Hands Off - WIP

[lemonnado]

All I post are 5-10 minute quickies… lol Not much quality there either. But I don’t pretend it has any either :lol: . My commercial stuff cannot be posted. Sighhh. The world will never know what superior Zbrush artist I am HAHAHA :rolleyes: .

The reason why I comment on your post is the fact that you try to finish something. So, go take a look at that tutorial and grow with it. Specially the use of reference material is important.

So go and make some more stuff and be ready for more motivational flogging.

L

PS:You should have the attitude that your results are gearing towards the top row material. Why bother otherwise? Aim high and spend the effort to get there. Or don’t waste your precious time with something you do not really want to push to a professional level.

[dapharmer]

i understand and appreciate where you’re coming from man… here’s my deal though… prior to picking up zbrush my artistic abilities amounted to zilch… i’m a cad pro and i’ve got some fair knowledge of photoshop, but give this man a pen or pencil and paper… or any other platform for art (other then clay which i can deal with) and i can barely draw a stick figure… it’s not for lack of trying either… i’ve just never been able to absorb fundementals of it. But put me on a computer and throw a program at me and i learn it inside out faster then i have any business doing. spreadsheets, coding, cad, audio, video yadda yadda… hell had a business directing concert videos for a year after picking up vegas in 2-3 days helping a friend out with something.

So when another friend gave me zbrush for a late xmas gift i was given a second gift. chance to finally be able to get any of the things i got racing around my head drawn down in a way i never thought possible. so this, what i’ve managed with this model, is more then i could have ever dreamed i could aim for in a 3d modeling program. Now that I’m learning zbrush i have no intentions of stopping and i wholeheartedly plan to get as good as i can and one day shoot for a 5 star… but i’m not learning for work, for school, or for any other reason other then fun and my own personal satisfaction at seeing something i imagined coming out as close to my original thoughts as i can.

in that respect i feel very much like i have been successful. A guy with no art backround, no anatomy knowledge whatsoever, and yet i managed what i released yesterday in maybe 4 hours and todays update with maybe 2 extra hours work. not that im shooting to be the super duper quickest or anything but it’s still something i feel proud of, so again hearing things like the word horrible, when in the past 2-3 days alone there’s been posts from other people with less effort and no critiscm or even positive compliments… well u can see where im getting at…

believe me… i know how much better it could be… im on these forums daily staring at what you guys all accomplish in awe of it, trying to read every tutorial i can find or discern as many techniques from viewing others works as possible. i’ve gained a ****load of knowledge and skill from the 2 months or so i’ve been doing so… but i guess in the end my standards arent as high as others here need to be since for many of them it’s their livelyhood and or education at stake causing them to be the best… with me it’s always gonna be just to have fun and learn from people… maybe one day be interested in freelance work but im not silly enough to think i could compete in an industry with people the likes of those on these forums already having years under their belt ahead of me :)… so im content with what i got

[Aberrant]

My constructive crits

Your render seems to be blown out with light. First try toning down the light before you do your render passes, it should give better results

You seem to know the technical aspects of things, try sketching in any free time you have. (I should do this more myself)

What I noticed (not always but more often than not) artists that produce great work are great traditional artists although, I have seen some work around here that I would consider to be very good with horrible concept sketches. This may be because they are quick, or because the person lacks some traditional art background or both. Either way im just saying that sketching will help you a lot in any field of art.

Lastly, try adding some variance to your textures, they appear to be a little bit flat. This could be due to the blown out lighting you have or be enhanced because of it.

I am no where near where I would like to be, so I can relate to the frustration of not being able to translate the image you see in your head to a physical image. Practice is #1.

[lemonnado]

Here is some literature:
http://acid.noobgrinder.com/Loomis/
The Loomis books are given to the public domain as a last will of the Author. So no worries, the stuff you download is legal. You might be surprised how good the contents is. With that and Meat’s tutorials the next piece cannot be horrible. Simply impossible :idea: !
L

[Kravit]

lol stars mean jack**** on this forum.

Everyone starts of being really ****, but im sure you will improve.

So take peoples comments with grain of salt and just push on and enjoy it. In time you will realize what is wrong with something without needing anyone to crit it.

[macgregor_oi]

Keep working. Don’t be afraid to start a new head. Each time you start over you will bet better and faster at it. The ring that you put in your base mesh is in the wrong place its affecting everything. I would say that you have a good understating of most of zbrushs ability’s. Now you should take a step back. Learn the art of sculpting. Learn your anatomy. Check out www.zackpetroc.com hes got some great tutorials. They are inexpensive and worth more then he sells it for. Try not to add a textures if the form of your shape is just amateur at best. I would save compositing till wayyyy later
Post another bust. This time with no edge loops cut in it and no texture. I think people will have a much easer time critiquing you.

