Character Design & Production with ZBrush for the Industry with Keos Masons - 2019 ZBrush Summit

is coming up with stuff like that so I'm pleased to present to you today here live from the gnomon green-screen hangar in the shadow of the Hollywood sign as you say we're gonna have Cedric you're here CEO and we also have again I don't want to mess this up because you told me and I'm like feeling Gillian Gilliam that's right I'm sorry and also a Marco Plouffe make the face yeah right that's the blue face okay so put your hands together in a warm ZBrush community welcome I'm miked correctly gave everybody hear me well all right okay cool great great so we can start well thanks everyone for coming so well we already been presented but Marco young Cedric together we are Kaos Masons and we will allow Kaos Mazzone also yes may is all for anybody who wants it's perfect it's allowed it's like perfect that's all we're actually going to change the name now we're gonna call the lawyers and change all of that I think there you go so like like some people know us but like for people who don't just to give you a little idea of who we are we are a outsourcing studio it's mostly dedicated for character modeling and character character design for the video game industry but we also like do a little bit of a film and collectibles as well the me and Cedric we founded the company a few years ago and young now is part of the team as another one of our artists from Montreal and we also have a lot of people working for us we have like a core team that's been with us since the beginning and it's mostly like all freelancers but some people has been what I've been with us since the beginning so we have like a little family thing happening and also we hire some talents like some that come and go and so we're always like working with new people it's pretty fun in terms of clients okay you can see well in terms of the clients we work with like people all over the world like I said mostly for videogames but like we've been working with epic electronic guardstar again Studio Bleu whole high-res studio a DDoS Gameloft gearbox with Berlin's three I just came out pretty good game and yeah we've been working with like blur also and it's like too collectible like Sam crime 1 etc etc and it's really nice to be able to work with so many clients and so many people all over the world because you really get to learn a lot of things a lot of different way of working and it's it's a pretty interesting aspect and the one of the interesting thing that it brought to us was this like versatility in style and everything which makes like great it's a great aspect to be able to have like this versatility and have like so many clients that can come to us because of that so at first it was not we didn't have like that much style not much different styles in our portfolio but over the years over working with so many people we got there so something that we think is a good definition of what chaos Mason does it's really in par with like the the benchmark of quality we try to always accomplish it's it's it's hard to always get there we make it like one of our priorities though I think that's a reason why people come to us actually so we always try to just like keep the bar like right there and and push it upwards and also for is we build the teams right and it's really important to be able like to teach the people to make sure that they can also like be there when we work with them and when we deliver the work to the clients so that's something that's really also really important for us the relationship with our clients also is really important we really try to always like I have a good time at a good communication with them respect their deadlines all that jazz super important stuff but we really really put a lot of stress on ourselves to really always accomplish it well and in terms of our relationship with our artists we really try to be human we always we remembered when we were artists but we're still also artists so by working with other artists we always try to make sure things are fair for them and that everybody has fun people who feel listened to and that also people can grow by being with us so even if we are working with a lot of people as freelancers we always try to have like as much proximity as we can to them so that we can actually have like this little dynamic happening something that's actually also pretty interesting is well some of you know we actually have like a couple of like resin kit that we actually do and maybe some of you are going to be happy to know that we in the future in a near future we're actually working on expanding this and having more of our IP and having maybe some that would be colored and we're really trying to like expand because we do mostly video games which we love this aspect and by doing resin kit like this we can actually really work on our own IP and our own ideas and bringing up to life by printing them and painting them so like I look as a little teaser we have like this one coming soon the flower power defender this one's a mess it's like 30 40 pieces I think it was really complicated to print but the owners did a good job and yeah it's pretty interesting this one also is something that's coming soon we're gonna also try to have them painted so it's going to actually bring us to like a next level for our collectible collectible adventures so we have like a so much so many things we can show you we have easily like 15 hours of presentation possibly but we're gonna condense it into an hour and a half ru and so about like Q&A just to let you know that we are going to allow Q&A for when we're gonna switch places and we're gonna prepare like our our computer so we're gonna try to maximize our time and also at the end of representation will also be open to Q&A so just to let you know just just remember your question and when it will be time we will actually allow it and I think we're also gonna be like in another room after your presentation so that yeah so like if anybody has a question that doesn't really have to do with a presentation or whatever just remember it remember it and come and see us and we'll have way more time way less stress and we'll head answer your questions as we can so yep and did I miss something I think I'm good we're gonna start a presentation now because I think that what's interesting it's probably more of the demonstrations than the talking so first Cedric will show something that has to do with what are you showing like we're gonna show you like a concept in ZBrush using like lineups and shapes then Guillaume is going to show like more on the production side how to actually do size character I came to his style or I can to like he's been working on fortnight a lot so I mean it's like pretty much like that style and afterwards I'll be a dissecting a like a treaty piece that's hard surface and try to show you as much much as much technique as I can within the time that we have so yep let's start like this okay so najin's let me just through the right picture train where is mine okay thank you thank you I try I try also so now let's talk about concept and I'm not going to go through the full process concept process but on in one part of it which is doing silhouettes and lineups because and there are many reasons for that actually there are two different reasons for that the first one it's because it's my favorite part when I want to have fun relaxed during my free time I mostly do silhouettes and the other it helps me actually why it's relaxing for me because and it's also very useful for me as an artist it's because it helps me to come up with something unique fresh and different most of the time and the second reason why I would like to talk about silhouettes is because whatever the project whatever the star you're working on you have to start from something and it's mostly silhouettes so now I just I would like to show you one picture very basic picture oh my god okay so when we look at the picture we can see that silhouettes are very important actually and because they help us to just to distinguish different groups of characters of archetypes and styles also when we look at one specific row here for example this one when we look at all the characters in this lineup we can see that very very unique from each other and it's something very important that will help us to just push the diversity the quality and get a better group at the end so as I just mentioned lineups I'm going to talk about a little bit more about that because I do think that doing lineups it's probably the best way for me to approach the concept work so here is let me show you different creatures and characters I did over the last years on different kind of projects in different companies so why for me lineups are very important actually the best thing coming in mind for me was it's because it helps me to just enhance the creativity because it forcing me to to diversify with different kind of shapes and volumes another reason which is very important especially for me as well just because I can