More Lord Arachnos mini-fig progress

Here's the latest Lord Recluse update. I've blocked out his 8 mechanical arms and added his head (always a good step). Other than that, not much new.

Being Sick Sucks

Call it flu, cold, virus....whatever you want. Whatever it is that's going around this year ain't messing around. I've just been beat to death with this thing since last Thursday. With a temp of 103 the last thing I wanted my eyes to do was look at a monitor or TV screen.

And to make things better....I'm pretty sure the meds the doc gave me don't even phase this thing. Just trying to finish riding it out for now.

Lord Recluse mini-fig body

Working on another mini-fig. This time around a villain, probably the most well known villain in City of Heroes, Lord Recluse. With his mechanical 8 arms attached to his back, he'll be probably the most involved mini-fig I could think of at the moment.

The 8 arms should also make posing him a pretty interesting job. Should be fun.

Retopo Success

Finally, something I've been wondering about for a while now and could never seem to get a solid successful test of was the ability to create new topology for a model without losing the higher level details. I found a tutorial on using the "projection" brush....which really didn't seem to work nearly as well as I'd hoped. I also found a tutorial about tweeking a models topology, meaning making slight adjustments for added details, but never a brand new start on the topology.

All you ZBrush masters are probably thinking, "What's the big deal, it's simple." But I had never found a way to pull it off until this evening. It was actually combining several tutorial examples that gave me the final solution.

Again, for those more experienced folks this is probably a "no-brainer", but for me it's a huge step to understanding ZBrush.

Take a look at the image above and see the savings I was able to pull on poly count....and with better topology.

ZBrush Materials Library

I was playing around with the extra ZBrush matcap library on the ZBrush site today and decided to make a couple of extra renders of the War Patriot mini-fig. I think they turned out pretty well...one thing's for sure, they REALLY make me wish I had a 3d printer (or that 3d prints weren't so dang expensive).

I could make a killer heroes/villains chess set.

War Patriot Mini-fig

Playing around with ZBrush and new projects for City of Heroes stuff. Here's the completed "War Patriot" mini-fig character. All in Zbrush. I had recorded the modeling of the head but my computer crashed resulting of a loss of the movie...lucky for me I had already saved the head model before it crashed.

Taking a hint?

I'd hoped to make up some time this evening on Vesuvious. However, two crashes and two hours lost later and I'm wondering if tonights such a good night to model.

In any case, I'm still trying to block out his head at the very least tonight.

Mystery Figure Sculpt

Now, most of you would think I'd be jumping right on that ZBrush contest entry...especially since I got a late start on it. But to be honest, my comfort level with some of the ZBrush features is still not so high. And I wanted to minimize the "oh, crap I really shouldn't have done that like that" factor as much as possible. So I wanted to do one more figure real quick and at least get my feet wet with some of the features I hadn't experimented with before.

And to have a little fun with it I'm not saying who the sculpt is of, but I did try out the "time elapse" feature in ZBrush just to see how that worked. So in less than 4 mintues you'll see the entire figure (torso), take shape in the video above. I'm modeling the head from a sphere a little later (sorry). And a hint on the figure...you'd really have to play City of Heroes or visit my Deviant Art site a bit to pick up on who it is.

So, have fun and enjoy. The real sculpt took around 3 hours....so my speed is still a little lacking.

NOW I've got to jump on my ZBrush entry.

ZBrush Contest....I'm in.

Ok I've been watching the awesome ZBrush - "Action Hero" contest for a few weeks now and it's been incredible. There is so much inspiring talent there and I've learned quite a bit just following the threads and watching the techniques.


I've thought about it quite a bit and I've decided I'm gonna give it a shot. At the very least I should learn a ton by being contest focused on it. I have to say, with what I've seen in the contest so far, simply making the final 10 cut would be a huge 'win' in my book.

These folks are incredible.

With that in mind I present "Vesuvious".



This should be fun. For the entry thread and rest of the info check out the Contest Forum.

Making 'lil 8

A friend of mine from Deviant Art inquired about a little more info on how I made 8. So here's the basics of it.

8 is separated into two pieces, his body and his head. Both were created using slightly different techniques.

The Body
The body began as a construct of ZSpheres (an interesting modeling tool in ZBrush). They're very easy to lay out, but a little tricky to get exactly what you're looking for from the final skin that gets created around them. The best advice I can give for making the conversion from spheres to skin, is just to play around and experiment with it. The good news is that you can preview any adjustments to make to the adaptive skin before actually having to create it.

