Excellent job on Lincoln and the dog.
I have thought, from time to time, that it would be fascinating to try to re-create historic figures using Zbrush.
Your relief of Lincoln is inspiring.
It was nice of you to post the info about the Smithsonian. That may be useful to others who want to try what you’ve done.
great work!
Apparently I slowed down my posting to a crawl during some longer projects and never returned to share more! I’m fairly sure I’m approaching the end of that reduced pace and I’d like to actually update for once. I miss the ZBC forums! I think this post will overlap a little bit since I’ve broken the continuity of my posts, I’ll put them all together in a set of posts here.
1. To start with, I entirely replaced my portfolio with a new Squarespace domain featuring a bunch of new renders and a new clean, concise style for displaying them. You can explore that site at www.ThisLandisDigital.com.
*My sculptures tend to lack exact render dimensions (not being 2D compositions) so I used a single frame with an exact height to force Squarespace to display them as consistently as possible (it scales with the height of the browser but not the width).
*I used picture frames because they tend to unify the vastly different styles of my sculpts and contain less precise compositions. They add a sense of depth, especially in the transparent shadows they cast (thanks to PNG files).
*I uploaded the optimized (maximum geometry on the front) bases I use to sculpt my reliefs into to my site. Check my About page or the composers page to find them.
-New render of the alligator eye relief.
-Notes I made while creating and editing characters for the Superman: Origins project I’m working on. We lacked any established style sheets or guidance and I’m not able to get to most of the characters so leaving notes for the next modeler to come along is useful.
2. I went back and rendered all of my composers using Mental Ray in Maya. The new images are much more revealing in regard to the depth of the pieces. I can only attach 6 at a time, so check out a few others at www.ThisLandisDigital.com/#/composer-reliefs/.
*I recently finished Fanny Mendelssohn and will have her up soon. She’s young and flowery haired, a big difference from my usual portraits.
*I’ve been thinking about making some sort of display stand to prop upright the reliefs for general use or some way to display smaller versions of them in a neat row.
-Rossini, Bach, Beethoven x 2, Puccini, Schubert.
3. I made an improved set of renders for Lincoln after changing the base entirely to resemble the Lincoln Memorial.
-Sketched out designs for the original Lincoln. I think I posted these before but I figured I’d put the final products all together here.
4. While I didn’t render them with MR like I’d intended, I also neglected to share my final Horse and Dog renders! I actually got around to doing it for a temporary portfolio I brought to a storybook illustration conference I attended in NYC earlier this year.
-At the time I was introducing myself to animals in a broader sense and went out of my way to sculpt the skull and pelvis of the horse as practice. They’re the sort of sculpt you get half way through and can’t put aside. The bridle took a lot of detailing, though I removed it for the 3D print.
4b. In making my new site I compiled a lot of the sketches for the Horse and Dog project. They obviously aren’t Zbrush related but they are part of the process for my Zbrush projects so I’ll upload a few of them along with photos of the 3D print from the friend I made them for.
-I did gesture sketches and an animal anatomy course (through Uartsy) while I waited to actually start the sculpture. It’s probably the most productive one can be while procrastinating. These sketches are really a tiny tiny TINY portion of a much larger and messier heap of sketches. It has really helped my drawing abilities and broadened the available styles I’m able to approach sketches from.
5. At the same time, I also rendered out a Fox sculpture that I made for my Grandpa and took forever and a half to complete. I based it on a set of interesting photos found on the google and intend to print it for him when I get around to doing it. A lot of the sketches I did for the horse project were also in expectation of this project. Fur still troubles me but, after a long time spent tweaking it, I found a style that worked for this piece. The log turned into something of a hero object as I searched through the photographer’s related photos to find it in the background to fill in the rest of the details. The plants and rocks were all added in an sketch over a basic render. I made the render using a matcap set to 0% opacity so that it was no more than a flat, white shader with the slightest bit of shading to separate objects in space.
6. Finally, I’ll include a new free sculpt. It started off as a bust to personify the cold I was getting over at the time and I later went and sculpted a body for practice. I tried to use as little reference as possible, mainly to lock in bone placements and a few mistakes I knew I’d made.
-Here’s the first render I made of this sculpt to send to a friend at the time. I really don’t move past this early stage until I’m fairly satisfied with the forms. After sculpting the wrinkles and details of the face, I sculpted and painted the veins onto a layer. I couldn’t figure out which google image to use as a full reference so I settled on two of the most reputable and combined them for the finished product (which is probably not terribly visible). I hope to mess with the rest of the body’s veins next time I sculpt a figure like this.
Anyway, that’s all the pictures I have for now. I’ll be around everyone’s threads to see what’s been happening since I posted last.
welcome back! and what a wonderful presentaion! i visited your website too, it is great style with the picture frames… and, i admire your scientific approach to your projects, your sketch pages are same beautiful as the sculpt you then produce from what you learned by these sketches. i really should start this too! very inspiring your work 
tha horse with dog scene are AWESOME!
absolutely love the Dog and Horse scene - beautiful gestures, very expressive.
very inspiring artworks
I finished up my relief of Fanny Mendelssohn recently. The piece we’re using in print is zoomed in to crop out her torso and emphasize her face but I preferred the entire sculpt for my render.
