ZBrushCentral

Moooo. A noob's 'sketchbook'

Ok well I’ve decided to just make this my sketchbook because I’m sure I’m gonna be around for while (unless I kill myself). If nothing else, you can guys can just enjoy watching me make an @$$ of myself. :lol:

Is there are a ‘row’ for people who kill themselves while trying to learn digital modeling? If it hasn’t been started yet maybe I’ll be the first. :slight_smile: I’m going through Scott Spencer’s book and trying to learn some stuff. I have years of experience sculpting traditionally and when I’m using these programs I feel like I’m trying to re-invent the wheel. I sit here thinking about how I would do this or that with my wax pen or some sculpting tool and then I want to stab the monitor… haha so anyway I’m slogging my way through the first lesson in the book. I wanted to sculpt a cow instead of a lion. It would be cool to have a ring through his nose right? Well of course everythings going fine until I start yanking on his ears and horns. Now look at that mesh! If it was a real sculpt I’d go in there and snip that crap off with my x-acto blade! Is there any way of salvaging this thing?? I’d love to finish my first digital sculpt before the end of the month. Help? Anyone interested in checking out my professional work can go here. -
http://www.ehrenbienert.blogspot.com/
Then you can come back to this thread and laugh at my humiliation! LOL
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What you could do is mask the areas you want to get rid of by holding ctrl and painting them, Then invert the selection (Tools>masking>inverse), hide the bits (Tools>visibility>HidePt), go to your lowest subdivision, and delete the stuff that is hidden (Tools>Geometry>DelHidden)

voila! Good luck, you’re off to a great start!

The sculptures on your site are wonderful. Sticking my neck out and maybe stating the obvious here ( so don’t hate me ) but I’d be willing to bet your talent of traditional sculpting didn’t come overnight or by reading a few chapters in a book. Keep at it. I too am in the process of going through his books…they are a great resource…but as I’m sure you already know…practice practice practice! You’ve got a good start here and I’m sure you’ll be doning awesome ZB works in no time.:+1:

Thanks for the replies. Every little bit helps. I’ve been around art my whole life. My mom and dad are both artists. My father has been sculpting professionally for 30 years. I’ve been through art school and spent 7 years working for McFarlane toys. Yeah it’s taken a long time and a lot of work to get me where I am now. And that’s why digital modeling has been so infuriating. I’m back down at the bottom of the barrel! I try to maintain a sense of humor about it though. And sometimes drinking helps… :lol: I can see that if I want to still be sculpting commercially in a few years, I’m gonna have to know this stuff. Sooo… I look forward to being part of the ZBrush community and I’ll try not to bog down the server with my stupid newb questions.

Your sculpture is great man, but as you can see, you’re asking a little bit much from a plane in terms of flexibility. You have a couple of options though, learn to retopologize (google zbrush retopo), and build a more efficient base cage around the head, or the next time you start, take the volume into account and use a primitive like a sphere or cube.

Unfortunately these are polygons and not voxels (voxels have no mesh until later when you want it, pure volume like clay or such, you can’t stretch it too far no matter what you do), so the limits of the medium have to be taken into account.

I often times start with an arbitrary form, push it to satisfaction in terms of shape and volume, then retopo to accommodate the desired end product.

You’re not trapped, just have some learning ahead of you. Again, your sculpt is boss!

I gave up on the cow lol. I figure it’s way too early for me to get attached to anything. I’ve been watching a lot of cannedmushrooms tutorials. So I messed around with some weapons. Then I started sketching with zspheres. I have to admit I still miss my wax.
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On the first sculpt I did, I was sure it would be possible to just cut a hole through the mesh, but it was not possible. I assumed it because it was a “sculpt” software. But as soon as you learn the limitations, you will think about them and try different ways. Learning retopology I believe is a must.

Sooner or later, probably sooner, you’ll achive what you do with wax in zbrush, and as your blog shows, you got skills :slight_smile:

yeah, you seem to be a case where sculpting won’t be a problem, just getting to know the program a bit.

There’s definitely ways to salvage your sculpt, but most of them will be a bit hard for a Zbrush beginner.

If you would make a Zsphere really basic model that has the form of the cowhead really roughly. You could add your model as a subtool, move it over the basic shape and project as many details/form onto the more suited shape.

But to explain all this in detail would be 2-3 pages if you’re only just starting Zbrush.

If I were you, I’d just stick to messing around in the program learning new things with it, because salvaging the model will kind of be a vertical wall in the learning curve at the moment :wink:

I came to the terrifying conclusion that there is no way around learning Maya (or 3dsmax or whatever). Zbrush just can’t beat them for hard edge modeling. So I dove into it and I’ve been watching so many tutorials I gave myself a migraine. So here’s a clasp thingy I modeled in Maya. Then I just brought it in to Zbrush to soften it up a tad. Jeez I have so much to learn.
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I REALLY REALLY want to focus my efforts here on getting my digital sculpts ready for printing. In fact I don’t have much interest in movie or game development. :eek: I know I know… But I’m a traditional artist at heart and I really just want to stay in the collectibles industry. That being said, does anyone know of any comprehensive tutorials on prepping a model for printing? Like Feligno’s tutorial but more detailed? Thanks

Hello Ehran, i’m in the exact same boat as you are. I too am a traditional sculptor, trying to get my feet wet with Zbrush & outputting. I wish you the best, and will follow along closely! i’ll even post my work soon, so you may laugh at my feeble attempts.