get bored very easily when I work on something when you work would laugh with lineups it helps you to just keep having fun working on them because as an artist when you work on only one asset at a time after a couple of days you can get born and you have to keep being motivated but by by your work and actually when you work on several characters at the same time it helps to just try to not to get bored you just have to switch on another creatures or character so this is very powerful for that working with lineups an oil point which is very important when you work with line up it's because you focus on the content not the details don't get me wrong working on details it's could be good because sometimes you just want to explore different kind of things like I don't know accessories embroidery or different kind of details but at the end of the process or at the end of the work or whatever the most important thing is reenter your character at another point which is very important actually when you work with lineup it's because it's all about universe creation so because we work with different characters you don't you don't work only on characters you work on characters who can belong to a specific group world or universe so actually it helps you to just define a subject it helps you to challenge yourself with adult direction so you make sure that all the flows access recent details are fitting in that group it helps you also to create some migraine stories and at the end it helps you to just refine both story and us at the same time to keep them consistent and to help enhance the final package so actually when you work with lineups it's not all about just characters it's something much bigger so now let's go go through the picture oh god sorry oh autism it works perfect so now let's go through some of them and I would like to list some example of lineups we could figure out actually when we work just to help us to define different kind of lineups so for example we could imagine a line up based on visuals very basic stuff so we could imagine a big character themed character small one so the big one could be tall and strong the thin one could be a child and the small one could be weak so could be an example another example of flying up we could do could be based on skills for example if we look at this one this one here we could imagine a creature with wings another one with four legs another one with big could be big and slow a normal type of character an older one for example so the guy with wings could be a Scout watching from the sky the one a Quadra pet could be also Scout and the big and slow one could be a transporter or build normal type of character could be a soldier a worker and for examples the older character could be a chief or wise character so another example you could have in mind when we talk about lineups we could imagine a lineup based on natural constraints so for example the first thing we have in mind actually I have in mind when I talk about that adjust we talk about animals so natural constraints would have a bird a fish a dog or a mole for example so the bird can fly the fish can swim so dog can run and the mole digs and also it's good I would like to finish with another example because it's good to do some lineups based on something basic ideas it's good but sometimes it's also good to try to explore even more the kind of variation and opportunities you could have in internet in your lineup so let's show you another one so for example this one it just to illustrate a lineup that could be based on morphing abilities so for example we could imagine this Oh God this creature like a rhino type of character and we could imagine some part of its body just open up same thing for this one the worm who could the background story for that character was actually was able to just open up each chest just to release some eggs so we can imagine different kind of lineups like that and for example we could imagine another one also with morphing abilities where we could you could have a character like this one a basic one who might be able to generate some VFX so you can have this character generating some smoke some objects some shapes and silhouettes also and to finish with that kind of lineup we could imagine something a little bit more basic where you could have a very basic character biped becoming something very totally different and it's good to play with the contrast also so for this example you have a very basic character just becoming something totally different like geometric shape or geometric not got a square shape so now I would like to show you two different lineups just two that I managed to do thanks to that process so for example here is the first one before showing all the different iteration on that lineup I would like to just talk about the background story because it's good to have some background story and I really used to do that a lot so for example at the beginning I just wanted to play around with different kind of things because I love doing this kind of thing just lose myself on something but in this case after a couple of hours I just found it could be fun just to try to create creatures with different kind of mechanics to carry eggs so for this one for example it's kind of obvious you can see the eggs on the arms and so here you can see oh yeah so really I think I think I missed something in my prison sorry give me two seconds because oh I can do that sorry so I talked about lineups here I didn't show you the process so let me just show you the characters and after that I will show you the process I use to to come up with them so just show you second one so now you have another one with eggs and you round and for this one it was very important for me to try to get something even different with you know animation and motion so I just try to change a little bit the anatomy to get something interesting at the end another one with a different mechanic also so you can see see the eggs around the character floating around and the character floating also from the ground next one more based on tree so you can see the egg just coming out of the ground and coming out of the character and the last one more like a flower so you can see the eggs at the center of the character and you have some flowers just floating around and you could imagine that you could be flowers trying to catch some insects to feed himself or trying to get some Sun just to get some energy from that so you could have some different mechanics so before going forward and showing you the process I just would like to mention something very important actually when you work with line up so you can play with different shapes in in grey like that very simple way to just see things but it's very important also to work with colors because colors can have some impact on your final concept so for example if I go through two different characters now with the colors you can see that they have all their own personality thanks to that as well so you have different colors for this one for example just for the background a store not background story but from this one I just started from a pineapple to get something a little bit different so for fun and the last one so now let me just go through the process which is very simple and basic actually but it's something that could be very powerful oops yeah so it's very basic first thing I do actually to to set up my scene is just to make a sphere I converted in Pali measures to make sure I can work on it in ZBrush after that I just subdivide the sphere just to make sure to remove the wire effect but you can see on the surface when I'd converted in dynamesh and change the resolution just not to get too many polygons on screen to get things smooth when I work on them next step is just to turn on the symmetry it's very important to do it before just because you don't want to do it on all these fields after that so you turn on the symmetry first when you duplicate the spheres and you have you seen kind of setup then you just have to to run solo modules because you don't want all the spheres to be displayed at the same time and you just want the one you are going to work on and the last step then it's not the last step but you can just start to play around with the shapes and volumes most of the time I use a lot the snake hook brush which is very very useful for this kind of things and after that the only one thing I do I can work on a sphere for a couple of hours and when I get bored I just have to use the arrows and the keyboard just to be able to switch between viewers fails so it's very basic but I suggest you were to try it could be very powerful actually just to you know to create so I'll show you one line up and now I would like to show you another one which is a little bit more different so more with based on mechanical characters and actually the reason why I wanted to show that line up is because for this specific one I wanted to use another technique just to once again avoid to get bored or try to explore different ways of creation so for these specific