Once I built the body with ZSpheres (minus the head because I knew I was going to build that later), I created the "Adaptive Skin". This basically wraps a mesh around the ZSphere object that you've built.

From that point, it's just scuplting. Using primarily the "Standard", "Inflate", and "Smooth" tools to push and pull the mesh into the shape you want. I turn the "Z Intensity" on the Standard and Inflate tools down to around 15 on low poly meshes. I also turn the Z Intensity on the Smooth tool down to around 30 for starters (ZBrush is nice enough to remember the intensity setting for each tool so you don't have to constantly shift them around).

Once you've all the detail you can add to the mesh at its current level subdivide the geometry and add more detail. Once that detail is maxed out subdivide and add more.

TIP: Try not to get to far ahead of yourself with any one area. Work the detail up on the entire model as you go.

The Head
8 Baller's head began as a simple 3d Sphere primative, with all the default settings. Then I adjusted the size of the "Move" brush to ENORMOUS and began pushing, pulling, and shifting the sphere into the basic shape of a head. This is a VERY QUICK way to work and get the shape that you're looking for. The down side to this is topology is pretty much useless, and you can forget about an low poly models. However, if you plan for a retopologizing phase then you can correct both of those short comings.

After I had a basic head shape that I was happy with I used the same sculpting tools and techniques that I did on the body to work out the details. One thing to note is that you're already starting off at a pretty high level of detail when you start with the sphere primative.

SubTools
Once I had both the body and the head sculpted to the level I wanted I used the SubTools palette in ZBrush to combine the two pieces into one "Tool". I also used the 3d cylinder primative to create a simple base for the character to stand on and added that base to the Tool as well.

SubTools are a bit more indepth to really explain so I'll save that for a later date.

Hopefully this gives a little more insight as to how Lil 8 Baller got to where he is now. The next step is to retopologize him, more sculpting, final colors, then finally posing and rendering.

8 Baller (Fisher Price Style)

My son has about a million Fisher Price "Action Hero" figures. They stand around two inches tall and have minimal articulation at best, but they're pretty dang cute. They come in a variety of flavors, like Star Wars, or Marvel super heroes, Transformers, and even G.I. Joe.

I got an sudden curiousity as to what some of my City of Heroes characters would look like in this two inch format, which brings us to the image above. It's a first sketch, colors are a bit off, as is the material, and he's not posed at all. But he didn't turn out bad for a few hours work.

Harei

So what to create first? Honestly, it was the narrowing down of things that was the biggest challenge. And I've picked a character model from a book I wrote for my daughter.



May I introduce Harei. He's a very old, very long earred rabbit that lives in his Hollow, under a large tree. His dominant character elements are his oversized front teeth, and his large feet.


This initial model was created in around three hours (speed is not one of my strong points at this time). He started off as zSpheres. I layed out a based sculpt, followed by retopologizing him. Finally I worked out the basic details in his face. The majority of his body still has to be sculpted, especially his hands, but I'm pretty happy with the way things are going so far.

He walks with a cane and a slight limp so I'll probably have to bend him forward a little when I get to posing him. I also need to go back and do a better job of working out how his upper lip and teeth work out. Typically he is found in his usual waredrobe of a long white lab coat and pockets filled with all sorts of mysterious tools.

A Year of ZBrush

Hello all. My name is Todd Cowden. I'm an artist of a variety of sorts, from traditional illustration, digital painting, and 3d art to name a few. Browsing the ZBrush gallery toward the end of 2008 I was pretty amazed, and inspired enough to make a new years sub-resolution. That would be to really get to creating a variety of things with ZBrush in 2009.

For some unknown reason I seem to be more productive and stick to a schedule if I keep a journal of the progress. Which brings me to this. This is a blog that I plan on posting at least once a week some update on something I'm working on in ZBrush. It could be anything from a simple "proof of concept" technique test to a multi-post larger project.

Even though I'll be working primarily in ZBrush, as the name of the blog suggests, throughout the year I'll probably be relying on a variety of other software as well. These will most likely be Photoshop and Maya.

To anyone watching, hopefully you'll be able to spot some progression through the year. Maybe you'll even be able to pick up a small tip or two. Or even get in a small laugh or two.

So, let's begin. Hello 2009.