ZBrushCentral

IOC ‘All together now’

ZBrush Artworks
#41

… You used the same base head model for all the characters? Could you show us the kind of topology you had before getting in and sculpting the character details?

Thanks

#42

I know what you mean :wink: There’s nothing better for a client than changing proportions on the fly. I made a character concept for a horror film a while back. The people were blown away at how fast I was showing them changes. It got to the point where they were just having fun rather than stressing out about the design. That was a neat thing for me.

This is really great work! The style of the sculpting and composition is very unique. Although, if I were one of those small people, I would be a scared little man! :o

#43

Great stuff!
I came across THIS BLOG that had a video breakdown of the VFX of this commercial! I looked at the smooth lines of the characters and thought this was modeled the traditional way! Nice to know ZB was involved!
Check out the other VFX Breakdowns if you have some time to kill.
Upham :slight_smile:

#44

that was BEAUTIFUL!

#45

This is a landard mark peice if you ask me. Great Music and cinematography

It’s emotional and the story is thrilling. GOOSEBUMPS. It’s so theatrical.

The ZB work is EXCELLENT!!!

It’s the Olympics. Huge Client.

The questions I always have about these project are “what are the logistics?”

Like what was the budget? How much did this whole project cost? How many rigtechs, animators? Time frame? How much do the people cost to create per character?

I understand it ZBC or the artist is not beholding to divulge such information, and maybe I’m a big dreamer but I don’t see this work as just being as phenomenally talented (as with this ZB artist :slight_smile: )

I’m just saying to get this kind of highly dramatic, epic work done, there’s a lot of other things involved to producing it.

Where can I find out some of the nittygritty info? Please email me private…but personally I don’t have a clue how much this would cost to make it happen. Or even if a modeler, rigtech and animator had to cost a fortune and thats not something the average guy can do on is own.

#46

Well, for the first character (Nelson the African guy) I just started with a generic head model from something I modelled a while back. For what I needed it for this could have been a sphere, or anything, but having a base with evenly distributed polys is always better as there are no dodgy pinches or poles. I will try and dig out the concept model to see the terrible topology!

#47

Superb in all aspects…such an inspirational piece!

#48

Love the Greek noses :smiley:

#49

that was awesome! great work and inspiring.

#50

Brilliant character design and execution. Such a unique style to be seen coming out of ZBrush. :smiley:

#51

Cool style,vivid and very refreshing with interesting forms and a good eye for colour.Love this.

#52

Xcellent

#53

Great work on every front!

#54

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Thanks for the comments everyone, certainly appreciated.

Here is a quick screen grab, hope this helps. As I said, the base mesh could have been anything, in this case I simply grabbed and old head mesh and relaxed it to remove the features so it felt more like a blob of clay. The most important thing was that I had evenly spaced polys as a base rather than just a sphere with poles, which is still doable, but why make life harder? I then started getting the proportions and volumes in place, then sub-divide, refine, sub-divide, refine, sub-divide,refine....etc etc. I used the smooth brush a lot as the poly count went up. The key to modelling in this style for me was to grab my pinch brush with the intensity quite high, turn lazy brush on and just be bold with the edge shapes, I suppose its a bit like the way car designers approach a new model, it's kinda the curves that matter.

I had numerous discussions with the directors and the rigging lead to decide what these characters had to do performance wise. With that in mind I re-topologised and tidied things up.

This mesh then became the reference head for all the other characters, even the girls.IOC_HeadTopo.jpg

#55

I am afraid I can’t discuss budgets, I am a studio lead at Nexus so my job it to make sure my crew are briefed correctly, motivated and happy. For most jobs the leads are assigned a producer who handles the whole financial side of things, so I don’t really get too involved with it. All I know is that this one was TIGHT!

From the top of my head on this job we had, two character modeller/texture artists, 2 riggers, 2 environment modeller/texture artists, 2 FX/lighting guys, 2 animators and 2 compers. There were actually less crew than that as most of these guys were all rounders so everyone got involved in all areas.

#56

Wow. Great job. Bringing back together a stylized Pangaea is a really fun concept, and it was beautifully executed.

#57

Thanks for the breakdown. really helpful in knowing the “how’s” really appreciate it…

thanks again.!!

Selah

#58

I saw this a couple of months ago. Gorgeous work. The animation stood out to me especially because of the character design. I employ a very similar design and style sensibility when creating my characters. Thanks for posting some of the work in progress on this project.

It would be really cool if you could elaborate on the process of importing your finished meshes from into Zbrush to Max for animation. Do you use normal maps to retain the graphic edges of the models, or is that a product of the topology imported from Zbrush?

#59

Hi Songai,

There were no normal maps here, the edges are simply modelled in during the re-topology stage in the same way you would model a sharp edge on a car panel for example. The ZBrush concept sculpt had very untidy edges that would not translate well for animation, so all of of the topology was redone and exported to Max as an OBJ file for facial rigging in the traditional way with morph targets etc. ZBrush was not used on these characters for anything past the concept stage, although in the past I have done morph targets in ZBrush, if you do this be careful to reset your pivot to 0,0,0 before exporting to ZB.

The graphic look is simply a product of the lighting and comp work.

Dave

#60

Thanks David. Once again great work. I look forward to more.