Scared Silly Entry by Rory Little

[Rory_L]

ScaredSillyDesignSketch01.jpg

My aim is to retain the freshness of the design sketch, without miring the final image in redundant detail. My first thought about this picture is that it should stay away from the highly polished, rendered look. ZB is after all a drawing package and, in the very limited time I have available I'd like to see what can be achieved without resorting to an external renderer, or illustration software.

For anyone who can't recognise what's going on in the sketch, this is a night scene of a bat sitting in a tree, scaring passing folk with a rubber bat. It was the first idea that popped into my head and I think it fits the requirements of the contest in being rather silly!

The sketch was drawn on a subdivided poly plane, with the standard brush, but with a J shaped curve. Rather than painting straight onto the canvas, scratching my marks onto a poly plane gives me the option of rotating the 'paper' to suit the angle of stroke I wish to make. Not many illustration packages stock that feature!

My weekends between now and the deadline are mostly already scheduled for non-ZB duties, so this is going to be a time keeping challenge as well as one of creativity.

Wish me luck!

R

[squeige]

I like the concept good luck with the schedule, most of all have fun.

[highlander_72]

Sweet idea! :tu:

Also I like your approach to drawing a sketch in ZB. I'll try that sometime, thanks for sharing that info!

[ravioli_rancher]

Rory_L,

Excellent idea, both with your challenge concept, and the rotating sketch plane. Thank you for the tip.

And conratulations on focusing more on the non-photoreal aspects of ZBrush. I've been messing around with it's render and the MatCap and agree that attempting an entire photoreal scene with photoreal lighting elements is a bit too time demanding.

Good luck and continue with your innovating techniques. :tu:

[Rory_L]

Here's a quick lighting sketch, worked up in ZB, with a radial gradient thrown over it all in P'shop.

The smudge tool was used to get the feeling of motion and to break up the harsh, graphic lines of the initial drawing. An alpha I use extensively is one generated from a LightWave procedural texture called 'smoky'. This in the brush alpha slot gave me the nice streaking I wanted.

I have to research bats next and hunt the Web for images of trees and rubber toys.

R

[Effulgent3d]

Love the concept sketch and the humor, viewing angle on this is great. Only thing I dont like is the highlighted eyebrows, can understand that to maintain the dark and moon lighting from behind it was needed to show the shock\surprise of the victim but it just seems a little, ..off somehow.
Its probably just me ;p

[Rory_L]

Thanks, Effulgent3d. I can see what you are concerned about. Let's hope that this image gets its problem points resolved in the end! For now, the bright eyebrows are, as you noticed, necessary for the representation of fear/shock. How this expression will be conveyed in the final illustration has yet to be determined, but I won't forget your point and will pay attention to the eyebrows as I go on.

Here are a few collected bat reference images, trawled from the Net. They might save other contestants the trouble of hunting down their own.

Cheers,

R

[Seavannah]

silly and fun concept love that second drawing it would make a funny and silly halloween card. keep up the good work.

[Rory_L]

Starting the figures. Volumes have been begun with z-spheres and slightly edited as adaptive meshes. Here I'll export the model to LightWave and add edges where required and then return that to ZB for further shaping.

ScaredSillyBaseCharacter01.jpg

[Marsyas]

Looks fun! I like your sketches so far and that method of sketching looks really cool. :D :tu:

[KOSOVA]

It looks good and I also like that second sketch a lot. Looking forward to see more.

[threetails]

very cute, it's a good looking concept.

[Rory_L]

Here is a pic of the basic tree mesh, made from z-spheres, beside a posed version of the base human character, for use as a template for composition.

R


ScaredSillyPosingTest01.jpg

[sasquatchpoacher]

doing everything with Zspheres... I like!

[Marsyas]

Dynamic! Looking cool.

[Rory_L]

Is there a way to export .jpg files directly from Z-Brush? It does seem strange that I can't upload any of Z-Brush's export file types to the ZB forum!:confused:

Today's been productive, as you can see.

I've modified the tree mesh, twisting the trunk and branches with Transpose and the Nudge brush and deleting redundant polys from the far side that we just won't see; it's now ready for subdivision sculpting.

The bat creature has been posed, using the base figure model; and it is now holding the stick and string, made from z-spheres.

The rubber bat was fun to make. Again, entirely z-spheres, massaged with the Move and Standard brushes and converted to an adaptive skin mesh. Moved into place with Transpose.