I thought there was a video tutorial in the pix vids learning area concerning HD sculpting and 3D printing conversion.

Well there is the one by Feligno, but he skips over some things that I’d like to know more about. Plus I think that was made before zsketch came out.

This is my first digital sculpt that I’m taking (semi)seriously. It started out based on a cool piece of concept art but I’ve deviated pretty far from that at this point. I’m just kind a letting the sculpt talk to me. Trying to work up the forms and play around with the different brushes and stuff. I still have a long way to go. I want to make some big 3 fingered hands for him and some kind of nasty demon head. Then try to get him in some type of aggressive pose. We’ll see where it lands. Whatever, I’m gonna try and push this one through to some kind of completion. :lol:
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So my digital sculpting/modeling adventure continues. Basically I dove in head first and started watching every tutorial I could get my hands on. Veoh, Youtube, Digital Tutors, Gnomon, Scott Spencer book, whatever. I also started using Maya. My god, what a nightmare. At times, because of my traditional sculpting background, I just felt like I was reinventing the wheel. I definitely could have sculpted this thing out of friggin wax faster than I did it in Z. But I think that will change on my second sculpt. For the first couple weeks learning Z and Maya I just wanted to throw my computer out the window and kill myself. Especially because I feel a lot of pressure to learn these programs as I make my living as a sculptor. There is no longer any denying that these programs are the future of my industry. Honestly it amazes how hard it can be to find answers to some of the most simple questions. That was very frustrating in the beginning. I guess it’s because the questions I had were answered years ago and they have been buried by time. LOL Anyway I think I’m on the right track now. I still have so much to learn but here it goes… this sculpt was started with zspheres and zsketch. I made absolutely NO attempt at organizing the mesh in any way. I did not retopo anything. I just blasted zspheres on the screen until I had something close to what I wanted. Then I turned it in to a polymesh and started hacking at it. The mesh is a disaster but it works I guess. The worst problem I ran in to were ‘poles’ or whatever the heck those little points are called where the mesh gets really awkward. Yeah I had a lot of those but I just mushed them down. Ha! Whatever. The only thing I modeled in Maya were the teeth on the inside of his mouth. Keep in mind I did not have ANY background in digital modeling. I learned Maya and Zbrush using youtube. LOL God just thinking about how frustrating that was makes me want to shoot my computer. Also keep in mind that I have no interest in video games or movie effects crap at the moment. My only goal is to get my z sculpts printed. So I don’t have to be as careful with my mesh as some of you guys. Basically I just laid this down and sculpted away. Meh.

He still needs hands and some interesting textures or something to take away the bland skin look. I also have to resolve his neck area when I permanently attach the head to the body. I’ll probably get this thing printed and sculpt a base for it the old school way.
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I can’t bear to look at it for another minute. Why does everyone but me seem to have so much fun sculpting digitally? Will I get it eventually or die trying? :lol:

Eh whatever I may come back to this and throw some finer detail on it…
[blind1.jpg](javascript:zb_insimg(‘213855’,‘blind5.jpg’,1,0))
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Good to see work coming from a traditional sculptor to the digital realm, you’re right there is a big integration in the present and the future (far into the future) with digital sculpting being in parallel with the traditional methods.

I’m the other way around though, digital sculpting brought my interest up in learning the traditional methods and got me interested in learning to sculpt with wax and picking the brains of other sculptors on various forums and boards. Always alot to learn in both worlds.

Keep plugging away it, I could say “don’t forget to refine your real world technique” but then I’d be a hypocrite as I have all my unfinished sculpts sitting here in my studio just staring at me working in zbrush all day haha. Keep at it, it’ll start to be “fun” after the learning curve starts to flatten out for you.

Welcome to ZBC! Looks like it didn’t take you too long to get up to speed in the digital realm -> the latest sculpt shows it -> rough pose / anatomy / blocking in of main shapes are looking great :+1:

(check this one out for noobishness: the first sculpts I posted on ZBC where done with the touchpad of my laptop because I was convinced I would never be able to work with a Wacom…)

you might be bored of it, but your last sculpt looks awesome. I am not too good with the digital medium either. I am more confident with pencil on paper. I feel the challenge with ZBrush is topology. Too much pushing and pulling and you won’t be able to sculpt anymore. to take care of that problem they have remesh and better projection features. I’d also suggest you use bump maps ( bump viewer material in ZBrush) for finer details. I just avoid subdiving after a point. Hate the slowdown and difficulty in sculpting at higher subdivs.

Why does everyone but me seem to have so much fun sculpting digitally? Will I get it eventually or die trying?

Just relax :). You’re doing great. Your latest model is looking good. It just takes a little time to get to know the program.

You are, you’re doing great!
You might be bored of looking at your behemoth, so take a break and we’ll enjoy him for a while.

Don’t despair, looking good!:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1:small_orange_diamond:+1: