ZBrush Sculpting Workshop Part One: Ara Kermanikian

incredible prizes for everyone tonight too so be sure to stick around until the very end and hang on to those raffle tickets for stage attendees we have a one-hour Skype ZBrush lesson with Erik Keller up for grabs so Erik is one of our awesome instructors here at Norman's school so it's a pretty sweet prize because he's a great teacher we also are raffling two one-hour Skype portfolio reviews with ara and Steve respectively so that's also super awesome and a great opportunity so do make sure you stick around till the raffle this drawn tonight and we have some stunning sketchbook bought variants to win courtesy of Steve and ara has some really cool ships and prints that you will have seen outside when you checked in so we'll do the raffle around 10 p.m. we also have a prize for a lucky online viewer too so that's one month subscription to the gnomon workshop training library to enter simply share tonight's live stream event URL on twitter using hashtag nomen and we'll select one winner 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Twitter or the live stream live chat let's see so yeah before we get started I'd like to really thank our s Steve and Eric for their generosity of time and for the insanely awesome prizes they've bought with them so can we have a huge round of applause to share our appreciation I also have to thank Paul Gabriel pixologic for loading his giant Cintiq again for us and a huge thanks goes to our event sponsor Lenovo for helping to bring these free events to you every month tonight's presentation is powered by Lenovo and Intel technology which has students also used here on campus if you didn't get one of the land over 20% discount cards as she checked in please come and find me at the end and I'll get you hooked up with that very special cool offer running until September 30th and it's exclusive to Nome an event attendees only so it's worth checking out and again big thanks to Lenovo for their support so without further ado let's have another round of applause for ara and we'll get started okay thank you very much lit and also thank you know man I've attended these I've been sitting in the audience for many years attending these presentations I always go back learning how a lot of new things and hopefully I can do the same here so poly sculpting is something that I do I'm actually writing a book called poly sculpting and it started out with my first book but this is going to be more focused on it and what I'd like to do is start out talking about what poly sculpting is and why you should you know look into it so all of you have seen these on the Internet right so if you're going to draw a face you know draw a head you first draw a circle and then you draw you draw the effing head and then if you're going to draw now you know you draw two circles which is kind of good because you know if they could have just drawn one oval here and said draw the owl but they broke it down into two so as memes go of course this spread to 3d so in my Facebook feed I stumbled on to this which said you start with a fear a sphere and then you modeled a effing robot right so I commented I said you know this is not true if you're going to model a robot you start with a and of course internet style everybody's going to come at me bro you know just really irate about why this is this is not the way to do it and and even the artists that made this robot chimed in he jumped in he's like I made that robot with that sphere so you don't know what you're talking about so at some point I think everybody realized everybody was having fun and laughing so everybody chilled out and it was great but I have the floor so I'm going to push my points so let's start out talking about primitives so this is how I start ZBrush when I start ZBrush I don't start with a sphere I start with a cube okay and I start with my default brush as the zmodeler brush because I'm mostly a hard surface modeler and I think it's a it's a great way to start is with a cube and why is a cube a better thing to start out with well the first thing is because it's got a face going in every dimension so XY and Z you can grow out of face right so you can grow out your shape in all three dimensions and not only that but it's an enclosed shape the normals are all pointing in the right direction so as you grow this out you can 3d print it unless you cut a hole in it you can grow this to be a pretty amazing amazing shape and not only that but now with ZBrush allowing dynamic subdivisions if you press D you're all of a sudden your cube will change into a c5 Dada my interface is bigger I have a bigger screen so it's gonna off to the side but basically you can go back and forth and choose how much curvy you want your cube to look so so the cube is like the primitive right so you do start with a cube you don't start with a sphere and not only that but I'll tell you the three primitives that you need to use and there's things that I see on models I'm even really skilled modelers don't do this right by the way we're starting really slow we're gonna get into release of this skater max really quick so if you guys are like he's showing us cubes what is that all about just you know hang on because this is important just I teach at Art Center and I teach at Otis and one of the things I do is I look at coaches and the way they coach is the first thing they do is they taught it teach students how to tie their shoelaces right and how to put their socks on correctly and those things are important because if you're you know doing all the things that you need to do afterwards and those things are not right then you will paint yourself into a corner and so if you know all these things then that's great and if you don't this might be a good opportunity for you to learn it so here's the perfect cube right and the way to initialize the cube in the new ZBrush for our 8 is you just go into the setting here and