The grass was a side bit of a ZB cylinder, the unwanted polys hidden and deleted. Subdivided to level eight, it was masked with stamped instances of Alpha 07, (the spotty one) and then the grass blades were pulled out with a combination of Deformation/Inflate, the Move brush and one more application of the Inflate deformer, to fatten them up.

The moon is a z-sphere lozenge adaptive skin, smoothed, sphere-ized and subdivided. This makes a ball without any poles: no pinching!

I am concerned about my limited time and am trying to pull up all the elements of the image together at the same time. Should I run out of time, there won't be any obviously unfinished parts. Fingers crossed!

Cheers,

R

ScaredSillyPosingTest02a.jpg

[Harmonic]

Looken Good! I am definitely getting a sense of the seen and liking the composition. :tu:

[Rory_L]

Worked on the base figure model today, adding edge loops and sculpting the resulting mesh with the Move, Standard and Nudge brushes. Nudge is really useful for pushing edges around the mesh without damaging the object's shape too much. Used in combination with Project Morph it solves almost all my topology problems.

It's probably a forlorn hope, but I'm hoping that this base mesh can with not too much effort be moulded into both the scared figure and the bat character. I've put edge loops into the ears in such a way that I have confidence that I'll be able to size them up to batty proportions. The wings are another matter!

R

BaseFigureEdgeLoops03.jpg

[Harmonic]

Rory_L that is a fantastic base mesh, it should work great for both of your characters! Great edgelooping! :tu: What is Project Morph? :o

[Rory_L]

Thanks, Harmonic! I hope so.

Tools/Morph Target/ Project Morph is one of the new features of Z-Brush 3. If you're still using ZB2 you won't have encountered it yet, but when you do you'll love it! It is like the Morph slider function of ZB2, but doesn't take point order into consideration: only proximity is bothered with, so it will place points that you've shifted round from another part of the model, to positions that restore the mesh to its morph looks, but not its topology!.

I like the way your picture is turning out! Glad I could help.

R

[squeige]

Loving the progress, friend.

[Rory_L]

Bit by bit, little by little! Here are the teeth and eyes. I saw this great teeth edge looping technique in a thread I read today, but can't now remember who's it was. When I find it again I'll post my thanks here.

Both eyes and teeth are made using copies of the moon ball z-sphere I made earlier.

Cheers,

R

BaseFigureHead01.jpg

[Rory_L]

The result of having a bit of time at the weekend.

The meshes were subdivided to the fifth sub-D level and smoothed in places to remove pinching and uneven curves. Then I piled into the sculpting mainly with the Standard brush, with a J-shaped curve for the carved-in lines, Accurate Curves on; and the default curve, Accurate Curves off for building volumes.

At times I would activate the Lazy Mouse; step of 0.5, radius of 15 and smoothing of zero. This was used a lot on the bat, where I wanted a precise, machined look.

The Move brush helped me shove the imp's grin into place; and Pinch was employed to crisp up the gaps between the teeth.

The rubber bat is now in its final resting place in the composition, with its ears rotated out of the way of the string holding it up, thanks to the transpose tools.

I am having to resist flamboyant detail, because time is running out, but maybe this is a good thing, as it forces me to remain true to the boldness of the original concept.

R

RubberBat01.jpg

[Rory_L]

A small update. These belong to the imp. The wings were copied from the rubber bat and shoved behind the imp's body. Wonderful liberties we can take with character modelling if we don't have to see them all the way around!:D

R

Bat03.jpg

[dustbin1_uk]

I just wanted to let you know I love this idea, I've had my eye on this thread since the start of the comp.

It's a great in concept, funny in design and a enough work to see through to the end of the contest.

It's looking great, can't wat to see some RGB on those sculpts soon. :D:tu:

[Rory_L]

Thanks Mark!

I'm actually thinking of rendering this as toon shaded monochrome, with spot colour red in the man's mouth, but we'll see...

R

[Rory_L]

Found it! The guy who's modelling inspired my characters' teeth is Tomasz Modzelewski. Thank you Zeet!

R

[nightwoodwolf]

cool characters :tu:

[Rory_L]

Spent an evening trying out the Matcap tech and the High Definition subdivision layers, neither of which new features I've had anything more than a cursory play with till now. I think there's about 30 million polys in this image. HD is going to be invaluable to me not only in defining the man's hair, but also in eradicating the poly lines you sometimes get on cavity shaded models.