characters I just decided to use something once again very basic in ZBrush so let me go through the process for this one so I set up the scene exact the exact same way as the previous line up then the only one thing I did actually was to use this next year brush which is a insid brush by default it's a very powerful brush so what it does actually it allows you to just exude some shapes from an object or primitive so you just have to select this next its next via brush after that it's very important to turn on the script wrist Pro otherwise not going to work and what I do after that just I increase the subdivision size just to make sure I don't have too many polygons once again on-screen in ZBrush to get things smooth when I create shapes and then I have that it's very personal but for me it's the best way to work and to get something interesting I change the brush modifier value from 100 to zero the difference is when you keep 100 you paint by normal and when you use zero value you paint by in screen mode so for example for me what I used to do is I take the right angle and used to paint something on the top of it to get some arms I don't know different kind of fix or what you want before going forward that just would like to add to mention something else it's that for example to get something thick or thin so you just have to increase or decrease the size of your brush so for example this one was very with a higher brush a higher size of the brush and for this one it was a lower size of the brush so when you play with that at the same time you could have some very interesting result so now we are done with that and I would like to go back to the liner process a different kind of line of process we mentioned earlier that you know in a lineup you could have some very different characters and it's good you can balance all the characters together so you could have some big one small one whatever but it's also good to you but to use that process with different days so for example you can imagine that you have a lineup and you to make even more variation with one asset on that lineup so you can also use that process to make even more variation so let's illustrate a bit more what I'm saying nope nope yeah so this is another lineup I did some while ago and after a couple of weeks just wanted to get back and I wanted to make some variation on one of them so second one so I just decided to change a bit suppose to get something a bit more natural so I just change the arms just to make them along the body and just decided to use it as a base and do many kind of variation from it this is the result so here is a base so from that base and managed to do one creature a little bit more realistic so you can see that the silhouette is the same that all the details are completely different with the same base I managed to do this one another one Treacher with more stretchy kind of skin effect mechanical character with different kind of details another mechanical character we have curvy shapes a little bit more organic we cartoony character for those who know Dragonball it was based on that so it's worse there are less details but you just you know it's very bulky and it's very so it's more cartoony I also managed to do a stylized character so you can see ahead you can do whatever you want so for this one there's a little bit more details and you can see that we keep the bulkiness of the elements actually and the last one which is a work in progress so it's not done because I I got only just a month to do all of them so I just for this one I want you to do something a little bit more realistic so the goal is to achieve a very high amount of details and to get some interesting and fresh and new so now I would like to just to talk a little bit more about the process how I did what I did actually to come up with that so actually what I did to come up with that was I just decided to work on three of them at the same time but not to get bored because actually I'm very someone who can get both very easily and quickly I just decided to work on three different kind of style so I just decided to work at the same time with a mechanical character a creator and stylist right a stylist character so as you can see as a base is exactly the same from all of them d1 the d1 was just to focus only on the art direction so for me I just wanted to come up with something interesting not everywhere on the character I didn't care at all at this stage I just wanted to get something interesting so as you can see hands feet are not done same here so it just the upper body and same for this one it's kind of rough you can see things but there are things that has to be done stage to d2 to d3 the goal wedges to extend the out direction on the entire character so as you can see none now feet and hands are done same here the lower body is done and same for this one I just managed to do different kind of details everywhere last stage d4 to d7 it could be 8 depending on the complexity of your lineup but the goal was to achieve something very final close to be final so it's something you can see now so the the work was just to try to polish a bit most plates and add a little bit of details using mostly alphas and masks for this one it was a little bit faster just because usually when you do create rows it's all about you know using Dan standard and pushing out the details cavities and stuff like that and for the finally valid details just using some alphas and for the last one which was the longer one just because I just wanted things to be crisp and clean so I spend a lot of time not a lot of time at I spend time just to separate all the pieces together and to be able to work on them individually to get a nice level of crispness so as you can see this process can be very powerful actually just because in a short amount of time you can have a lot of variations which is very powerful when you talk about concept so now just to finish my my part I just would like to talk about very quickly about the process I used to polish that elements on the character which is a chest area so whoops okay this one so as just to go through the process quickly that was a base I just decided to isolate the chest element first thing I've done was to divide the mesh just to make sure I could use van so paint brush just to paint the cavities the reason why I painted the cavities was to be able to use one very powerful feature in the brush which is oops which is almost done yes almost yeah okay good the polygroup it I really love that feature it's something I use a lot what it does actually it helps you to just separate all the elements together so as you can see it's kind of crappy here on the outline of the pieces but the good thing is a brush it's because there's many more very nice features so to be able to smooth out a little bit the outlines just use a group loops features the only one thing I changed actually was a G polish value I put it to ten just to not to smooth out too much the inside of the element next type were just to remove the loops because I didn't want them they were useless uses using the Dell Eden next step was just to add a level of realism so for that I just decided to add some thickness V only it was by default so I used a panel loop for that the only one thing I changed actually was a Bevelle value 221 that allows me to get some very nice you know bevel effect around the elements at at the same time it helps me it helps me to just feel the gap between the different elements next step was to use the police by features which is very useful in concept actually because it helps you to just smooth out a little bit the polygroups and remove the artifacts so it's very useful for that next step then I just decided to apply only one polygroup pair elements the reason why I decided to do that was because I wanted to be able to work on them individually so just by hiding an ID in them it's better to have only one polygroup so I use auto group of at that very quick step because it was a stires stylized character just wanted all the edges to be a little bit more smooth so I just decided to apply a polish just to smooth that out a little bit the edges and then I managed to work on the pieces individually thanks to H polish clear smooth smooth brush and the last step was to sorry to add the final level of details using the standard brush to create some straight lines the mask just to be able to get some bumps interesting bands the inset brush which is very powerful and useful to add more level of details on the on the on the the element the standard brush just to use some alphas which is also very powerful when you in term of conceptualization because it's very easy and fast and the last one which is a damn standard brush I used to change a little bit of lazy Mouse value just to make sure that the lines are very you know clean and crisp and this is a result for this character after a couple of days and I just would like to mention something very quickly which is very powerful as well to save time it's to work in symmetry so it's good sometimes to