you can choose one of these primitives right so all the primitives are now just launched a bowl right here from the gizmo 3d and so you can launch a cube from here I usually like to initialize my cube because when I do that it gives me polygroup on each side so now I've got a poly group on each one of the faces but not only is a cube a really awesome thing but how many people start out and I'll do this I'll go ahead and bring up one of these spheres so how many people start out a sphere this way a sphere 3d right some of you do this sphere is like the worst geometry ever because it's got this tremendous pole over here so unless you've got a five-sided thing or even six which is six or five a pole with six or five or is okay but if you have something like this it's pretty scary so if you were actually to model this and let me go back to my gizmo here if you're actually to model on the sphere the way to do it would be to go in here and let me just polygroup these if I were to make the sphere useful what I would do is I would have to go in here and pick this and go ahead and do a poly group of a poly loop of a nitch all group of a poly loop here and I'll just go ahead and choose this poly loop right and I'm going to do that on the other side as well and then go in and delete a Island or polygroup island and so I'll get rid of this one and rotate to the other side and get rid this one as well so now this is actually a usable surface and what I can do is I can go in and go to polygraph qmesh all polygons and then pull this out and now I've got a sound all quad mesh that I can work with so this would be a decent sphere to work with if I was to make sense let's say some sort of a shape that needed this type of topology but the better way to make a sphere in ZBrush is you can again start with a cube so you start from with a cube and then you generate a sphere out of it so the way you do that is you go into geometry and you click divide smooth is on and you divide it once so now you get this shape right so this I want you to kind of pay attention to the shape and I want to call it a alpha mesh of a sphere meaning this is a sphere in its smallest possible form right the least amount of geometry if you played with a Playstation one some of you here might have done that this could have been a ball right and PlayStation 1 game or it could have been a face it could have been Solid Snake in the first PlayStation solid-state game so then what you do is you continue to divide this right and now you're getting more of a sphere shape but there's a problem if you look at the sphere you can see that it's kind of a squarish looking sphere so if you want to make this into a perfect sphere one more thing you need to do is just go into your deformation and choose sphere eyes and do that a few times and you can see this thing becoming a perfect sphere so here I have a perfect sphere that I can go in and go down in in subdivision levels all the way down to a cube and all the way up to the sphere right and it's all quads you can see it's all quads all the way and the only place where the squares are not similar are in this these corners over here right everywhere else it is a just a perfect perfect sphere so if you want to make a sphere or you want to work from a sphere I would highly invite you you do it this way so so that's one's primitive we have the cube cube is free it's perfect a sphere can be easily generated this way as a matter of fact also pixologic gives you a sphere in these primitives too so if you choose bali sphere it's a I guess we need to get rid of these subdivision levels here so let's just do the higher ones and if you choose a poly sphere it's a similar sphere the only difference is that these edges are not as equidistant as the ones below but again this would be a good one to use or of course you can always load a polysphere from your light box menu and they have a few in here that you can load up to okay so the next thing I'm going to do is show you how to do a cylinder so from these shapes you can grow anything you can throw that whole robot from a cube from a sphere and from a cylinder so the way to do is cylinder again if you initialize a cylinder here so I'll just choose a Q cylinder Y and crank up these two to the default numbers and Q cylinder this is what it looks like right and this is a okay you know this is an okay cylinder but if you crank these numbers up then you start getting that pole over here so what you want to do is you want to start from this one a really really simple one and then what you do here is go into your zmodeler and choose Q mesh and what you want to do is polygroup all and you want to grow this out like that okay so now you have this shape now you have a nice shored up edge over here you can add a couple of edge loops here if you want to and let me just go into edge mode and go into insert you can add an edge loop here too if you want and now if you go to D you get this type of a cylinder but if you want a sharp edge you can just go in and crease that edge loop complete and now if you press D you have a perfect cylinder all quads you don't have that janky pole in the middle okay so a really great way for you to create the primitives that you can work with and as you grow these primitives into bigger shapes they will grow fully quads you don't have to deal with the problems that that polls have because you can run edge loops around here very easily okay so hopefully this little be useful for you I would recommend you try these out and you'll see that they're a lot more useful than the regular poll sphere and the poll cylinder as a matter of fact this is from my AK in 2017 in the newest version they have parametric primitives but I just put in a one of each of all de Maya primitives and from a sound geometry perspective the green ones are the only ones that are all quads all the rest I have either triangles or angles or have all sorts of things good that can run in