Hey, guys,
I have to keep the majority of the details of this project on the DL for now, but I’ve been given the awesome responsibility of designing a catalog of illustrated poses for a major licensed character client. I’m charged with changing their look slightly for this new catalog, so I thought perhaps I’d sculpt some maquettes to keep myself “on model” and so I could show the client how the new design will look in 3D. Now, I’m going to be illustrating the poses, but I do need a very complete and correct maquette for the 5 characters I’ll be re-designing.
The tricky part is, I have a very limited time to do it and I’m VERY new to ZBrush (on my 10th day so far). I’m working night and day to fill my mind with as much info as possible (I’ve worked through 100 pages of a ZBrush book and 4 hours of Martin Krol’s DVD series on character design and as many Pixologic video tutorials I can possibly watch while at the office). Right now, however, I have no one to ask questions to about this, so I wonder if I could pick your collective brains to make sure I’m understanding some things right.
The characters will be VERY simple (think Spongebob…simple body shape with tube-like arms and legs sticking out). I need to be able to re-pose them and open and close their fingers if possible.
Martin Krol seems to approach things using the ZSphere approach and that was the way I was planning to go, but for the kind of characters I’m trying to sculpt and with the goal in mind of having their arms and legs be re-poseable, here’s my question…
Do I want to start the character out in the “arms out” symmetrical way using ZSpheres, then go into preview to sculpt the details, then re-pose? In the FAQ, there was a link that was dead that seemed to address this very issue, so if you all know of another way to do that, that would be awesome.
Otherwise, I was thinking of just sculpting the basic body shape, then using subtools to sculpt individual arms / legs so I could move them around / interchange them (Mr.Potato Head style). Which is preferable?
Thanks in advance, guys. I’m having major information overload and I just needed to bounce this off of someone who uses this program every day. There’s really no one in my area whatsoever who knows this program and I’m trying to pioneer it for my company since I see the possibilities of it in the future.
Sincerely,
New Sculptor In Training