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Zbrush Mecha "RONIN"

Hello, all. Bleeding over from the recent class I took with ZBW, Furio Tedeschi as instructor; I decided I would start a thread to catalog the exercise and go through to the final mech. Right now the dude himself, who I named RONIN, is close to finished but I still have plenty of ideas rattling around for what I want to do. He’s a decommissioned experimental robot, stolen by gang bangers, with the brain of a deceased bank robber.

The goal is move beyond just concept, and take a character into a game-ready state. We’re using Cry Engine 3 at work, and I have a badass animator who saw this guy and wants me to get him ready for animation and rigging. So that will be the engine I will bring him into.

Backplate is too low res. I’m still not used to working with keyshot. It’s making the dude look small, like a toy, right now. I plan to get a DSLR soon so I can study Focal length, aperture, etc, etc with some education from some VFX peeps rather than second hand. I think it’s good to dive into a field head first and learn to swim for yourself. But I’ve moved beyond that point with a lot of the stuff I’m doing now; It’s time for swimming instructor again.

Just a call-out/massive detail pass to show lower level details on the hands. I wanted the overall tone of the guys to encased parts with exposure to reinforce the sense that it’s manufactured rather than evolved. So lots of organic shapes with insets, clips, cut lines, exposed casing patterns and so on.

Okay…now for some info on the process. I started out with RONIN’s head. While Foo assigned us to do multiple versions, including multiple bodies, for the sake of experimenting with the silhouette; I usually know what I’m going for and just dive right in. One of the great ways that Furio educated the class is leaves the room for muscling through and figuring things out, but he gives you great advice for quickly getting a base to start from. Focusing on some tools rather than a particular technique. What I wanted to go for was something to challenge my pretty much non-existent skills with not only ZBrush, but with shape language and fusing details.

Shape Language: Evangelion.
Muscular Details: Deus Ex Human Revolution.
Mechanical Details: Engine casing patterns (Furio Tedeschi/Vitaly Bulgarov/Mike Nash/Aaron Beck type stuff) and unique bits with military style.

Some versions to placate the instructors desire for explorations. Kind of like this one. Went a little more in the metal gear/terminator direction with liquid or flexible metals. Maybe they’re muscles that cover the whole endo-skeleton. Just trying another shape language.

Then following the exercise for roughly morphing the Fembot into a heavy.
I like the dude’s stance from the front, but from the side it looks goofy to have his ass sticking out…kind of. I sort of still like it and come back to it, I just think the front/back tone conflicts with the one from the side. It’s like an assault droid vs a worker drone.

Attachments

Dude_Head.jpg

Dude_Base.jpg

Fem_Dude.jpg

Heavy_Dude.jpg

Them_hands.jpg

mech.jpg

Going back to the guy I like I worked up the head. Masking off areas and extracting them, using insert meshes, and bringing in appended objects to morph. I usually work in retarded run-around fashion where I grab areas that spark my interests. I say retarded because i haven’t formulated specific techniques for process yet; Doing this keep me interested in the model. I may continue to use it in the future though. It’s wicked fun and I’m able to enjoy the piece all the way through. Roughing in some of the things I know I want to do later, as a sculpted note for myself as well. Anyway, I’m setting him up with lots of subtools from the start so that when I bring it into keyshot later I can easily apply materials and get a decent render…later you’ll see I F’d up and still had do some eraser compositing in PS. I removed the large wire markers I had running from his arm pits to his ribs because this hurt the silhouette I wanted the achieve, it’s also looked cumbersome and impractical.

Just running through the details, figuring out what I want and where I will take this dude. I’m not quite setting things in stone, but laying down ideas that can transition into materials…what functions a certain way, etc. Thinking about the mechanics both overall and at the lower level.
There’s still quite a bit of “mooshieness” to this dude. I pretty combed back through the whole guy at the end applying the tools and some techniques I learned from Foo and some other master sculptor dudes.

Now I’m starting to really really think about the direction of the detail…I did a couple of hand sculpts that I didn’t like, I felt this was a case for sketching it out because of the level of knowledge (see. Lack there of) I had at the time; It would take much longer to get a 3D representation of something final rather than previzing it on paper or a wacom. So, I decided to do a paint sketch of how the hands would work.

dude_hand_previs.jpg

So I reverse the direction of the hands because I felt that they conflicted with the rest of the design language. Contrast is nice, but breaking the design theme isn’t so I tried to find ways to make this stand out, but also not fight or upstage the rest of the design. As you may notice in the final, I dumbed down the material levels. Right now it looks like an insane mess, but it will work in the end. I has teh plan!

Jumping around to the legs because they look like poop. Still look kind of poopy here, but sense is applied in the image.

Dude_legs.jpg

Now we’re getting there. Swapped out the crotch area because it looked kind of dumb…almost like a second face. Busted out some details on the dude’s back. This is where the brain bucket is for the deceased criminal’s dome sponge.
More work on them fingers. Yep yep. insane mess. It will make sense once light and color is applied. Then the revamped, but not finished, legs.

Dude_hex.jpg

Yeah…more craziness. Look like an aweful mess I know, but I have a plan in mind and it seems to have worked when I looked at the keyshot renders. Anyway; here are the hands in zbrush viewport.

handy_01.jpg

Handy_02.jpg