The original reference is a pencil sketch. It’s not necessarily as idealized as it could be but much of the detail in the face was left out in favor of hasty scratched in flowers and hair. The lack of facial detail in the composition made it rather difficult to find an appropriate balance because the various images of Fanny are either limited in detail or in accuracy (although finding the high quality version of this picture just now would have helped but the compressed images of it look terrible). Squinting at the faint smudges that appear across multiple images was enough to get a rough idea what this face should look like.
To tackle the hair, I first had to research flowers and arrangements so I could easily look this sort of thing up. Here’s my list of keywords if anyone’s curious:
*Crown of flowers, flower halo, leaf wreath, vinoki (Ukrainian), diadem (Greek), garland, gajra.
*Periwinkle, vinka, myrtle, laurel leaves, orange tree blossoms, sprigs, spray roses (and grain of course).
After finding better references, I had to extract the composition from the sketch as best I could. Obviously not every flower had been drawn in perfectly and the scan itself was very restricting but I came up with a decent number of flowers that I thought I could see in the mess. I outlined them and used that to help in zbrush later on. While sculpting, I inevitably had to separate the hair and grain to allow greater detail without dividing the entire portrait (which would be geometry heavy). I trimmed off the back edges to reduce the poly count while dynameshing. All the while I tried to keep in mind the overall depth of the hair so that it didn’t look bizarre from angles. The grain threatened to break the illusion until I flattened it out too.
Surprisingly, the open shoulder gave me quite some trouble. The sketch had just an outline and the dress obscured the actual landmarks. On top of that, the whole area has very little depth to work with despite its surface area. I sculpted over it several times before I was satisfied with it.
nice
I was messing with doing a quick figure relief. I did my usual and forgot to set it down after an hour and took it mostly to a finish. Pose is from the book “Study of Pose”, #802.
Finishing up a ballet figure in relief. It’s an arabesque pose and I separated the sculpt of the dress to make life easier.
This is what her face looks like from the side. It was originally much thinner but I scaled up the depth by request after it was finished. With enough depth, the awkward fish faces you expect from angles like these should start to disappear.
Another view of the depths on this piece. You can see that there’s quite a lot of shiftiness going on with the expected depth. Looking at the leg, you might think that it’s been pinched back at the pelvis but really it’s been pulled out lower down to provide more distinctive forms to the leg, especially where it protrudes from the dress. The angle of the hips was very important to the piece and I sculpted her without the dress to be sure I had it placed correctly. Limbs are able to carry their own unique depths because they are more difficult to compare in a relief. The relative change in depth between the front and back limbs is minor but hardly noticed because you’re focused on identifying the forms themselves. In most cases you end up with the bare minimum depth change to establish that one thing is in front of another. In this case, much of that distinction is made by the inward or outward twist of the hands and feet rather than by the receding of the limbs.
I recently finished up this portrait. I think sculpting directly in relief helps avoid a lot of the awkwardness of systematic hair styles in relief. All those curls were just not flattening quite as nicely as I’d hoped on my older portraits yet both Fanny and Dvorak are looking much better. For the beard I tried to emphasize the underlying planes as much as I could while breaking up the remaining space with a handful of different sized strokes based on the foreshortening. It’s still not ideal, partly because his beard hairs were so thick and rather spread out, but I think it turned out much better than I had hoped. I still had issues with the amount of detail I could capture without going up subdivisions endlessly but he’s still got more detail than most of my prior sculpts.
I had wanted to make a last pass over the torso to clean it up and give it some texture but somehow my Cintiq Hybrid’s power cable stopped working properly so that I couldn’t connect to my computer. Sadly, there is only one reseller that ships in the US and Wacom isn’t being very helpful since they aren’t responsible for their resellers. Also, that reseller is the Wacom store itself. Despite emailing them over a month ago, I still have no cable and no way to acquire one short of relocating to Europe so I’m stuck with a wonderful piece of hardware and no way to sculpt with it.
Simultaneously, my actual computer sprung a coolant leak, which I didn’t even know was possible. It drained straight into my graphics card which then spilled all over my foot when I took it out to dust it and find the problem.
In the meantime, I’m working my way through Scott Eaton’s Facial Anatomy and Portraiture class. I started a bit late and managed to get through the first half at a decent pace but my brain reached capacity and I’m now working my way through the 5th of 6 weeks. I’m taking excessive notes because I enjoy the lecture style for some reason and Scott asked me not to post them since the notes are too detailed and basically cover everything. When I’m finished with that I badly want to work on some 3D portrait studies, probably starting with some anatomical ones.
Anyway, I finished this and managed to get my laptop to cough up a render for it. I also managed to wrangle my side project together and order some 3D prints of Fanny and Dvorak in addition to a little metal book stand I’ve made for them to sit in. Renders for that and photos of the progress will hopefully arrive as soon as they’re finished up!
Impressive work! I hope you sort out your cintiq problems soon…