in you into trouble as you continue forward and just to let you know this is not just me making assumptions on my own a lot of artists back into 14th century even who were working with cubes and arranging cubes to create organic shapes and the reason why I'm passionate about this is when I was struggling you know as I don't know some of you how many people here are new to ZBrush or sculpting okay some of you are if you feel that you're struggling there'll be things that come along as you're working that will kind of shoot out a light bulb and then you'll be able to you know be able to work a lot better and for me it was this picture from Andrew Loomis right so figure drawing for all it's worth and it's it's basically an amazing book you should get it it's mostly a drawing book but the reason why this really clicked for me is that I was trying to make a face you know my first lesson of ZBrush which I took here I took it with with Ryan and my first lesson was here's a sphere make a skull out of it right and so I did and it was fun but then I tried to do other things and it was really tough but then when I saw this picture it clicked for me so what Android Loomis is showing here is a very complex human being with really good Anatomy but he's broken the human being down into planes so I figured if I can build this then that can smooth out those corners and then get a more perfect human being and that really kind of opened my eyes to sculpting so I start with and I'll talk about forms in a little bit and you know in the book there's a plenty of that stuff like look at this hand completely very polygamy looking hand right and this lends itself to 3d I don't know if Andrew Loomis ever used a 3d program but if he was alive today he'd probably look at it exactly the same way as you go to drawing like look at this face it's completely polygamous so he took a very organic looking shape and broke it down into political political shapes and then once this clicked in my head then I started seeing it everywhere so you know I looked at Anatomy tools they have these busts they probably sell them here in the store and again you see that you know really nicely sculpted figure here and then you see that there's a polygamous is something that's easier to make you can adjust it easily and then you can add detail and get to this so here is how I create a human being from a cube right so this is how you grow a cube into a human being right so you start from a very very straight shape extrude and add edge loops and as you move forward you start adding more detail and then you push and pull the polygons in ZBrush to get this shape right in my out pulling and pushing polygons is kind of a harder thing to do but in ZBrush it's so easy and it's made for that it's made for moving groups of polygons and sculpting on them easily and here's another thing too is that you look at complex shapes like you look at this shape over here which I will show you in a Mac in a few minutes and this shape can be grown just from this these two polygons here right so you take these two polygons you marry them over this way you take this you mirror it over that way you crease that middle edge and then you take this and you rotate it around and connect them up and then you take this and you put them next to each other and you rotate one about halfway and then you go out some edges extrude it out and then subdivide it and you get this shape right so to get this shape you all you need is this this is the seed that can grow that the cube is the seed that grow an entire human being right so if you're modeling you start out with the right primitives you can grow it out correctly whereas if you start with a sphere and start pulling and pushing and pulling and then before you know it you're kind of frustrated with art you want to be done with your idea in the fastest way possible because if you stay on it for a long time and you keep butting your head against it you'll get bored a bit in your move on to something else and here's a chart that I don't know if you can see it and this kind of level but you know if you have a model that's a thousand polygons at level zero as you start growing that model it multiplies itself by four once you get around this area it gets to be a lot of polygons and from four you go to 16 million and that's a lot of points to push and pull right it's easier to make corrections here than it is over here okay so I guess I need to maybe show you another thing so this weekend went to a book signing for one of my friends Mimi came up with a new book at skylight books in Los Feliz beautiful book store by the way and as I of course I'm in a book store I have to peruse I found this book I didn't seen it before it's by jodorowsky and I'd love Jodorowsky Jodorowsky is you know if you don't know who he is look him up he is the the start of a lot of things that you love if you haven't seen jodorowsky 'he's doing it I recommend you watch that movie he basically was the reason why alien exists and why a lot of the Star Wars exist a lot of these movies exist he was going to make a version of dune but he he kind of didn't get the funding it fell through but the story of that is really fascinating anyway so I saw this book I looked at the cover I thought this is a really cool looking cover I want to go home and make this and luckily I had a few hours so I went in and basically instead of starting from a spear to make this face I started from an alpha mesh of a hat a bus that I have and I'll show you that in a few minutes and basically I just go from this generic looking head and then I just run it to create more of the shape of this person his name is show man I guess and I just basically push and pull again the eyes are really easy to manipulate because there aren't them too many points it's a very few number of points and I'm pushing and pulling and then I get it to look more or less like like show man so I kind of did a quick time lapse