Espléndida anatomía. Me servirá de ejemplo.
Muy buena la idea con los perros!
Felicidades!
beautifull.
I finally finished the horse and dog, though I haven’t gotten around to making some nice renders of them. I want to take them out of zbrush to get something nice through mental ray (I have trouble creating nice materials in zbrush). In the mean time, here is a quick render of the dog and the horse’s tack which I spent a few extra days on (definitely easier to detail as straightened bands than twisted like this). This project took me about a month with all the random side trips I took. I sculpted a detailed horse skull and pelvis before starting and did more than my usual amount of designing in 2D as well.
Anyone know any useful ways to twist a strap like the reins in zbrush?
I finally, finally managed to get these printed in plastic (separately and without the tack). I had to switch from metals because the metal printing goes through a temporary soft phase and the legs didn’t hold up unfortunately. I printed myself smaller two inch long versions of each and am happy with how they turned out.
Better renders coming eventually!
For awhile now I’ve had Lincoln on my to-do list for my relief work. After finally getting done with the animals in the last project I sat down to do him. I was glad for a fresh start on the whole subject of reliefs since they’re rather unusual and disorienting if you spend too much time with them.
For my Lincoln I initially sketched out a lot of different variations on compositions taken from the photos in the hopes that I might get a chance to do more than just his portrait. I really wanted to avoid doing anything like what has already been done a hundred thousand times already, particularly anything at all resembling a penny (round + relief + Lincoln). Lincoln has a lot of character in his posture and body that seemed to me to be fresh ground. A last thing I wanted to avoid was the text and border style that we’d used for the composers which I really disliked. A rectangle would have felt much more photographic which seemed appropriate for the piece. While I didn’t manage to get any responses pretty much at all to my designs, he did mention that I could go with a pre-beard Lincoln. I quickly shopped together two pictures to make the composition I wanted and got to work.
I was surprised that the bulk of the sculpting took only a week, followed by my schedule being loopy for the next week and a half, until I eventually did everything I wanted and detailed what I could.
Oh, and at some point I pieced together all of the photos of Lincoln and made a rotation of his head. I cut out all but the clearest photos so it’s a bit less choppy but it was interesting to stare at for awhile. Client didn’t say anything about it when I sent it to him. He also didn’t seem to find it interesting at all that the Smithsonian allows FREE access to scans of both of Lincoln’s actual life masks. I literally had his actual face in 3D and he didn’t find it important. Anyway, here’s a gif to mesmerize you for a bit.
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