just put some pieces at the center of your scene work on them in symmetry mode and then put them back you can save a lot of time so for example the bicep element the thigh element is a knee and the feet we're done bad way and this is it for me so now it's time to mark who and IAM to take over and I just would like to finish by saying that all the if you're interesting but those are the pictures I can just share to everyone so presently I was gonna be I'm gonna set up his presentation but like in the meantime was there a question from someone maybe Oh squirting the fourth sorry alright I hurt you no no drop that before did you know - for - yesterday kidding kidding kisses um Guillaume really beautiful work my name is Rachel um yesterday I was just curious this is more of a general artist question do you work a lot from reference or do you just close your eyes and look at the back of your eyelids and kind of just move clay around no I have a lot of reference every time I have to build something it's like I have to reverse-engineer anything if I have to do a car then I'm gonna have to learn a bit basically how something is built every pieces of clothing to a certain point you don't want to push it to the extreme but I like to know how things work even if it's stylized for sure it's gonna give a flavor ability a believability to do that okay so I don't say also that - sorry I I got your name wrong that's fine don't worry I don't even say my last name nobody does I didn't know who was speaking before - I was curious about what I'll give a trick at the same time is every time I do some some type of shoes I'll keep the reference I'll make a montage of it and I'll keep it for future reference and it's something I built through the year so every time now I start a project I'll go through that bank before I even start looking for reference it's super practical it was Cedric yeah just saved your fro man just saved your phone not gonna lie curly hair don't care come on he's just saying why is it for me the question we're questions and I'm floating around it's like just told me you would have said the same so yeah they're late they're our team they're sharing like uh you know what I mean David yeah yeah they're like a rock band as I'm not done this city with it's a quick mover so a Sedgwick for your final process are using subdivision levels or Z model or anything like that or just staying at high oh yeah at some point @vn just who adds the extra level of details I used to subdivide everything but sits up yeah I just add VN to get something shop you know on screen but yes I do that at the end okay the box oh hey getting your money's worth like that I know Rigel - I like take advantage of this I'm sorry Cedric this is for you when you were talking about those three concepts you were doing yet like the eyeball one the stylized one in the armored one why did you choose those out of the seven oh it's it's about concept you were just you were going through the seven different like designs you went with that body type belly happy body type you ended up going with the three the armored one the organic eyeball looking one and the stylized character why did you choose those three versus the other ones I don't know there's no reason for that I just it's chaos yeah it's part of your name I don't know I just felt comfortable to work on them just because I did a bunch of them a long time ago I love doing mechanical character I love doing stylized character and Crouch shows it just fun the reason why actually I used to work on this boss free it's just because you know a mechanical character it's a lot of energy and I just I knew that at some point I would get bored so I just decided to do a creature at the same time because creature it's very very easy so it's just kind of finding the best balance just when you work on different characters at the same time so it's probably the reason so secret reason yeah yeah yeah go on can start can you hear me of course my name's man it's good what do you think yeah we have a nice voice oh thank you yeah so Mike yeah my name is Guillaume de Berg a I'll try not to answer other people's questions for now so it's really nice to meet you all finally I've been friends with Marco and Cedric for a long time now we met at Ida's Montreal I was really surprised and humbled when you guys I want me to join because I do very different things and you guys are freaking legends it costs us only $20 so I'm working on with epic on fortnight for more than a year now with a great team so shout out to them in my shout out to them they're working really hard I love you guys so like Cedric and Marco I adapted 100% ZBrush pipeline a long time ago thanks to Frederick da who was a friend of us and it's really widened my scope I used to do everything the old-school way and since then everything has improved and the scope of everything we can do as a as god has gotten better with every update so I prepared a project to show you guys I'll start a character that stylized from scratch I'll try to sparkle in some artistic reasoning and decisions I took through it so I hope you enjoy it usually all I don't work from personal ideas I work on the friends concepts it's just an excuse to work with really cool people and I always I always get something out of it because of their interests so here's the concept so this is Gretel from ensel and Gretel it's made by a friend of mine I called wuyu I worked with him in Palo Alto so please check his work out it's it's really dynamic there's strong shapes and he's a good friend of mine so it's based on its it's based on the the fairy tale so I'll assume that most of you know that fairy tale it's pretty dark you know child abuse and the poverty and no starvation like stuff so even though it's happy I'm gonna try to induce some of those stones through the process through the use of color and tone and value so I'll do some research I'll gather some reef research and I'll try to understand the artistic direction so usually I'll talk with an art director and our concept artists to make up a story about it to ground it in my mind so if I look at it her hair is unruly so it shows her wild nature this disc Andy she has I would guess stole from the gingerbread house so it's mystical and it's glowing and it's it's pretty intense she's from a woodworker family in detail so she's very simple and I can see something interesting is you see those embroidery we decided to take out in the end because it's felt too it felt too deep it felt to visually detail for what it was and also she wouldn't wear something like this she's too poor for that and then the bag the bag is I guess what she used to hide the bread crumbs to find our way back home what else yeah that's it so first I'm gonna say it's very rare that we get to start from a base body we we get to start from scratch in production usually you start with the base body but I think it's always good practice to start from scratch it's it's pretty cool to know that you can start from nothing and build something and a good thing about not starting from a base body as you won't get influenced by underlying Anatomy as much as you think you want you kinda will kind of keep those shapes and if you really want to go crazy in specific you can start from from scratch oh I'll stop rambling I'll open ZBrush from here so this is basically what I'm gonna start from these three primitives they're directly from ZBrush and they have a nice diversity of shape from here I'll build the base body so I'll look at something let's take the head or the torso I'll try to simplify as to the simplest geometrical form and I'll start building things bit by bit you see it's completely different from what you're doing Sedgwick so to each his own that's it's really interesting to see how people work even though this most of it will be hidden I still am gonna work on it because it's the it's the base structure on everything and everything's gonna fall on that main structure you see the deltoids you see that the torso it's a bit like if it was a wood mannequin and in the same idea I'll build everything else it's not supposed to be pretty at this point it's we're just placing things we're just working on the relationship between forms through this I'll make sure to zoom out a lot to make sure that everything works together and also something some people don't tell you I'll look at it from weird angle angles from the top or from the bottom from the side making sure trees will really well so here's a progress so the ID I want to keep clear planes directional planes of the form and slowly by little I'll chip it in like if it was clear or rock and I'll start to define the shapes little by little excuse me so you see the vast like basically I just carved it in I just I'm looking for this shape right now this is the end a bit like what you were saying when I work on something complex I'll work on it in the center of the universe of for ease of ease of use because if you work on a hand and it's angled in the universe you'll have a hard time like try to find your straight