Ben Mauro Sketchbook

[Ben_Mauro]

FZD Warmup for class, Golden Turtle Ant study.

No Alphas for surface details. Want the students to not use alphas for surface detail/texture on early assignments
so they really understand the forms and surfaces they are sculpting.

FZD In class demo, Whip Spider.

As with the Golden Turtle Ant study all surface details created without alphas (all the really large shell bumps
were done by hand with an inverted Damien Standard brush), though on this one i did start to use one alpha
in class to create some slightly irregular surfaces on the shell area but then undid most of it because it didn’t
look very natural then went back and sculpted it by hand to try to adhere to the restrictions on the early
assignments i am giving out.

Attachments

[nickz]

Beautiful sculpts Ben!

[LVXIFER]

love the whip spider…amazing creature

[Aliasofall]

Amazing Whip Scorpion and ant

[Ben_Mauro]

I have always known the creature as an “African Cave Scorpion” then had someone correct me saying it was a “Whip Spider” not a scorpion, then i did a bit more research and found it is referred to both as a “Whip Spider” and a “Tailless Whip Scorpion”. Hahah, i don’t know who is right, it definitely looks to be some sort of in-between species, i just think its a cool critter.

[Lisalawrence]

Ben, great artworks!

[Ben_Mauro]

Couldn’t resist some keyshot tests :)… will post a few more in a bit.

Attachments

[Ram-Z]

Beautiful work!Thanks for sharing, very nice shapes
You will add some fibers on the surface?

[Aazv17]

Damn nature, you scary!!
great sculpts btw.

[Dman3d]

Nice, whip scorpion is killer

[zigrapher]

You’ve got very cool concepts here.

[Drakaran]

It looks a lot like a vinegarroon, so I’m betting it’s in that classification (Amblypygids, which is a separate class of arachnid from spiders and scorpions). It’s a great looking model, though I’m hoping you don’t mean you placed every bump individually and at least used a “spray” type stroke, cause I once used to stipple in pen & ink, but not in a very long time.

[Ben_Mauro]

Drakaran - haha no i did every stroke by hand, yes very much like stippling with a pen or something.

Few renders of last weeks FZD demo + a little warm-up sculpt i did to prepare…looks pretty simple by comparison Ha! I let the students pick what they wanted to see me do, there was a unanimous vote for “Crab Soldier” out of the 4-5 options i gave them, so crab soldier it was! Look forward to developing this guy further in next weeks demo.

Spent a little time messing around with the model with some of the new 4R6 tools while i was learning them, ZRemesher is pretty awesome! A lot of technical updates BTS that will make everything that much easier for all of us. Envy all the people getting into ZBrush now, definitely the most user friendly it has ever been!

Still focusing on purely sculpting so they really get an understanding of the program and tools.

And the warmup bust influenced more by the ant forms from the earlier study.

Will update this week with a few more wireframe images showing what i did experimenting with the ZRemesher.

Attachments

[FigmentPigment]

Very cool Ben! I quite like some of the forms and interplay you have going on in that bust.

[Likesyrup]

Your work is always inspiring.

[VampireDghost]

I like your sculpt Ben, nice work!

[Ben_Mauro]

More FZD Demos and warmups for class.

Attachments

[Aliasofall]

There ridiculously beautiful I cat stop admiring them

[Ben_Mauro]

Some more FZD class demos and things from last week, Primates! Everything was started with a dynamesh sphere and sculpted from scratch.

The more detailed one is the class demo, but i ended up eyeballing a lot of the forms based on photos and reference…which didn’t feel accurate to me… like something was slightly off. While i could always justify some of the forms based on many of the variations of Orangutans i was looking at, something still felt off to me and it bugged me into the weekend. So for personal growth i decided to model a simple orangutan skull so that i was building the forms around it to allow everything to fit where it should, this was a much more logical way to work and allowed me to understand how all the muscles and skin fit on top of the bone to create the forms i was seeing in the reference photos. The less detailed one was done with this process which i feel looks much more accurate. Then after all that was in place i sculpted an expression i saw in my reference that i thought was pretty hilarious… fun times! I modified the teeth and things based on the reference photo which was pretty interesting as well, one of its lower teeth had been knocked out so the remaining 3 had shifted to the center and many of the other teeth were moved around and shifted at odd positions from years of use in the wild. Really cool stuff to put into the visual library for future use.

Attachments

[Ben_Mauro]

One more of this expression.

Attachments