I'll have to push on with the sculpting tomorrow. Tonight was by no means a waste of time, but it has left me feeling happy about how this could all look in the end, but more anxious about completion.

R

ScaredSillyRenderPassTest01.jpg

[squeige]

Hey rory can you give a little more info on toon shading? I searched forum but no one really explains they do give the mats but no explanation found, I wanna go with a combination shader of realistic with a line... very cool shader by the way

[dustbin1_uk]

This is an interesting technique, I'd be very interested in finding out a bit more about it.

[Rory_L]

Luigi and Mark, thank you!

I started out by following the process outlined in the 'Birth' tutorial on the Online Docs site at Pixologic's home page.

I drew a sphere 3D onto the canvas and applied the Metal01 ordinary material to it. In the Modifiers palette I set Specular to zero, Reflectivity and Diffuse to 100, then opened the ReflectCurve and dragged the right hand curve point down to the bottom of the graph. Then I added another control point at about H0.13, V0.4, which gave me a nice dark rim all around the sphere.

With Quick edit off, I did a Best Render and grabbed a texture copy of the image with the MRGBZGrabber tool.

Selecting (an arbitrary choice) the MatCap2 material, I replaced the Material Texture Image with my render grab. Instantly this default MatCap material became the spitting image of my edited Metal01 material.

Drawing one of my sculpted meshes to the canvas with the new toon material in the current material slot, I then adjusted the mat's Cavity Transition and Intensities A and B till I got a strong enough black line on the mesh. Making the background colour white and setting Background Gradient Rate to zero, I could then render a perfectly white page, with just the black linework visible.

Hope that helps!

R

[squeige]

Thank you :)

[threetails]

that is one cool work flow for the toon shader, do you have to adjust the way you model to take advantage of the shader or do you think it will work with any model, very nice look.

[Rory_L]

Seems like any model should do. Can't say for sure, as I've only just made the material...but I can't see why not.

R

[Dondemaker]

All your work here is looking very good and I think that's the best toon shader I've ever seen on the forum.

[Rory_L]

The new updates. The tree and imp are done: now I just have to concentrate on the man.

The tree was knobbled by attacking it with the Inflate brush with a very high focal shift and using the spray stroke. This was followed by a short session with the Standard brush, J-shaped edit curve, to cut grooves and fissures into the bark. Finally I applied the Standard brush again, but this time with a bark pattern alpha which I'd generated from a digital photo of a tree trunk. I sculpted this on a new 3D layer, so that I could get just the right bark effect strength. Storing a morph target of the mesh with the bark modelling layer turned off allowed me to erase and soften the bark back to the underlying layer in places.

The imp was moved into position with the Transpose tools and then his sculpting was finished off using Posable symmetry where possible to save on time.

Cheers,

R

Bat04.jpg

[dustbin1_uk]

That bat dude looks great! this is a brilliant way to render. The tree bark is also good. i have to say I am really looking forward to seeing this one complete!

Good job! :D:tu:

[Marsyas]

Loving the expressions! Really funny. :tu:

[Rory_L]

Fingers and below the belt yet to do, but the end is in sight! Got the T-shirt done tonight and will have a go at the unfinished hands in the morning.

I masked the T-shirt area polygons, reversed the mask and inflated it all to get the hems; then performed Standard brush crease work, with a spot of Pinch here and there.

R

Man02.jpg

[UncleZ]

very interesting material yo use in the competition i find it unique very nice models :)

[Rory_L]

Thank you UncleZ!

I have finished with the man's fingers and sized down the hands a trifle. I'd wanted them big and expressive, but that was too much.

I also have increased the size of the rubber bat and rotate-shifted the man further to the left to make way for it; I wanted for viewers to be in no doubt that this was a toy bat. These changes are not reflected in this picture.

R

ScaredSillyRenderPassTest06.jpg

[Dondemaker]

I really do like this work Rory_L. Looking forward to the final piece.

[LittleDedder]

Really interesting look

[nightwoodwolf]

very nice Rory_L

best luck

[Rory_L]

Thank you guys!

The timing is looking safer to me now and I can consequently start to enjoy myself a bit more. Deadline anxiety was gripping me till I got the hands and shirt done yesterday. I've set my computer clock to U.S. Pacific Time so that I don't over run.

