My very first ZBrush piece: Fantasy Sleigh...

[RobertR]

Hi there, I've just completed my very first piece in ZBrush 4... It's a fantasy sleigh, and I still have the warrior and the "evil reindeers" to sculpt... I've started with the sleigh, because I was a bit afraid of the hard surface brushes, and I wanted to learn them first... I'm a 2D guy, and this is my first foray into the 3D world... I usually do location design and storyboard for 2D series...
More than 50% of the sculpture was made using meshes created in Shadowbox... I love Shadowbox because it retains all of the positioning information, so we never get lost with the Subtool placement... I haven't touched the Spotlight and Polypainting options yet, because I don't want to get spread out too much, since I'm a starter... So this is how it's looking so far...

[kokoro]

wow !!! you made that sleigh in shadowbox ? amazing, wonderful... really love it (though around easter i find a sleigh with reindeers funny ... lol) ;; great work !!

[dmitriy7365]

[Gareee]

I love the design on this! Did you make seperate parts in shadowbox and then asemble them?

[RobertR]

Thanks guys!... Shadowbox was of great help to get the basic shapes that I needed to work properly , but keep in mind that it is by no mean a way to get sharp and precise subtools right away... It will just give you a good workable mesh that will help you achieving good results at a low level of subdivision, meaning that your polygons won't get stretched out too early in the workflow... It's also the best way to cut holes inside your mesh... The subtools I got from Shadowbox were very "balloonlike", but I could get the results that I wanted very fast with the clip brushes... With the three views of my sleigh wrapped around the Shadowbox, I was assured that all the subtools generated with it would be at the right place, and with the right proportions in relation with one another... Once all the pieces I wanted were created and saved as tools, I just had to reassemble them in a new project... Here's an Xpose view of the decimated model...



I also used some custom alphas that I made myself... They were drawn by hand with markers, before I added the grey tones in Photoshop... I added a gaussian blur to the motif, to make sure that the corners would be smooth on the surface of the mesh...



Next step: the warrior !... I've done some color studies for him already in Painter12... Can't wait to see the results in 3D !...

[EZRA52]

Excellent work, I love the sleigh and I love the Santa drawings.

Ezra

[magbhitu]

fascinating and inspiring stuff! I wonder are you familiar with old norse Gustafson's Sleigh http://www.martinlaventure.com/Trave...0427&k=x5vShvd

[RobertR]

Yes!... I had some photocopies of that when I was doing my first sketches... I also had some reference of old Russian churches... Very inspiring stuff indeed... I will probably spend a lot of care trying to keep that feeling, when I do the polypainting work... But overall it's Fantasy stuff, I just take the elements that I find exciting and I make my own synthesis out of it...

[ShadowOptic]

Now that...is awesome.

[Sangius]

perfect use of shadowbox! Looking forward to see the Warrior in 3D.

[3djock]

Congrats on the turntable gallery nice work !! What did you use for the wood texture?

[RobertR]

Thanks !... I mostly used textures from CGTextures, but some of them come from the Pixologic Download Center (Alpha Library)... They are color pictures that I imported as alphas... Some were pre-edited in Photoshop so they would follow the shape of the subtools... The Z Intensity was set at around 11 or 12 most of the time... At a higher setting, it starts looking like a caricature of a texture, instead of just adding realism and a sense of scale...

Here's an exemple of a pre-edited texture ready for stamping with the Drag Rect stroke:



The motifs on the side were just hand-drawn:

[ricor]

Great work Robert. The quality of the detais show your long experience in 2d graphism.
Bravo!

[Dragon]

Hi Robert, are you still working on this one?

[RobertR]

Yes, I'm working on the warrior... I will post most of the subtools as I sculpt them, starting with the three daggers... I'm pretty slow, because I'm only working part time on that... But I don't give up !...