall polygon flow.
• Cleaning up the textures and repaint many sections of the current maps.
• Update the shader network to utilize some of the new goodiness in LightWave 9.6.
• Model proper eyeballs and texture/shade them.
• Model and style a hair wig as well as brows and lashes.
• Model a few accessories for her.
• And finally baptize her, she has got to have a name, doesn’t she?

And that’s pretty much it. Oh well, let’s see how far I can take her towards completion today. It will be a couple of entertaining hours, as I love when I have some time to spare for my own projects and character work. Which is also the times when I evolve my techniques the most as well.

Happy 2009 everyone, and I hope this will be a more active year blogging wise for me than the past year.

This is approximately a 4 hour sculpt from the first drawn ZSphere in ZBrush until the final textured render in LightWave 3D, as seen below. Let’s call it a small Sunday evening project.

Click to enlarge

Of course, it’s far from perfect, but with the small amount of time spent, I’m pretty happy with it. I could tweak it for a few more hours to make it shine a bit, but that would defeat the purpose of my speed modeling/sculpting/texturing/rendering sessions.

I started this time as well by placing a few ZSpheres and then converted them to an adaptive skin, ie. a polygon mesh. I tweaked the low poly mesh to get the proportions somewhat how I wanted them, and then just kept going by subdividing, detailing, subdividing, detailing and so on, until I had reached about 2 million polygons. I didn’t use any references but just kept going and let the character evolve by itself as I went along and the details started to come through.
A few screenshots from the different stages of my sculpting can be seen in the image below.

The progress in ZBrush, from ZSpheres to detailed sculpt

I spent around 2 hour in total with the sculpting part of the character. At this stage, I would have retopologized the mesh if it was a real project, so I could animate it properly, but as this wasn’t the case I exported the low poly version to LightWave together with a displacement map.

Below is an ambient occlusion render of just the mesh with the displacement map in LightWave.

Male Head - Speed Sculpting - Ambient Occlusion Render

Well, well, then I spent around 2 more hours, painting/creating the color map, specular map and the bump map in ZBrush and Photoshop, as well as setting up the shaders and lighting in LightWave for rendering, which ended up as the image at the top of this post.

I’m getting closer to move on to bigger things, but I’ll probably make an additional doodle or two in the coming week.

Working Music: Joan as Police Woman – To Survive

Click to Enlarge - Quick LightWave Setup and Render

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.

ZBrush Sculpting Workflow

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.

Click to Enlarge - Retopology Process in ZBrush

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.

Finished Texture Painting in ZBrush

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