Here's the image with the enlarged bat.

I made the trouser cuffs by adding edge loops to the ankles, masking and inflating. Pics to follow.

Good luck all!

R

ScaredSillyRender_08.jpg

[fizzy]

"Deadline anxiety was gripping me till I got the hands and shirt done yesterday"


I so know where you're coming from, I've had nights where I can't sleep...well when I eventually do actually go to bed that is. But I then lay there thinking "oh no I've still got to do that and this and....ahhhhh"

I really like your style by the way. Reminds me very much of an etching.


Pete B

[Plakkie]

Really fresh style, bravo! :tu: :tu:

[Rastaman]

Very nice. :tu:

A very clever perspective view, nice and clean modeling in an uncommon linoleum-cut-like finish.
Very beautiful. I think this will be ranked high at the end.
Maybe try a very subtile and slight coloration with ZBrush's 2D-Painting-options on the final picture to enhance some aspects that will be lost in a grayscale-technique.
Like the after-colorated black&white-movies from the 20'ths.

[Rory_L]

Thank you everyone for the kind words!

Rastaman, that's a great idea. Indeed, I had been thinking that if I had the time I'd like to experiment with some subtle and rather sloshy watercoloury tinting. The linework would hold the image together and the bleeding colouring would add a dreamy quality, perhaps. I'd have to try it to know for sure.

Cheers,

R

[Marsyas]

You maintained the feel of the sketch very well! :tu: Looking forward to the color.

[dustbin1_uk]

Arrgh! I missed the last few posts you made! Been so busy I missed the email notification!

THIS LOOKS GREAT! I love the style of this. it's comming together nicely. well done!

[Rory_L]

Again, thank you guys! Feels wonderful to be so supported.

Here's the finished modelling, one in the B&W style and one a very quick, er, hasty coloured version. Subtler might be better...I miss the uncompromising quality of the monochrome one.

Here also is the screen grab showing what I did to get the jeans cuffs.

Cheers,

R

ScaredSillyRenderPassTest09.jpg

[boozy floozie]

A very original working method - very nice indeed.

[sasquatchpoacher]

good work! I kinda like the color one.

[Rory_L]

Saquatch, so do I on reflection, but I'm still torn. Shader enhancing the coloured one to highlight important areas like the fella's eyes was good and I'll keep that, should I go for colour or not.

Mark, cheers! I'm just sorry there isn't a Boozy entry in this shindig; something like your zombie elephant would have enriched the competition.

The man's pate was not sufficiently full of polys for hair making, so I isolated those polys, (easy, as I'd retained the edge loop polygroups) and extracted them with no edge thickness to a new subtool, which could then be more highly subdivided.

The entire scalp object was masked and then I unmasked dots all across it, using Alpha 23, the crisp random dots alpha.

After that it was a simple matter of applying judicious amounts of the deformers Inflate, Smooth and Gravity to pull the hair out from the head, smooth it off a bit and make it reach for the sky.

Since the scalp tool had been extracted from te rest of the head at te head's highest subdivision, there was a very good match at the join line, requiring barely any manual blending.

R

[dustbin1_uk]

:tu: This looks awsome, an truely original design and funny concept.

If you did go with a bit of colour then I think all you'd need to do is tone the bat back a bit more. the rest looked good. Maybe blue for the bat instead?

anyhow, it's not really needed as this is great as it is. Well done!!!:tu:

[soulreaver]

Wow!!! Really nice work, luv the tree sculpting and the BW render..looks very original.:)

[Rory_L]

Ugg! It is 12.45am Saturday morning and I've just finished the picture and submitted it. I am shattered and have been fighting a killer headache since 6pm last night, but I am well satisfied with the image and with having completed in time!

Thank you Mark and Soulreaver. Thanks to everyone who's posted and viewed my progress. As I suspected at the start this has been a challenge not just technically, but also with regard to available time. I have had to take time from things I should have done at home, so thank you also to my wife, Yumiko for having put up with all this!

Good luck everyone!

R

ScaredSillyFinalRender.jpg

[Dondemaker]

It looks excellent - the final render you chose really does the piece justice.
Good luck,
Jason

[Atwooki]

A really terrific image Rory_L :)

Love the originality of style you've put into this one -
Your sense of composition is spot-on too.....Great stuff !!