here that you can see over on the left and this is where I left it right and then I you know started sculpting on it so I'll show you this again the book signing was on Friday and I'm sorry I need the Friday or Saturday and then I just went home and started working on it so let's go ahead and take a look at this in ZBrush [Music] okay so so this is what I ended up with okay so this is maybe three or four hours of sculpting right and I poly painted it as well I'm ventually going to take this thing into substance and and work on it so I'll just bring up the cover so you can see I just use this to get the colors of the face right and if we look at the head i'll just isolate it out right if i look at the head and also let me turn off the texture on it and yes it does have a texture because my alpha mesh also has you these okay so this is what it looks like and this is what it looks like at level one right so here it is all the geometries there I created poly groups based on my UVs so I can work on the different portions but this is basically what I sculpted to get his likeness to get his face this is what I did sculpted from my base match that I had right I didn't you know sculpt on millions of polygons i sculpted on a very few and you know and this is at level one and at level one this thing is about maybe 3,600 polygons right so it's very low poly and I can work on it on very quickly and get the shape and then once I like it I then I subdivided one level I work on it some more subdivide it another level as you can see some of these details I did towards the end so they're kind of seeping into here and should I turn off the polygroup so you can see it better so you can see the geometry even at a higher level is very well distributed so when I applied the poly paint it went on pretty evenly okay so I went from this all the way up to that okay and then since I have the UVs I'll show you to you these right I can paint on it and not only can I paint on it but now I can also take it into substance painter which is what my next step is going to be so I just did this quickly for this presentation but my next step is going to be to take this into substance painter painted a little bit more detail make it look more like the picture and then maybe I'll send it to these guys and see if they want to make a movie out of it I think jodorowsky deserves a few good movies by the way if you haven't read the inkle find it and read it it's an amazing book alright so going back to the sub tools here let me go ahead and crank this back up in geometry and I think I have the poly paint on here still as well so I'm going to turn that on so this is what the poly paint looks like and then it's very easy to just take that poly paint and create a texture with it and then multi map exporter and ZBrush if you haven't seen that plug-in it's really helpful you just you know go into multi map exporter and in exports all the maps and the geometry for you then you go into the substance painter and load them in and you're good to go and then you can do some even more sophisticated painting in it and get a nice render so I'll probably be posting this image on my website karma cocom if you're you know keeping if you look at it in a few weeks you'll probably you'll probably see it so again not that for maybe three or four hours of quick sculpting by the way his shirt is just basically I basically cut off the the bottom part of it and made it into the shirt underneath here and these are two cylinders and I just want to point out that they are good ones I'm showing you the thief see they don't have that pole it's basically they're all quad cylinders so I try to make everything work and the eyes and the mouth bag by the way I got from this model right here and there's some really good models in zbrush by the way so the ones that I really like I like this new demo head they have the female demo head and another good one is I think maybe it's available as a tool is Nixa karelas human male and a model so those are really good models you can start with you don't have to build your own I kind of did want to build my own but if you want to start you can start with these models they have you these and they also have some of them do and they also have good topology so you can you can work with those so moving on to the next topic by the way if you have questions please ask them during the presentation it's fine I can I can but raise your hand and somebody will come over with a microphone all right what no they were not they were not I am I use a program called head SUV layout because I you know I'm you know if I need to do a lot of you vieng i can do it in-house UV layout however after i did the the model i did go into ZBrush and go into UV master and do unwrap again because it will stretch it to the new dimensions of the head so you new masters great i mean it's it's for if you were you want to generate some quick you've ease it does a really good job with like a press of one button but if you want to do more meticulous you being like if you work for a company that just wants you needs to be perfect and headus UV layout is really good unwrapped 3-d or unfold 3d is really good as well and my I think just got so many of the tools so I think you vieng is getting less and less painful and maybe eventually it'll go away but i don't know it seems to be around for a while i'm one of the people that likes to UV by the way and and the reason why that's good is because now I'm using marvelous designer and marvelous designers reverse you ving so you do the you these first and then you make the clothes so so that's giant-killer all right so this is the other thing so when I teach a notice in Art Center I noticed that a lot of students suffer this through this I see other students suffer it I go into other teachers classrooms @tg brush and see that they they have the same issue and and even after I tell them they seem to suffer through it so if you kind