My very first ZBrush piece: Fantasy Sleigh...

[RobertR]

Hi there, I’ve just completed my very first piece in ZBrush 4… It’s a fantasy sleigh, and I still have the warrior and the “evil reindeers” to sculpt… I’ve started with the sleigh, because I was a bit afraid of the hard surface brushes, and I wanted to learn them first… I’m a 2D guy, and this is my first foray into the 3D world… I usually do location design and storyboard for 2D series…
More than 50% of the sculpture was made using meshes created in Shadowbox… I love Shadowbox because it retains all of the positioning information, so we never get lost with the Subtool placement… I haven’t touched the Spotlight and Polypainting options yet, because I don’t want to get spread out too much, since I’m a starter… So this is how it’s looking so far…

Attachments

[kokoro]

wow !!! you made that sleigh in shadowbox ? amazing, wonderful… really love it (though around easter i find a sleigh with reindeers funny … lol) ;; great work !!

[dmitriy7365]

small_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamond

[Gareee]

I love the design on this! Did you make seperate parts in shadowbox and then asemble them?

[RobertR]

Thanks guys!.. Shadowbox was of great help to get the basic shapes that I needed to work properly , but keep in mind that it is by no mean a way to get sharp and precise subtools right away… It will just give you a good workable mesh that will help you achieving good results at a low level of subdivision, meaning that your polygons won’t get stretched out too early in the workflow… It’s also the best way to cut holes inside your mesh… The subtools I got from Shadowbox were very “balloonlike”, but I could get the results that I wanted very fast with the clip brushes… With the three views of my sleigh wrapped around the Shadowbox, I was assured that all the subtools generated with it would be at the right place, and with the right proportions in relation with one another… Once all the pieces I wanted were created and saved as tools, I just had to reassemble them in a new project… Here’s an Xpose view of the decimated model…

I also used some custom alphas that I made myself… They were drawn by hand with markers, before I added the grey tones in Photoshop… I added a gaussian blur to the motif, to make sure that the corners would be smooth on the surface of the mesh…

Next step: the warrior !.. I’ve done some color studies for him already in Painter12… Can’t wait to see the results in 3D !..

[EZRA52]

Excellent work, I love the sleigh and I love the Santa drawings.

Ezra

[magbhitu]

fascinating and inspiring stuff! I wonder are you familiar with old norse Gustafson’s Sleigh http://www.martinlaventure.com/Travel/Norway-2011-1/18531287_XRh24k/1430520427_x5vShvd#!i=1430520427&k=x5vShvd

[RobertR]

Yes!.. I had some photocopies of that when I was doing my first sketches… I also had some reference of old Russian churches… Very inspiring stuff indeed… I will probably spend a lot of care trying to keep that feeling, when I do the polypainting work… But overall it’s Fantasy stuff, I just take the elements that I find exciting and I make my own synthesis out of it…

[system]

Now that…is awesome. :lol:

[Sangius]

perfect use of shadowbox! Looking forward to see the Warrior in 3D.

[3djock]

Congrats on the turntable gallery nice work !! What did you use for the wood texture?

[RobertR]

Thanks !.. I mostly used textures from CGTextures, but some of them come from the Pixologic Download Center (Alpha Library)… They are color pictures that I imported as alphas… Some were pre-edited in Photoshop so they would follow the shape of the subtools… The Z Intensity was set at around 11 or 12 most of the time… At a higher setting, it starts looking like a caricature of a texture, instead of just adding realism and a sense of scale…

Here’s an exemple of a pre-edited texture ready for stamping with the Drag Rect stroke:

The motifs on the side were just hand-drawn:

[ricor]

Great work Robert. The quality of the detais show your long experience in 2d graphism.
Bravo!

[Dragon]

Hi Robert, are you still working on this one?

[RobertR]

Yes, I’m working on the warrior… I will post most of the subtools as I sculpt them, starting with the three daggers… I’m pretty slow, because I’m only working part time on that… But I don’t give up !..

[RobertR]

OK, I’ve completed the set of three daggers for my warrior (actually, the warrior itself is coming along really well, but there is still a lot to do before I share anything)… So I’ll post the accessories as I sculpt them… The dagger number 3 is the same as number 1, but with different alpha texturing… They will have different colors at the end anyway… I used the same MatCap as the sleigh, for the sake of continuity, even though the red wax shows the small details better…

To start with, a detail of the original 2D artwork:

And then the final set of three daggers:

Different views of each one:

Dagger-1

Attachments

[RobertR]

Dagger-2

[RobertR]

Dagger-3

[RobertR]

Still working on the accessories for my nordic warrior… Out of the factory: four decorative metallic plates (with custom made motifs), and a quiver with three javelins… ZBrush is good for me…

[Gary_Komar]

cool and different small_orange_diamond i like these - some cool stuff in your thread !!!