lines so I work on it in the center and then I'll go and place it on the character something cool about working like this is you can work on the only one finger and then poop you copy it and you have a hand even though it's an organic shape or the ones you know I like to keep the power of creases so I have my nice change of directions in the form okay so let's say I do this for every parts of the character I'll show you how I I'll get a nice topology out of this so here's the leg the leg has been built like I explained out of different sub tools from here I'll dynamesh it together and then with the power of zremesh I have a leg like I can build on it's pretty cool and I think zremesher got really really good in the last update and it's a joy to work with yeah so imagine that I do this for every car every parts that's why I end up with you can see even for the the face I got a topology that's pretty good - just sculpt down and yeah it won't be used for low poly but first Kulp thing it's pretty cool you can also see that I creased my edges to make sure that when I'll subdivide those things will remain straight there's an example I always try to keep my forms my silhouettes reading well and that there's a relationship between each other you see they're not here everything goes well into each other and this in the end will create that nice little contact shadow that will give it a bit of realism and believability some trick aside if I open this you see that I kept my edges instead of keeping it true it might be overkill but I try to save polygons when I can because when you have different sub tools at some point it gets heavy and what I'm looking for is ease of working I just want to keep the flow of it okay and by the way I decimated everything just for ease of use this is the final character in people's I was laughing because I don't usually do colors so I'm good the thing why I'm not doing colors I'll do I'll do colors at the end but at this point I don't want colors to speak for themselves I want to make sure that the character the modeling is really really tight before I even start adding colors I it's attached right now but I think sometimes I put a darker values on the eyelashes and maybe the pupil just to sell the character just to give it a bit of personality so like I said it has to read well from every angle where am I so yeah you see all those frills that was some storytelling about about the shovelled and hues or addresses I'll simply use some cylinders and I'll copy them and when I get in that variety I'll just create a brush out of it and then I'll add them up too to every aspect so that's really efficient and it really really fast what else something cool I wouldn't do before is I I was picturing translucency on the on the candy part so I modeled the candy to have an inside so I made a boolean I made a copy of the stake and I made a boolean out of the the candy so it would fit perfectly with it with this I'll be able to create a thickness map later when I'm texturing and do a lot of fun stuff in the shaders you know something was missing about the characters from the back at some point that wasn't in the concept so I I tried to do a bit of concepting myself so I added a hoop skirt and bloomers to her so I think they fit pretty well with the time period and the style and I saw I can say that you see the way it it goes around the knees it's a nice visual it's a nice visual echoing of the shoulders so it I felt that it worked well I decided to do this late in the game and it's pretty easy I just took the legs I masked it out and then I extracted this I extracted a mesh out of this so I already out the form of the leg that's right so if I was in production it would end in T pose personally I think something cruel about the character artists job is that we try to invoke we try to invoke an evil in the motion out of the character that sin T pose and that's insanely good as it can be I will never really tell you anything so for my personal projects I spent more and more a lot of time and effort into posing the character so I'm a measure twice cut once kind of artists if you didn't see it already so instead of posing the character right away I'll use a mannequin so this is a Ryan Kings line eight head mannequin you might not even know mannequins exist because they're pretty far so let me show you where they are they're in spotlight in project and in sorry in mannequin here so there's a lot of stuff here that's super interesting I'll talk I'll talk to you after so working on the mannequin you'll make your mistakes and your experimentations right away before even touching the model which i think is really cool it saves you time in the end so with this I pose the character it's pretty straightforward but it's a long process tonight there we go so what was important was to I wanted I wanted her to detach the silhouette but also also the the area around her would tell a story so you see that everything everything like under armpits is opened up I will always like look at the model in a different angle I wouldn't usually now in Photoshop usually I will simplify simplify simplify simplify and something important is contrapposto so it's the way the body finds balance in imbalance you can see from the front the way she leans her head compared to her shoulders compared to her hips you can see it from the back also so from here I'm gonna take that character in another software to texture it and rent a texture in the renderer but before that I'm gonna I'm gonna use ZBrush to do my poly paint to make sure to to have nice areas of effect for my elements so where am I so when I look at the character I'll look at it and I'll I'll think okay what is cotton what is skin what is hair what is letter and I'll make a list and assign it to a color here's my lists you can do the same if you do the same make sure that your colors are very different from each other or they're gonna blend in when you do selection that's a production track so we always use that trick and let me show you what it looks like so simply when I add that that squirting I'll plug it in texture and then I'll I'll color pick it and here what it looks like it's not about colors that fit it's just it's just you have to think about it there you go and from here let me show you the final result though this is Gretel listen it's it's a bit far from from the concept there's a lot more realism in it I don't know about you if you're doing stylized but I'll always add a bit of anatomy in there and then I'll have to scale back and simplify and simplify so simple is hard simple is really hard something you haven't seen in the ZBrush is her head or high or eyes there's this Clara mesh which is this sphere copied with a bulge at the iris and here it's it's transparent but it will highlight the eyes and that's what is gonna give her like life really okay you see that all the stitches the fabrics and the details I did outside zbrush in texture with death you can totally do this and in ZBrush and it's probably going to look better but I like I like the iterative aspect of it of adding things and bringing things in and out something else I changed from the concept as I had a green background just to to grammar and the forest of detail they have anything else sir so in the end because of the color the value the the fact that she's very bright and saturated and the background is darker I just wanted to evoke the resilience of children and the dark world of adults and parents so I hope you got something fun out of this and if you have questions come and see me we'll all totally nerd out it's gonna be fun [Music] Cillian good job can we get a sneak in a couple of questions here before yeah let's do that before the Plouffe we're actually really good yeah of course well yeah sick talk yeah she's over there we speak later we do a photo-op anybody how's everybody doing I'm not so convinced it's Saturday come on how you doing this is got a question there damn what a catch other side turn around turn around turn turning around there it is okay it's not working oh jeez okay try now squeeze it yeah hey there would you explain would you um expand more on your technique regarding identifying textures using that paint technique that's something I haven't seen very much of that was me the last technique you use to identify your textures yeah would you expand upon that a little bit more so to me the most important thing first is value so it's your mouth of it's your range of white to black so you try to stay away from complete blacks and complete whites and and I'll look at my character I'll look at the color but from time to time I'll look at it in grayscale to make sure that it reads well to make sure that we're your biggest contrasts are or where you want to bring the attention which is usually the face and from there I'll build my colors and then I'll think of my materials the way they reflect light and something fun about that characters I wanted to get into materials so there's a lot of SSS in there there's a pasty there's a there's a emissive does that answer