of hold yourself down and just make yourself do this you'll be a better you'll be better immediately so when you're sculpting when you're modeling you're working with forms right and if you look at form break it up into three different ways there's primary form secondary form and tertiary form and these have different names I like to talk about primary form as Gestalt which basically means that the sum is greater than the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts so basically it allows you to look at something and appreciate it as a complete object so you have to always be looking at your primary form if your primary form is broken then nothing else matters right so if you have something that looks janky as a complete thing but it has really nice pores or really nice hair or really nice greebles or whatever 2,500 different kinds of boolean holes in it which seems to be the new trend it's not going to work the whole thing needs to work first and then those details work so that that's the primary form so you know when you're working on your model do the primary forms first and then when you go to secondary forms and second key forms basically our primitives when you bash derivatives together you get your secondary form and then you get into tertiary forum which is detail complex forms high resolution stuff so where do you think most people spend most of their time when they're starting out these tertiary form right because it's cool it looks cool it's a cool thing to do so you know and it's a noodling thing so you just sit there and noodle and create pores or create hairs or create wrinkles or whatever and whenever people show their work they're like how did you make the pores and how did you make the wrinkles well those pores and wrinkles would not look good if the whole thing doesn't work so to show you that I'll go ahead and start out with something really simple so everybody knows what this is right I don't have to explain it to you and this is just using four different things and I can take these four different things and orient them a different way now I have more of a hot rod I can move this down or rotate this as well right so I can just you know using these four forms I can get a lot of different shapes out of it and I can show this to anybody any kid and they would get that the silhouette is a car so that's the first step right you have to think about it is like how can I make something that everybody can look at and recognize what it is and then the next step is what kind of car is this what sign Volkswagen Beetle how many people here have a beetle one person does were you the person who said it's a beetle okay but this is a generally recognized form because it's perfect design one person sits here another person sits in the back here's where the engine goes and this is a room for four people to have a small bag to put in and drive around right so if you look at that this form this form has been around for a very long time and it still works and it's still recognizable right so it is your job to create whatever form it is that you're creating to be at this level and if you look at this book over here industrial design it's by Taschen and there's a bunch of really amazing industrial design items in here and by the way if you want a something to kind of get you to be a better designer or create better forms either sculpt or draw things that are in here and again when you look at the silhouettes you'll get what what the the reason is behind there being so great so again really simple shapes create really compelling forms and if you figure one out then you can continue to do them now I'm by no means assuming that I'm a master at design or have mastered this but I am aware of it and every time I work same as working with low poly geometry and primitives every time I feel myself getting better because I keep focusing on these things and they're always in the back of my mind so here's a pretty simple image that basically has the same model in different polycount I've got one that's 312 Polly's twelve hundred and forty-eight Polly's and one that's about five thousand Polly's right and if you look at these the gesture of the first one looks better than the other two and it's got less polygons so if I start out with something like this I can polish it out into a better model than if I start out with something with a lot of polygons and then bang at it here's another example of some people that are doing it so when I started out making a skull instead of starting with a sphere if I started out with these and then dynamesh these together then I would do it and it would have been easier for me to figure out this skull form if you look at this amazing statue again you can easily see the gesture of it can be expressed just with simple cubes right here's a photograph and the person is kind of broken down and down into planes so it's something that you can easily do yourself so build a planar object first and then start adding the detail so the this primary form secondary form in tertiary form loop is a recursive process and what I mean by that is that the primary form is what you should focus on right and then you go into secondary form and then you treat the secondary form as a primary form so the secondary form has to work as a whole as well and then you go to tertiary form so you go to them to app or instead of looking at all of the pores look at one pore and look at how it's built right and build the perfect pore and then multiply it and replicate it and then keep going around and around and around always making sure that your top primary form is the one that really matters and it's the one that you're really paying attention to and it's the one that really screams off the page right so with this I'll go ahead and show you when I started discovering these and and how my work changed so I'm going to be going at and loading a model here it's going to take a few minutes loads so this