You sure your mind isn’t just naturally bent?! :lol:
Yeah, this represents a few months of me just falling down the rabbit hole with Zbrush. It was kind of like I envisioned an ideal application for dimensional illusion and then accidentally found it one day. Painter, Photoshop et al are great programs, but this is another thing entirely.
I wanted to see how far I could go in the ZAppLink-driven aesthetic of Part 14 but using Projection Master and 2.5D brushes only. These are two ‘freeze frames’ of a simple plane that I gooed up in 3D edit mode.
Then I wanted to see what happened when very structural brushes were applied while in the PM plugin space…strange vertical compression ensued…not precise, but potentially inspiring:
…and finally another plane manipulation using a lot of negative space Subtool ‘cutters’ and some nice shiny materials:
Really complex, tangled forms can be composed of simpler units interlocking at different scales. These might be almost impossible to sculpt in ‘straight 3d’, but they come fast and furious in 2.5D. The basic unit forms should be stringy or knotted, or possible solid but containing many nooks and holes for fitting together.
Here is the unit…
which was then carved up with openings and notched up with many copies of itself:
Usually I don’t much care for the abstract ZBrush work, especially the 2.5D type. But WOW… I really enjoy your work! Very interesting and pleasing to the eye!
Thank you for that…I think Zbrush has so much potential in this area, and I have a long way to go before getting a handle on how to use its blindingly huge feature-set! Still, I was so pleasantly surprised by my little 4 month experiment on this series that I have a lot of hope for getting something really artful out of this in the next few years.
Here is a pair that demonstrates a very strong simplification in approach – all detail is created by a simple primitive repeated over and over again at various scales, angles and depths.
A spiral ‘cloud’, with some photoshop filtering at the end (Alien Skin Snapart):
This one really surprised me because of how complex and fractal it appeared at the end…yet every single surface detail is created by a visible section of a non-altered torus! There is something really ‘tide-pool by the side of the sea’ about the overall gestalt:
The following pair are both from zsphere chains where some settings got pulled to a limit and the bugs actually went crazy to full artistic effect…not sure what’s going on technically here, or even if I could recreate it, but serendipity rules:
Awesome stuff. 
small_orange_diamond
subscribed. (into my “2.5D Best” category. very few threads make it in there)
Fantastic :)…Thanks for sharing,… and into my favorites folder also…
Glenn
Folks–
Thanks for checking this out! I know it isn’t in the ‘main stream’ of Zbrush, but I do think ‘painterly’ works deserve a little love – and, in that connection – I want to make a list of 5 or 10 artists on the Forum who people checking this thread should bounce over to, in order to get the ‘real story’…whose stuff really turns your crank? I have about half a dozen in mind, but I would be interested to hear your views first…as soon as I get a sense of the list I will post it here. Thanx!
–M
Here is a pair that really shows how much mood shift you can get in the Photoshop post-production phase:
…my ten years ago discovery of Zbrush! 
Interesting work! 
Cheers, David
I have always been fascinated with Escher’s piece ‘Three Spheres I’, where you see a sphere, a folded version of the top sphere as though it were printed on 2d surface and that same surface lying horizontally…all stacked on one another. There is so much in the image about 2D/3D assumptions our eyes make. In that spirit, this next piece is many repetitions of an image of an Owl projected on a 2d plane and then rotated and warped in 2.5D and there emerges a kind of pseudo-reality that has an ‘uncanny valley’ quality of not-quite-right:
keep on posting, you’ll find your way
zbrush has infinite possibilities
i’ve started with 2.5D too in the beginning
To be clear…I have nothing against ‘sculpting’ mesh (3D ‘straight’), but I AM curious whether having an infinite number of 2.5D facets does eventually open up areas that are unique. Of course, the most awesome ‘paintings’ would clearly have elements within that were highly sculpted before being ‘dropped’ into canvas. I am trying to constrain myself to getting the canvas concept at the moment, to see how far it can go.
There ARE a number of techniques that would be almost impossible in a traditional sculpt, even using insertable mesh brushes…I refer to things like the dot stroke where you can lay down thousands of copies of even complex mesh units in a matter of minutes. This kind of ‘profligate’ form manipulation is a nice complement to the more ‘stately’ process of laying down each instance with complete control. For instance, on one piece I had a simple zsphere chain in a dense dot-stroke and the metaforms that came out of it were totally different than the unit-form…sort of licen-like fractals. I could not have planned this given all the time in the world. (note: I DID try several times to get the same effect with the Projection Master, but it does weird things to the dropped dot brush elements when it reintegrates them)
For a couple weeks I became obsessed with the effect displayed below – where a shiny metallic material and sweeping surfaces are post-processed with a stroke-simulation filter, and the result is very convincing ‘brushed’ color gradients:
So, while I am still posting the results of the past/research, this is the first post in the ‘combined techniques’ series which is totally current work showing how many of the experiments viewed in other parts/sub-series can lead synergetically to a broader style. Note also the switch to a more landscape aspect ratio to suit the working screen and targeting most canvas print/wall adapted sizing:
More on the repeated use of structural components and emergent forms that are strangely organic in spite of the hard-surfaces:
Here are another 5 in the interesting uses of metallic reflection as a basis for post-render filters with a painterly feel:
Something ‘Nude Descending Staircase’ going on in this last one…
When leaning on 2.5D techniques it is easy to get seduced into making pieces which are all on the picture plane where Tools tend to land if you don’t have a ‘landscape’ to drop them onto. Here are a couple early attempts to understand the solutions to that tendency.
This is a piece of research to see how the bump brush reorients to surface normals:
This one was done on plane sculpted to have a ‘rolling hills’ shape:
