Thank you both. Your feedback and support means a great deal.
So, I decided that this asset, which was originally meant to be a header hanging over Popeye and Olive Oyl, would look better on its own. That composition is already extremely busy without it, so now I get two pieces for the price of one.
I’m calling this one Muerte. It looks good at its native resolution of 6989x2804, less so when I scale it down to this size, but most of the detail is still more or less readable.
Art its fantastic to see your work again.
Im not on the other site as much as I want to be where I would see all that great stuff so this will have to do… and it does!
Beautiful and very very… um… on.
GRIN!
Heed the words of the wise and talented Boozy Floozie. You’re on your own road and it will pay dividends. Such magick!
Very cool. It has a (kinda-sorta) 3-D R. Crumb feel to it.
Nice work!
Okay. Here is my final image. It’s called I Yam. Native resolution is 4573x6685.
Thanks to all for the endless inspiration.
Bravosmall_orange_diamondsmall_orange_diamond
I am delighted to see it for it is delightful and very original.
I keep coming back to look.
Yes, great stuff. Can’t wait to see what you do next! 
Thank you both very much. They never really quite come out in the end the way I see them in my head. The final result is always a bit of a surprise, and I never really know how it’s all going to mesh together until all the components are stacked together.
I’m pretty happy over all, but it was sooooo very labor intensive. I usually feel a bit let down once I’m done.
I really love how crazy this whole thing is
and how much effort you put into the individual pieces.
Though it could be so much more interesting with proper more dramatic lighting.
Have you thought about using a different renderer?
Holy cow…
Thank you much. ZBrush is all I know, to be honest.
I’ve tried my hand at modeling in Maya, but only have a VERY rudimentary understanding of its most basic functions. I think you’re right that I need to up my game in the rendering department though, and I may just have to jump back in and try to learn a new skillset. What would you recommend? VRay?
I’ve tried to vary the values in the individual renders, but I recognize that the whole thing reads much flatter than I would prefer. I would add in light caps, but I’m pushing my poor little laptop about as hard as it can handle already. I’ve got about 20 individual renders here all stacked on top of one another, and because the size is so large (so I can print and frame big enough that all of the detail reads), some of them take 8-12 hours to process (if they don’t crash the program before they finish - which they often do…). The whole process is ridiculously cumbersome, and I suspect it would be quicker, easier and more effective using another renderer.
I want the viewer to feel like they could reach into the canvas and pull out a gear or something, and I recognize that I’m not quite getting there. But I am committed to improving with each one and steadily increasing my skillset.
I very much appreciate the feedback.
It’s so weird, I was just putting something up in that other site for you and everyone else… Foolishly I hit the wrong button switching back to that window and closed it instead of hitting send. Oh dopey me.
I think you might like KeyShot, its got limits and some problems (like the whole world is stuck inside a sphere) but its pretty good, its keeping me out of Blender for anything other than rigging and that is a wonderful thing…
On the other hand Im learning Houdini, its hard, mainly due to complexity, but its got some amazing abilities that I think you would like, specifically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Qw9TTZTKE&t=114s
It was made in ZBrush, Maya, Houdini and composited in something called Nuke.
I know its violent and destructive, but you get the idea of what you can do with ZBrush objects in Houdini with this I think.
The compositing you only need if you are making a movie, which I think you should.
Houdini is, as I said, hard, its procedural so there is a lot to learn but all that animation and simulation stuff was done in it so its looking to me like its worth the effort. Theres also a free version and a ton of tutorials of varying degrees of ease or intense difficulty.
So far its more fun than Blender and I need to get away from Blender for a while.
Man-o-mooskie. That breakdown video is nuts. Thank you for posting it.
Dry and procedural tends to put me to sleep (which is probably why I’m so drawn to ZBrush), but I have to level up. There’s just no alternative.
My mindset thus far has been that the answer lies in just getting better with my existing tool of choice rather than exploring new ones, but I’m starting to rethink that a bit. Regardless, growth is pain, any way that you slice it. There’s no way around that immutable fact, but there is a bunch of good **** on the other side of it!