would be a good time to ask me questions again just raise your hand there's one over there and somebody will come over the right it's just called industrial design a-to-z it's by Taschen Tasha makes really inexpensive design and art books I think there's a store at the Grove and you know they're available on Amazon and just a really kind of a you know I just picked this up and I always look through it and whenever I feel uninspired it usually kicks me into gear so here is the mech that I did when I started to think about Gestalt so one of the things that's nice about ZBrush here's a nifty trick for you if you go to the material over to the left you click and drag out it changes it to a a flat shader right so you don't have to go click here and click on flat shader if you just click on here and drag out it becomes a flat shader I've got all these parts are you vide by the way that's how bad I am I guess I have to have everything UV because I have to paint everything meticulously and this was something I was using quick slot to time I wanted to load this into quick soul so I had to give you all the different parts but let me go ahead and clear the texture that's on here so you can see this better so I'm just going to go down the parts here and clear all the texture maps that are assigned and then you'll be able to see the silhouette so I figured if I'm making this Mac it needs to really stand out as a silhouette and so I always had that in mind I always want it to make sure that the gestalt on it worked right so here are all the parts and as I'm moving on you can see all the different parts and these are combined by the way because I'm a macro that I used to pose the Mac so it's not a static Mac that I can put it in in dynamic poses and if you were here before the presentation started you probably saw this Mac kind of doing different things and that's how I do it it's all done in ZBrush I didn't rig this one at all by the way all these screws you know isolate this thing see all these parts here all of them are you read every single one right I mean luckily some of them I can just copy and paste do these like these bolts and whatnot but yeah I just you read this whole thing just because I by the way but after I did this I knew how to slay out inside and out backwards and forwards so yeah I just basically this was my goal is to to make this mech and and this was for nothing but Mac too so I kind of always I work alone I don't really you know one of the good things I can show all my work I don't you know you can take pictures it's not like I work for a studio and they don't allow me to show it and so my work usually goes into books or goes into tutorials or or goes into me learning something new and and this is kind of that process so here's the Met kind of in repose and I'll go ahead and load another one here where it's been posed for nothing but Mack for which is coming out this Mac is going to be nothing but Mac for as well and it's going to be in there in a new pose so you can see it there and this would be a good time to ask a question to as this is loading all right so here's how it stands up and rotates so again I've got macros that I basically points to the subtool and then run a macro and it will rotate everything according to my initial rotation shape okay and something else I want to note here is that remember that thing I showed you with the holes in it that part with the holes earlier this one right this thing that's where it is right there right so that's when I learned how to do that and so again I put it in a my tutorial alright so any questions about the gargoyle mech before I move on yes got to yeah yeah I like Mex you know I'll get into why this and I also have a so after I finished writing poly sculpting I want to do a graphic novel I have a story in my head that I've had for a long time and I think the best way to do it is a graphic novel and if these guys the humanoids will do it it will be another dream come true so in the story these mechs are patrolling ashore and in my head I can see these things patrolling ashore and their ships that are coming towards the shore and there's a bunch of these just wailing these guns very loudly at these ships so in the story this is a part of a story so I thought I'd make an asset for the story I use it in nothing but Maxo again they're the multi-purpose that's what's beautiful about it and the other thing that's really great about ZBrush is I can make this into toon shader right I can choose cel shading and I can put this mech in the book I don't have to draw this mech meticulously in every frame I can have it like 10 15 different angles of it perfectly shaded perfectly perspective good shadow everything done for me in one shot and there are some artists that are making comic books with ZBrush that are phenomenal I had one more question yeah can you turn the mic up just to know the total poly count of the main the toe sure yeah um so again all these parts these are combined but all these parts you know if I go down in subdivision level I can change their level of detail right so all these parts start out as very simple forms that are bumped out but they're told poly count of this thing is about 25 million it looks oh no two million five no it's below sorry that one part is so it's about it looks like 36 million ZBrush eats it up I have had models that are in the hundreds of millions and ZBrush just works really great especially the 64-bit version is awesome and I'll show you that model - I think it's coming up next all right so we did the gargoyle Mac we have another question here yeah oh yes sure what do you what do you used to pose it was a russian transplant mustard I used to use Transpo I did that with transpose and now the gizmo is there and it is a dream come true the gizmo 3d especially the fact that you can move multiple subtools at once is is a really beautiful thing do you know what I'm talking about yeah yeah it's it's it's