Chris

[Marsyas]

Very cool! I like the metallic look. The subtle coloring and highlights add a lot. :tu:

[pigma]

Congratulations on completion.
I like your work.
The sense of making the color a minimum is effective. :tu: :tu: :tu:
And, it is cool !! :cool:

Is your wife Japanese? :eek:
I was able to solve the mystery by this. it you use Fluent Japanese. ;)

Please give my best regards to the Mrs Yumiko.
:D :D :D
From Shikuri, Wife of pigma.

[Harmonic]

Very Nice! :tu: It looks much more dynamic and easier to read now. Great work And good luck! :)

[Rory_L]

Thank you Jason, Atwooki, Geoff, Uraji san and Jesse!

Yes my wife is Japanese and she says hello to you too, Uraji san. She thought your picture was beautiful! そうですよ。妻が日本人です。うらじさんに宜しく言っています。うらじさんの絵がきれいと言いました。

At the time of submission I was too drained to complete my notes on how I made the image, but now I have the opportunity to share my rendering process with you. Here you go!

Rory

The trainers were entirely masked, save for their soles which were bulked up with the Inflate deformer, then smoothed a little to remove any rawness at the mask edge.

The soles' tread pattern was created in a similar fashion, masking all but the area to be worked on; but this time I drew a Standard brush DragRect stroke across, with a fractal crumple alpha in the active alpha slot.

Rendering.

My composition required a square format, so I created a 1024*1024px document, a good size for moving elements around the screen easily.

The scene tool was drawn to the canvas on layer 2 and a marker was attached to that position.

Clearing the scene, I double-sized the canvas and re-drew my tool onto the page, by clicking once on the marker, which had been retained even after re-sizing the document, since it had been on layer 2.

The key elements of the picture, the man, imp, bat and tree needed to be comprised of super-highly dense meshes to eradicate poly edges being picked up by the cavity shading, so I activated HDGeometry for these models, creating two or three HD layers per mesh.

Placing the cursor over blank canvas space, I tapped the A button once, activating the HD geometry render preview. With the HD polys fully rendered I could then make a Best Render for the currently selected sub-tool.

Using Z-Applink I took these data to Photoshop and copied the top shading layer to a new PS document. I repeated this process for each sub-tool.

With all the elements nicely rendered I just needed a way to isolate each element from each other in Photoshop, to discard the non-HD Geometry rendered elements from each PS layer. To do this I selected each sub-tool in turn, chose violently strong colours and filled each model with a different colour.

Returning to Photoshop, the Z-Applink temp file colour info layer was now a perfect mask for each of the pieces.

I wanted a warming of colour through from the far background to the front of the scene, so I grabbed the z-depth information from the Z-Brush document and exported it to Photoshop. The Z-Applink file does have a z-depth channel, but it's only 8 bit quality and I wanted to boost its contrast considerably, so used the alpha version.

At the top of the Photoshop layers stack I added a new overlay blending mode layer, filling it with blue. Selecting the z-depth alpha as a selection mask, I deleted the unmasked parts, leaving the picture bluer to the back of the scene.

Making the background radial gradient was started in Z-Brush. On layer one I drew a polymesh cone onto the canvas, removed the cone base polys and reversed the normals. Positioning it with point away from us and the now-absent base facing us, using transpose tools I positioned it in the centre of the moon tool and scaled it up to fill the canvas. Hiding layer 2, I grabbed the z-depth scene alpha and exported it to PS, where it was used to softed the pure black of my base layer background.

Saving out the image as an 8 bit, flattened .PSD file, I imported it to Z-Brush and Crop-Filled it to the canvas.In Flat Render mode I applied the whizz line motion blur to the bat wings, shoe and grass, using the Smudge tool with a spotty alpha.

With Render Adjustments the contrast of the picture was boosted to my satisfaction and the final image was returned to Photoshop via Z-Applink and saved.

[Dondemaker]

Thanks Rory_L for an excellent rendering tutorial. There are some very useful tips in there.
Jason

[dustbin1_uk]

I know what you mean about being too drained at the end to post the WIP's LOL. Thanks for showing us how this was done. As this was a WIP competition this one should have won not just on the creation of a great image, but also the unique method you used to make this image, and the sharing of the porcess of said image.Well done Rory this is something I am gonna try out someday soon I hope.