WIP's - Benjamin A. Slack

[nimajneb]

This thread is for showing and getting critique on my works in progress. This first entry is a bust I'm working on with the intention of eventually rigging and animating facial tests. This is my first "real" sculpt in ZBrush. Comments and critiques are welcome. See the turntable for a better view.

Turntable

[goast666]

it looks like you're doing some form changing on 1 subD or 3 too high. the back of the head and the center of her breasts and color bone are very lumpy.

other areas look good. The ears might be a bit too exaggerated as well as the lips. her eyes seem far too large as well.

also, the red wax clay has a horrible display if you ask me. try the sculpy or the green clay. (just my opinion)

[nimajneb]

Thanks for the comments. I've attempted to address them all. Did a lot of smoothing and clean up work as well as some changes to proportion. Scrapped the eyes and the ears for new sculpts. Spent a lot of time toying with topology in between only to decide that I wanted to change the sculpt and so dump it. However, I learned a lot messing around with the topology tool, so it's not time wasted. In any event, here's some links with the updates. Thanks for your attention.

[TriAxis]

Big improvement from the first sculpt. It's obvious you take critiques well. Good job.

[nimajneb]

Just updating my long neglected thread with some current studies. Any comments welcome. These are a combination of zsketch, shadowbox and traditional polyspheres for the base elements, combined and remeshed for the "skinned" final bust.

[TriAxis]

Looks to me like your heading in the right direction...

In my opinion, one of the things makes a great artist, in any genre, is the studying and understanding of all things relating to your subject matter, like bones, muscles, skin, etc.

In the case of character development, you study and understand everything you want to communicate to the viewer. For example, what is your character's environment like, is it male or female, is predator or prey, does it need to be fast, does it have weapons, does it need clothing, does it fly... How much gravity is on it's planet could determine bone and muscle structure, and movement. To have a believable character, all these things are based on things that are relatable (from our reality). From that foundation you can stretch our reality into a believable fantasy world.

In other words, I think your work is growing because you are studying and understanding your subject matter. Keep it up!

[nimajneb]

Just an update, various sketches of busts and anatomy. Belated thanks for the comment, TriAxis.

[f roldan]

Man you`re improving a lot, those last sketches are very nice i`ll keep an eye on this thread.

[Tyrone70]

Extremely inspirational. Thank you for posting these.

[Karthik.AL]

Hey nice studies i really like the hand and keep them coming

[nimajneb]

Thanks for the compliments folks. I don't tend to post back to my threads until I've something new to share, but don't think I'm not seeing and appreciating that you took the time to have a look. The above is just some new practice, done from a polysphere base in spare moments, maybe a total of about four hours or so. I'm slow, compared to some folks around here, but its coming faster than it used to. Thanks again for your time.

[nimajneb]

Today's sketchin'. Kind of an ogrey sort of head.

[ZombieSwarm]

I am really digging all of the sculpts you have.

for the long eared character, I am quite curious, what process did u use to generate the separate muscles and then create the final mesh

[nimajneb]

Zombieswarm: Most, if not all of the muscles were created from basic masses shadowboxed. I'd attach a shadowbox to the tool, scale it and position it as a "canvas" where I wanted to add a muscle. Mask the basic shape out on the box. Mesh it and sculpt it into what I needed then. I can't take credit for the technique; Ryan Kingslien uses it in his anatomy sketches in the beta threads and I thought, "Wow, that's a good idea." As for getting it all together, the merge was a multi-step process. I think (been a while now) that I did an initial merge, not a remesh, did some sculpting on this to fill in some of the areas that still had "holes" from the various muscles. Then I remeshed again to get a solid single surface and did a projection. Then more sculpting and clean up.

[nimajneb]

Today's doodling, something cartoony and some experimentation with rakes and rasps.