Well I know that feeling of ‘feeling disappointed’ once you’ve finished a piece. I make big, highly finished oil paintings for a living and they can take years to finish. The finished work is always a disappointment compared to what I have in my head but I’ve come to realise that it goes with the territory of being a perfectionist. There are many high points along the way. It’s even worse if I exhibit; a rush of energy, anxiety etc. worrying if I’ll meet the deadline then ‘poof’ it’s all over and we’re at the opening night feeling harassed instead.
I think it’s good that you’re considering expanding your skill set with rendering engines and the like. I’m learning Zbrush, the airbrush and the Munsell colour system for similar reasons; growth. It will take ages but ideally I’ll be able to pull all those disparate strands together and move beyond my current limitations. It’s the journey that’s important. I can easily imagine that if you apply yourself as diligently to learning Keyshot (for example) as you have here with realising this image that you’ll do brilliantly.
Art:
It’s hard, but there’s elements where suddenly things make sense and quickly.
One of the things I like a lot is that you can make something like a simple linear curve, tell it to be geometry, shape it in various ways and then stick instances of it to something else. If I stick it to a sphere for example I make a ball with a lot of tentacles, it I stick it to a… well… stick, I can make branches. If I take the stick with branches and attach that to a copy of it self I might wind up with a tree, though there are things specifically for making trees and plants and stuff.
You still get the sense of hands on making of stuff, but you can do some radical stuff with it.
There are certain geometries, especially ever changing ones that can be made with this that would be hard in ZBrush because its got less motion in a sense. Picture a lizard with too many teeth and the closer the lizard gets to you the more teeth it has and while that’s happening behind and off to the side a mayan pyramid is growing it self relentlessly into infinite complexity, this sort of thing (hehehe!) is possible and once you understand what goes where and why (I dont yet, but I see this potential very clearly). Lizzard…
I say its hard because its not Sculptris, ZBrush in a sense is hard at first and yet you find it falling into place in your head after a while. Blender does not fall into place in my head, it hurts it, Houdini, so far does not hurt it, it makes me think, but its not that mind numbing and pointless memorization.
This would be hard in ZBrush:
https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/polyextrude-curve-input/
I think I could do it with ZSpheres, or something like it, but it would be less flexible in more ways than one and this isnt even rigged.
I think making stuff like this, then bringing to ZBrush for sculpting could be amazing, but I still dont know how to export it yet, Im sort of at the beginning of this little adventure.
The thing is that its free so you can get the idea and see if you want the big fat versions, Im likely to buy the Indi version.
On the other hand, KeyShot changed how I render stuff in a big way, its pretty great and super easy for lot of stuff. Its got limits, like fog is horribly difficult and should be trivial, but that’s minor… it is also a world stuck inside of what I think of as a very small ball and this annoys me to no end but in a way is one of its strengths lighting wise.
What is your laptop, like how much ram and what CPU?
Neither ZBrush nor KeyShot care about your GPU but Houdini does, and it cares a lot I think (2gb minimum I think)…
Im on a laptop that’s showing its age now, but so far its running well, though I haven’t pushed it like I do with ZBrush yet.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Houdini handles the stuff I make in ZBrush, nothing else likes it much, getting Blender to puke is one of my singular skills!).
I have some things I have made in MagicaVoxel (another free thing you might like, its pretty amazing) that Im going to test some of the simulation stuff on. I should have some stuff up on here and that other site soon if I make some progress.
Some of the things from the other side of my eyelids want out and I think it would be nice to have a way of liberating them.
GRIN!
Hows that for longwinded?
@Coyote:
I have something like that too, the not ever being quite satisfied thing I mean. I look at stuff, nitpick it till I cant stand it any more and do something else. But then I have an attention span usually reserved for blond jokes and an intellect to match.
Also don’t worry about how long ZBrush takes to learn, I did (worry I mean) and trying to force it slowed down the learning process. It becomes very fluid after a while and suddenly you are doing the strangest things without knowing how you know how to do them and with no idea when you learned it.
It actually does not take ages, once the addiction sets in its all downhill and you learn faster and faster.
One thing I found to be very helpful is during any tutorial if it says to do one thing, try five and see what happens, ZBrush has unlimited UnDo so this is almost never a disaster.
Oh, and one last thing:
If someone tells you that you can’t do something in ZBrush, do it anyway, they are almost universally wrong.