[dapharmer]

thanks everyone… i at least have an idea of something i will go for next… relatively simple and straightforward but we’ll see if i can get the time to work on it… anyways the one thing i guess i would pose towards any of the more experienced modelers here is a lighting question. i have a good understanding of pretty much every process needed in zbrush at this point (and the compositing stuff was moreso just to prep myself for later on, can’t focus on that for every practice sculp or i’ll be wasting my time, i know…) except the lighting. i know zbrush’s lighting isn’t as advanced as some other programs out there that i see alot of people here saying they use, but i also know that some people who use only zbrush for their end product still manage to produce some wicked lighting. personally i just can’t grasp what i’m doing wrong with it. I understand 3-pt lighting from a video production standpoint. But without having to have been able to find any sample .zli setups (other then the ambient occlusion mat package i got on these forums) that i could study to figure out what works within the program, it’s been a royal pain getting any result that comes off natural. I’ve been trying to find any tutorials that go in depth with the lighting but either i’m looking in the wrong place or the oens i’ve found speak more to people with way more technical understand of the process then i have … either way i should likely not focus on the lighting atm and stick to a good modeling matcap while sculpting for now as that would at least let me present things in a better light, pun intended… but i still like to learn thigns first then perfect after so whatever advice anyone could give, or if anyone has any lighting rigs they could share, that could help get me started then it would be greatly appreciated.

[lemonnado]

Rendering in ZB is tricky. You cannto mix matcap with ‘regular’ materials. Either use Matcap and forget about lighting or use the other materials and then think ‘orthographic’. There is no real 3 point lighting in Zbrush. hence the difficulty with shadows… they are simulated around the 2.5D aspect.

You might be better of getting another render engine going externally. f budget is a problem, then go for Blender and one of the free engines connecting to that. If you got used to the ZBrush interface, you can master Blender quickly as well…

So stick to Matcap in Zbrush and for ‘real’ stuff go external… It’s a good exercise as well… You will do that sooner than later in any case.

The Render engine in the previous version was nicer for illustrators and less interesting for plain sculpting. For sculpting it’s much nicer now but the ‘regular’ render always lack lighting, AA, shadows as it’s a pita to tune all that nicely in ZB. I have the feeling that rendering is really not in the focus… It’s all about sculpting and the support for that activity.

R

[dapharmer]

the matcap/regular mat thing i’ve been learning just how much an issue it can be. that’s one of the reasons i wanted to learn the compositing over the straight render. since each composite would just use a piece of the lighting puzzle and I could adjust as i went. but then it becomes a battle to figure out which material/light combination produces the right pass and i guess thats where im getting lost. i think i’ll take up the suggestions to stick with a matcap sculpting material for starters and then once i’ve got a worthy sculpt down start worrying about a final material/shader selection and whether or not to use zbrush to render.

i’ve been trying to learn blender for uv’ing purposes so i guess i may as well try to pick up rendering in it to… the only thing i intensely dislike within blender is some of the documentation and tutorials out their read like swahili, and there’s a horrendous tendancy for blender to cause my sculpts to resize when reimporting them. i’ve messed with the scaling options enough to realize how it “should” be fixable, but then the few times i re-import at the proper scale i start getting mesh artifacts in areas. it’s likely a result of the meshes i’m trying to uv and not necessarily zbrush or blender, but since i got not one clue what to expect of it havent been really prepared to counter it and it’s definitely affecting my ability to finish a product… like the enterprise model i had in my sketch thread… i went back and wanted to retopo and uv the whole thing. got midway through retopo and all my projections were starting to explode booo … then the few peices i managed to retopo when i would do the uv process would come back in all funky on scaling, and i’d use a morph target to try to bring it back to right size and bam, big honking hole in the mesh :\ …

bah… well i know that all i can do to hope to get around those problems is learn what im doing wrong to cause them… btu sometimes it’s hard to tell the diff between zbrush’s “quirks” and my screwups

anyways im gonna start working on a very simple japanese demon mask today… try to do it from scratch and not just jump into hi-poly sculpt but really have with where my low sub-d model looks as clean as possible, and keep it in a sculpting clay the whole time. in meantime if anyone has suggestions for the import/export scaling issues with blender it would be greatly appreciated… that crap was pissing me off tremendously on monday and i havent bothered opening blender since

[dapharmer]

so i’m hoping the answer is a resounding yes… but here goes… does this one show better effort at all or all around? I spent a good 1-2 hrs on the low poly meshes before even pushing it over 100k… focused on modeling with a decent sculpting mat, and then did a sample coloring to test my topology and see if theres any areas i need to work on. and this time i had a reference pic up the entire time, both on my second monitor and as an image plane to assist with the prelim mesh work… started off the model with a super low-poly poly-sphere

sculpt only

Attachments

[Aberrant]

Compared to the reference images you have achieved some likeness. Good job. Try not using any materials and focusing strictly on form, that should help you with the sculpting

[Twitchmonkey]

I agree, I find the GreenClay material really nice to work with, it’s aesthetically pleasing and simple. As for the sculpt itself, it’s pretty successful for what it attempts to recreate. It doesn’t have the proper contours of a face, but neither does the reference. So, well done.

[dapharmer]

thanks guys… i’m gonna hit the drawing board so to speak again and try to maybe go for a proper face from scratch… force myself to finish it… but now that i figured out a better way to use image plane for myself may make it easier for me now…shall see

[macgregor_oi]

Nice one. This looks really close to the reference mask. Keep up the practice!