your question you're my new best friend quick question um so after you are done xiri meshing yeah all the primitives over here do you actually go through increase things again or is decreasing just for the initial like primitive blockin I'm not sure I fully questioned so from say that I guess are you blocking the primitives with creasing yeah and you zremesh the whole piece that's right do you go back and increase anything or do you just kind of start sculpting I don't know what you saw at the end was when I was happy about the whole the whole topology I did not have to but you see that at some point if it's pinching you're not going to fight it so you're probably just zremesh it for sure mm-hmm don't forget your guides and is that you with a hand up is that a hand put a toss through the guy on the chair so you know what I did there Holy Smoke knock you out okay talking to the Box right into the box hold it right near your face there yeah my name is Freddie seis I was notice I didn't quite get like you're posing technique I'm a high low poly guy where you know you rigged it and you posed it notice how do you set up your rig once you after your T pose and spot for print or is it well I don't do print your thing making me think about something I don't run guy is that what this is it's okay don't be ashamed it's not your fault I don't do for me it's not you yeah I don't do fancy rigs like really so know what I can say is what you've seen some you know posing a character is not about transposing it and then it's done you're gonna break some stuff you're gonna stretch some stuff you're gonna have to risk all a lot of things that's why I say it's a lot of work but if your knowledge is into fancy regs then you I'm sure you don't have to do as much work as I do yeah saying it's alright he's giving you the thumbs up back here is that a thumb up is that a thumb up yeah give me a thumb up right there oh look at this guy Holy Smoke where you been on my life I like this guy's energy hey you want some of that he says nice on a simple Saturday get some of that later better be streetside okay where we at somebody else one more and that's the last one that we take it off right and take another question actually we're yeah okay we got the proof saying it's okay for one more anybody else but don't hesitate get off them hands oh you know when I was a kid I could really throw a baseball yeah I should have been born in text though yeah yeah my name is Jason most of them are curious uh where did you end up rendering that at and how did you do your textures for that Wow okay can I say it Zoey well let me come and talk to you in my lab so I carry is caring i textured that in substance painter and I I ran it in a barber shop yeah that's fine it's you know we're not the only tool used in the world we know this it's okay make me feel like I'm dipping my toes in the holy water for pete's sake I'm the only person to drive a car up to the Parthenon in Rome looking at McCoy you can't drive here what it's it's a Fiat it's fine Chad oh don't companies go okay so uh is that it one more how do you feel yeah one more how you feeling all right no questions now it's all good it's all good is my mic working yeah am I good yeah yeah everybody can hear me well yeah yeah we up the game on it well I mean eating up the game also it's cuz oh okay the game I'm an electric guitar Morgaine dude alright so uh yeah yeah yeah okay so since Cedric was presenting a lot about the concept and a Guillaume it's more inclined would like production Plus also we've been touching a couple of different styles so I'm gonna go more into like the like in quotes realistic and also hard surface of course because I mean that's pretty much what always people ask me so I did this this piece for for a sideshow it was a the Sentinel actually this one sorry sorry it was a the Sentinel and it was actually used to make like a base for the the Wolverine what's their name again premium the yeah their it's really nice exactly well of our insider fella did it actually so it's kind of funny he's coming like right after yeah and I think we'll our bottle did the the magneto actually and this like piece was actually completely like ravaged and destroy afterwards but it's kind of fun because with sideshow I actually was able to work on concepting the the head and also making it like production ready so print ready or as much print ready as like I can because there's a lot of people in the process afterwards right so so we worked on the on the full character at first so this is like the complete character it was not necessarily like approved or anything we just wanted to have like kind of like the full character before we like focus on the parts we wanted to model so it's not like necessarily like certified or approved by sideshow right it was just like a work in progress and we decided to focus on the head and on the arm but it's just to show you like a little quick like my presentation is not about concept but I just wanted to show that like I like to practice concept as well and like when I'm given the opportunity it's pretty fun so like this whole character was pretty much done on a like on one starting from like a human base mesh I did like on one asset maybe some are separated are you starting from like just like crazy spheres or whatever and like him from like primitive and I'm the one that starts from a base mesh so we have a company together but we do like nothing the same way and we don't agree ever also that's how you run a company so yeah exactly I just like wanted to do like a quick little character here just to give you an idea it pretty much like took me like a day for the character just to have it like in concept but I just used like shortcuts to get to there well what I mean by shortcut is everything is done like by hand and it's often what I find that some people have the most difficulty with its gaining this like dexterity to do something that looks hard surface without necessarily using like crazy techniques and this is pretty much what I'm going to try to talk about for the remaining of the presentation so if we look at the finished character so the finished character was basically build on top of the of the this blocking here and what's interesting about this this piece why I'm showing you this one it's because there's like three clear techniques that I use all the time and for this character I've used them out and so I can use it as a good example so the three the three techniques that I talked about I named them the quick the the quick clean and the classic farcical yeah it has a good good yeah yeah exactly well it's good yeah yeah and so the quick technique the idea is basically just to be able to go as fast as possible to get something that kind of looks polished or enough the clean technique is the one that takes more time it's more technical but you you're more guaranteed to have something that looks that looks good in the end and the classic is basically just talking about going back to poly modeling like we like pre ZBrush and such so I'm talking about Z modeler in other words if I look at like some pieces here you'll see that for example like this piece this one here is what I consider the quick one all right so it's really important for it to look finished and to look clean anyway right but I haven't really used any like fancy techniques or whatever I just took like a block and I chiseled it and I made sure it was like all like the planes are all clean and such then adding mid detail and adding smaller detail just to make it look finished whereas a piece like fragance I put like the face plate here this one was actually first of all it was cut out of them all the same way that like Cedric showed with like you know the black line and having it like become a poly group and then you can actually extract it that's pretty much the exact technique and force people have been following our tutorial we've been talking about that for like five years now so like the whole panel loop technique that's pretty much like the the foundation of the clean technique that I'm talking about but what's interesting is that the the quick technique which is like I said more like the dexterity part they're using brushes and the chiseling surfaces and everything it has to be applied on the model once it's actually it's panel looped and it looks like the base looks clean you still have to use like two techniques from before right so that's why even if I divide them in three groups they're basically like all interconnected in a sense and the third technique is when I say classic I'm just talking about like creating like stuff like this it's it's pretty much just a like a like a cylinder that I kind of like changed the shape or I actually know this one who I just used like stuff that I found like in IMS that were in ZBrush and I just like Frankenstein them to actually look a bit different and to have it look a certain way but I would take for example like I think this one I made by hand this was basically like a sphere that I just used ed modeler to just like add