ZBrushCentral

Male Dancer sculpt (slight nudity)

ZBrush Artworks
#1

Hi All!,

Just wanted to play with doing a male dancer this time as opposed to a female one. I’m still not really getting lighting to work the way I want but hopefully the images aren’t too bad. I’m still debating about what’s the best way to work with posing, which got to be a bit of a headache with this sculpt. My latest guess is that possibly getting the base masses (primary and secondary(?) forms) of the body and any symmetrical detail work (face, hands and feet) done in a symmetrical pose then retopologizing, then posing via the transpose tool and then going back to sculpting tertiary forms and might avoid some of the insufficient topology issues and issues where the edge loops start getting in the way of sculpting if an extreme pose is desired (the area of the ilium/gluteus got really snarky on this sculpt because the hips are so open and the legs are twisted as far as they are.) I know that there is, of course, the transpose symmetry, but I find it a bit too temperamental for my tastes and there is the Zsphere “rigging” method but I run into major and frequent issues with the known rescale bug on that approach. Has anyone else got some thoughts on alternative ways to tackle these issues?
As always any thoughts and critiques welcome:)

Johannes

Male_Dancer.jpg

#2

Well Done Johannes! :smiley: :+1:

#3

Hi!,

Thanks for the compliment. I'm still debating how best to solve some topology issues and whether I should retopologize it and tinker with it a bit more after that (the gluteus, right hip and mouth area started to become a real issue). Thanks again!,

Johannes

#4

nice job! i hear you on the transpose issues. nothing beats a quick ik rig in maya/xsi. the whole issue is no way to get good pelvic rotation using transpose like you can with a good rig. with ik/fk it would be great to pull around the dancer since having a set ground plane for balance and a sence of weight compression is so important. instead in zb you have to rotate the body then pose around the hips. tiresome at best. transpose is best suited for making surface adjustments in my book. why try to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver. there are better tools out there. as for work flow,
i generally do a 60% sculpt then retopo. then take the sculpt the next 30%, rig, then using layers import my poses and tweek them the final 10%. xsi has a really nice human template and auto rig and skinning is twice as easy as maya so throwing them together is quite quick. and far less maddening! at least for this dirty belgian!
mm

#5

Hi!,

Thanks for the compliment, it means a lot! Yeah, the transpose tool has real limits but it's fast enough that I vacillate on whether it's good or bad, given the fun and games of weighting in Maya (I rig in order to relax, a statement I'm sure proves I have a psychological deviance of one form or another;), but weighting is the one part I can't say I find any fun in.) How are the binding tools in XSI? I've never seen how it actually does its weighting, is it an artisan-like weight painting method or something else? I know I look at the "out of a can" rigs that come as part of XSI and really wish that Maya had something similar for those cases when you are in a hurry or only need very basic things (yes, I know, we can build one easily enough but a push-button one would be nice to have as an option...). I think you may be on to something with the 60% sculpt/retopo/final sculpt idea. I had been thinking about that a lot for my next sculpt since I'm planning a really extreme pose combined with a lot of clothing (I was looking at a french documentary concerning an interesting brazilian combat art called Capoeira which works the vertical dimensions a great deal and started thinking about the combination of that type of movement with a method of pole arm use from Japan using an extremely heavy bladed short staff and then just started sketching...) The other part of it was the idea of possibly doing the sculpt to around 60% then bringing in lores clothing and using the already sculpted model to help "see" where the drapage and folds go - I know Zack Petroc does something like this for hair on his female sculpt video over at gnomonlogy, and I think it might be easier to do than sculpting clothing from the very start when combined with extreme poses. If you have any thoughts on this, I'd be very interested to hear them, because there hasn't been much discussion of the nuts and bolts of sculpting clothes (that I know of:) ) and for many projects, it could be incredibly useful. There are some stunning examples of finished, clothed sculpts here at ZBC, but I haven't found out much about how one actually goes about attacking this issue. Hope to talk to you soon,

Johannes

#6

maya indeed has a automated rig template for quardropeds and bipeds but it is hard to find inside the program. i think its in the bonus tools. i use createFBIK_Skeleton script u can get from highend or i can email it to you. you can also buy setup machine for a 100 bucks. this works well also. i am not the sharpest crayon in the box so rigging drives me nuts, but these plugins really help. xsi does offer a better take on skinning for sure. it is actually tolerable.

i have seen capoeria and the idea of sculpting a fighter of this sort is an excellent idea. im sure you will be amaster of folds by then.
doing such a character would definitly warrent a nice rig so once done you spend the time on it. you can just wip out poses like nothing! it would be great to see a time lapse sequence of a move all sculpted out in contiguoius flow! it would be like a wave of nice human cloath forms!

as far as cloth goes i like to reference drawing and sculpting books which im sure you have plenty:)but most importantly i have access to scan data at work so that helps out tramendously to really nail cloth. not that i am a master at it. its probably the hardest thing to do.
lay down your forms then i use the pinch brush with elevation with lazy mouse turned on. then give it a little love with the nudge brush with gravity on. masks help with this. that and get to know your fabric. sometimes the more simple the better. that and asymetry. cloth will fold in the same spots but never in the same exact way! a great way to get cloth going in zb is to build your lo res base version the use the retopo on each pose you can actually get some great crease results from overlapping edges in edit topology. so keep the base geo to the bare minimum so resurfacing will only take a few minutes. press preview adaptive an you will see some fun stuff happen!
hope it helps and i cant wait to see your next piece! great idea
mark

#7

Hi Monkeymuscle,

I just wanted to say thank you for all the info on cloth modeling, it is very appreciated! Sigh, you just had to let me know that XSI has a good weighting system for rigs, now I'll have to go take a look at it and suffer more XSI envy;). Talk about temptations to go over to the XSI side of the Force... (insert mechanical wheezing sounds and the voice of James Earl Jones Here);).

Thanks for the help!,

Johannes