some like little detail and such increases I'm actually able to use dynamic subdivision with that that technique so it actually makes the scene like way less at the end so you had those three techniques and also in the middle the middle piece since it was something that was going to be printed I knew that there was a like it cannot be like a hollow piece it needs to have like a like an inside and pieces needs to be actually glued be glued on it in a sense so there there cannot be like any like like empty space or like like I said holiness so when I actually worked on the concept piece by piece I just like remove them from the concept and I actually created like a new subtool and the like the hole that it left you can just like close hole and like push it like inside of the inside of the piece this is basically like how I was able to get this sub tool in the end that just acts as like the center of everything but everything on top so everything that's not like yellow right now is basically either like an EMM or something that I is like Zed modeled like the eye or a plate that's on top like this plate or this plate or some object that are less like plate like it's gonna be like this one here which is basically just like a like a shape like you're sorry I probably started from a cube where I don't know and I just polished it with like brushes or whatever I'll go deeper into that but everything on this model that's what it is so the reason why I think those three techniques are important it's really a matter of efficiency I find that efficiency is one of the most important thing when you work when you work for a client and you have to respect deadlines but you also have to respect your own life and might have a life outside of work and the way that I've been able to to gain enough speed to be able to do so much work but still have time to play like Borderlands 3 right now or large souls again again again again again again and again it's because Orr has spent time with my girlfriend also exactly and then with my dog and I love them hi so and I'll say hi mom and hi that also so the the reason why I'm actually I have time to do those things is because like I've been able to really practice on going fast but doing smart and this is pretty much just going smart that's the most important thing sometimes I find that some people maybe they don't think before before they they start working and they might actually just like double the time that it takes to actually get there and but to know how to get there it's pretty much just like practice but not only practice and practicing without thinking about it but practicing as like how do you think of after you're done with your piece you go over it and you're like okay so maybe I could have done that like faster by just doing it like maybe like dirtier because I don't even like notice all the work that I did so this work is like completely useless to the goal that I wanted to achieve and by that I mean like for example when you work on a character maybe like the head the hands the upper chest is gonna be like the parts where you want to put the most work with but like like the feet and their legs like often I'll kind of like do it like half-ass and nobody notices because nobody looks there so except if there was something super important on the legs and you knew that like maybe like the camera would go there often yeah maybe you do take more time right but you really have to like work smart so you have to know like the scope of what you're working on and such and such when you work on personal your personal work it's easy because you kind of like decide what is important and what is not important and when you're gonna render in the end and maybe zoom in and out so like for example like I did a couple of like my Megaman characters recently and like none of them have like a back side except the near one and I think the first one also but like there's like a lot of characters I was like I'm never gonna show that back so why work on it like I just want to do like a character that looks fun and get over it so efficiency just really tried it I think what's necessary before you start working on your character in the case of this character pretty much pretty much everything was was important since it could be viewed in 360 because it was printed in 3d so it's like like the person that's looking at it's gonna decide what's important what he wants to look at and it can be everything so everything had to be like polished and stuff so oh yes I think that's also interesting is if you're actually smart and efficient for people that are for people that are concept artists it's actually right in your lane because you don't want to spend too much time like polishing anything right you just want to get like a shape so you have the perspective and then you can actually go and like do your like your paint over and that sort of stuff so it's it's good to know the techniques that will make you fast and a technique that will make you do something that looks clean even if it takes more time so that been said I'm going to take a piece of the character I'm going to actually go from from the concept that I have here and I'm gonna bring it to something that will look polished so I'm going to take this piece right here and like I said I'm it's calculated that I actually took the piece that I don't have to do the panel loop because a panel loop is very like technical in a sense right but what I find is important is more like the mentality behind polishing a surface so your panel loops going to get you your shape your panel and then you have to make sure like the surface looks clean and such and for that we're gonna use this piece here so I'm just gonna make myself comfortable so here I don't have to break to break it apart to break the shape out of the character because it's it was already like appended as like its own polygroup and the subtool but like if I if I had to I would probably like if I had to like polish like maybe like this piece here I probably have to like to mask it out and be able to actually like break it into like its own piece so by masking just a little quick trick I love to give a little quick little tricks if you use the brush depth here then you say it to not go like solo you'll you'll pretty much be able to like mask it like this and you see it's not even if I'm right my radius is bigger it's not going lower like it's not going here so it's actually like in the in the idea of being efficient it's just a quick little trick that like I know that just makes me go faster and you see without being really like careful I get to actually like mask the entire character so I could break it out like this I could do the poly paint the edges and extract it like Cedric showed many techniques at your disposition butts in this since this one is already like it sounds what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna take it I'm going to hide it and do split hidden and I will be using my shortcut because it's still in the subject of efficiency all my shortcuts are working the same way that like you play like FPS it's all in like those keys it's like mixes of like ctrl shift and out and I strongly suggest that after you're done like exploring with the software you create your own like way of working like this and every time you cut in like milliseconds in the end you may be spent like a day less on your character maybe two days even so I'm gonna remove the symmetry because it's just gonna help me work better and this is like the piece and I'm gonna start from two actually to actually do my polishing where's the other pan this one like though the button is kind of like wonky yeah that's good all right okay so the first thing I'm gonna do is like I have this piece here I'm basically gonna reuse the same shapes split the firt though what I want to do is start by removing any kind of like detail I want to go back to like a pure shape so what I'm gonna do is I'm basically just going to clay build up or clay the holes here just to actually fill them and I don't even need to be clean because I'm going to smooth them afterwards but I I'm not going to get anywhere if I don't get rid of those like details that are in the way I'll just do them like just in one shot but clean on top of a clean surface so once you fill the holes you can basically just like use your smooth brush just make sure - don't hit hit the sides - to do something like this but you can just like smooth it out also you'll see I'm pretty much gonna concentrate only on like one view because like doing like the backside could take a bit of time but it will be like the same thing applied everywhere so I have like all my shapes here if I actually find that I'm losing like I'm losing some some Criss penis I'm actually just going to insist on like what the planes should be and when I actually have this at this point I can pretty much just take my h polish I'm going to start like just like simplifying the planes and making them look clean it's important to use out when you use H polish sometimes because for example like this is actually this is really important if you actually have this site this piece here and you try to polish it sometimes like you're kind of like destroying like the thing that's right next to it and it's not that especially a big deal because you can go back and just like clean it up there you go but if you experiment without you'll know like at some point you'll start to like understand its behavior and you'll see that like sometimes you destroy less of what's like beside the shape if you like just test with this the alt button and like no it's behavior correctly so exactly like I'm just trying to get something that looks like somewhat clean in terms of like the general shapes I could even use the clip curve in some like areas like this the back side since bird it's another don't really care for the the backside right now I'm not gonna work on it like I said well just make sure that at least like the silhouette of it is like tolerable alright and this is the first pass this is basically just like cleaning out the details in having the shapes back to something that's workable at this point what I'm gonna try it with what I'm gonna want to do since I know the shape is not really gonna change anymore the shape I'm going to create actually I'm gonna work on clone here I'm going to do a Zed remesh just to have like a cleaner cleaner base to start to go from I find that it's like it creates less like artifacts to use on Zed we use that remesh then dynamesh but sometimes I just use dynamesh because I get lazy alright so like games minute so no miss Gahagan sorry so at this point I could actually reproject my details but I still have something that's I still have like something that is close enough to my shapes and I know that I can get my shapes back simply bike like re H polishing it because I didn't spend much time trying to polish it so it's not really I'm not really losing any work but like right now starting from here I can actually really focus on having like those shapes clean and it feels like I'm really early in that work still but the reality reality is that this step is so important that I'm gonna spend like more time making sure that everything looks clean before I actually go on and do like the final passes which will be the middle detail in smaller detail so by using out I get this I'm just gonna make sure everything looks sharper since I kind of like lost it right okay so I'll stop here for the moment but I'll show you like what's the the next like the next step what I want I'm gonna want to do is like take care of a couple of lines that are starting to get crooked because of the way that I work so what I do is I often just go take my move brush and for your show me this little button here that was actually if I'm pretty useful it's a cute curve and I use it like see like on enough and it's just like a way to like like when you pull like on something it becomes like more like spiky so if it's not a cute curve you'll see it's gonna be a rounder and I actually use a cute curve and know a cute curve basically to just like start and make sure that like all my lines are like more parallel to each other because like this is something it's not about the surface the cleanness of the surface is really about like the the the well the cleanness of the line itself and let's say that like I find that this is like it's enough parallel for my taste I'm going to go back to H polish and pretty much like finish do like the finish pass for like the clean surfacing okay so one way to make sure that your surface is clean is to use the metal render like this means you see there's like a dip in the shape right here and here it's also not super clean but at this point I can pretty much just like use like smooth to just try to get like those artifacts out this I'm going to need to make the radius like bigger because like my my hand my strokes are actually getting like too visible but you see at this point like this it's like it's okay like there's like a dip here I think I can probably fix it it's probably because like these lines are not super parallel but you feel a deep here but it's just a matter of like just CH polish out like this you see it got already like sharper and I won't overdo it right because I just need to make sure that it looks like respectable and if you look at my work closely you'll see that sometimes like I leave things like pretty dirty but you don't end up like really noticing it because there's so much other things to focus on see like I'm just trying too much no okay so the next step afterwards is going to make sure that like all your corners are am a genius okay because one thing one thing that can get problematic is if you have like sharp edges and then like round edges like this is getting pretty round you want things to be like everything to be like somewhat similar so and I'm really just gonna use like the smooth brush to just like see if I want this like a little bit rounder maybe this one here like this one here is getting a bit sharp - sharp so I could oh yeah really okay that's funny so you see like this for me I find it like clean enough I'll actually go back to a material that's less shiny and what I'm gonna do at this point as I'm just gonna apply the middle details so like for the mid details I'm basically just going to use like mostly masks like this a distraint of my mask is crazy right now I don't know why it got like this can you see you're gonna remove my depth mask here but technically the the mask there's like so many techniques to do that and it's like what I like to do most of the time is I just like create like a mask that looks somewhat clean I'm gonna blur it and sharpen it so that like the edges are like fine and I'm going to reverse it and controlled click in this and this is smoothing it on only on one side once I have this I can actually just like move my piece like this move my piece around I even like change like its shape I didn't mask the other side but like if I actually masked it correctly I could have like just create like like a dent here like this actually I'm gonna do it because it it's kind of weird to just say something and not do it yeah you push it like this you can like change its size its size and you can pretty much like have something that looks like this then others are there us mid details I'm going to actually use like like brushes like or crack or Jesus it's uh orb cracked and I'm gonna use their Aegis I'm gonna put like really big because it's actually going to give me like this like that will effect so I have this here now I get like this bevel the bevel needs to be clean maybe a little bit not too much and it's gonna be clean between the same way as like I did before how much minutes do I ever lift none what but there's over tits no it's an error oh really Jesus all right okay that's how I was smoking you out there yeah okay I see that Jesus all right they mean to smoke yelling okay I watch you do this for a lot longer but you know all right well okay so technically I'm not gonna do it like because I can't and I'm at the time but technically what I would do next is basically just like add in like smaller details maybe I'm gonna one like had a cavity here cavity here I'm gonna grab like an alpha holy like this like this but it's just it's just to say that this is really the technique that I've used it's just I was not pressed for time doing it but there's no more like there's no more magic it's really H polish orb crack using this method just being careful take your time learn from it and you can get to this like level of detail afterwards and then you can create this character and then some what can actually just like completely destroy it and use it as a as a base for you yeah see all that work somebody could say was lost I like to say that I contribute it into like something nice so yeah well I mean since it's finished I'm just gonna say like thank you for coming thank you for ZBrush we're also creating the software cuz it's it's really great to be in there organic organic artists and have organic techniques but still be able to do hard surface to able to do concepts still able to do like full production work within the software so I mean we're really glad that it exists we're thankful for ZBrush and we hope to see cool stuff coming absolutely yeah and you guys really did a great job of showcasing a really diverse sort of series of workflows so thank you again on behalf of all of us at the fix logic team and everyone watching around the globe here in the live studio audience put your hands together again for chaos who makes all and we have ghulam cedric and marko thank you so much guys and we'll do a photo op with Julie the mannequin right here

Channel: Pixologic ZBrush

Views: 125,002

Keywords: twitch, video games, pixologic, zbrush, zbrushlive, zbrush summit, tv, 3d printing, film, zbrush 2019, video game development, keos masons, gnomon, robots, character design, cg, concepting, fantasy, monsters

Id: UthCuDB1IEQ

Length: 91min 43sec (5503 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 29 2019