like it's it's a sing here wipes in syv got this Mac loaded here so if I choose the top part I'm just gonna not choose the legs here alright so these are all the leg parts bear with me I guess there was less to show them to hide I think I missed one somewhere no all right I think I've got one leg kind of not where it's supposed to be is that the case I just show this yes oh I've selected that that's why okay so I've got this part right here and I where did I unselect the guns I did we have to have the guns okay so this is all one part right and if I want to rotate this whole thing I just bring up two gizmo right and I want it to be usually I like placing the gizmo at the bottom of this so I just click there and I'm usually more precise to let me go to that tool I'm usually more precise I put it exactly at the center first so change this it's already he rotated and then I'll move the gizmo over to where I want it to be down here right so now if I rotate this it's just going to rotate that part okay but that's not what I want I want to rotate everything that's visible I just clicked this button and now I can rotate everything that's visible it's just the most beautiful thing ever I wish I had that when I did the posing in the first time but I had to write a macro to do it and that was not that Bob had bad add to code a little bit but every once in a while you know coding is fun all right any other questions one more two more okay what kind of previz are planning did you have to do to put all the parts together you know do you just build primitives in ZBrush and then so good question um so just like the primitives right so you take that and scale it up so I have a huge library that I built over time of just really simple parts right and now in ZBrush with this thing if I go to IMM and I'll just use this gun one I guess if you loaded a insert multi match brush they all show up here and you can just choose them right now I just have a library like that as an IMM I load that in and then I you reuse parts so if I have good primitives I can grow them into better pieces so I just have a big library of those and sometimes I sketch so I did have a sketch of this before I started and sometimes I just go into 3d and just do it in all 3d it depends sketching is a lot faster sometimes and sometimes it's not one more question I yes in the back oh hey thank you for setting the next part up right okay and that's storytelling InDesign okay and so all these things that I design I have a story for them I don't just kind of blindly make stuff so I either read a story like this guy I read a story and then I made his his face and some of the mechs they're in my stories and some of them are not so so basically you know this is storytelling in a very very simple way hero's journey if you haven't read it it's a great book if you haven't watched the videos they're great on YouTube basically this is every story you've seen and you can shout out any movie and I'll tell you that this is kind of what's behind it and if it's not then it's breaking this story mechanism but basically there's a protagonist or antagonist there's something that they want and there's something preventing them from getting it and the story is them getting that thing right so anyone to bring up anybody you wanna bring up a story a movie Lord of the Rings right so basically you know they want to just you know Frodo or you know Gandalf wants to destroy the ring right Gandalf's Frodo those guys are the protagonist they want to destroy the ring or the chasm is all the stuff between them and Mount Doom and that's a story and that's three movies worth and an amazing books worth right there it is and every single story Star Wars is is this story all of them kind of fall in this part so before you start you know put a story in your head what is going on here what is this used for what are the things that why is this you know peace here why is this gun here why is this leg this way so once you get all those things figured out then modeling your object becomes more feasible so here's the Goliath mech and for this I unfortunately have to jump into Maya I don't say unfortunately actually era when you do that one of our livestream viewers is asking I've lost the question I've lost the question how do you scale right when you're exporting from ZBrush into max or Maya so how do you ah good so one of the giveaways again like these questions are just sending things up one of the giveaways that I have that you can go get from my website for people that are watching this is a scale file and I will show you that when I jump into ZBrush in a few minutes but let me go start loading this file because it's going to take a few minutes to load ok so this is the Goliath Mac this is the first one I did it took me a long time took me about three months to do the gargoyle mech took me about a month the Mantis which I will show you in a few minutes and key shot took me a lot less time so again you get faster as you do these projects so here is the gargoyle Mac and I don't know let me just go to my classic here okay so here is the gargoyle mech and this I actually modeled this thing in Maya initially and then I loaded into ZBrush ZBrush was just coming out with panel loops so I used panel loops for it and was beautiful but here's the thing and I'm by the way work very organized that's another tip name everything group everything layer everything and so I said this is a mech right so then I was like well what does this make do right it just goes out and destroys stuff so what does it need to have a lot of guns I put a lot of guns on it and then how does it get to where it needs to go well how do Mexico - where they need to go in a lot of movies that get dropped off form a big you know carrier shape or whatever but I thought you know this makes should have its own they so I made this peel of drum for it right so here's the helo drone the co-ed drone comes in and snaps to the back of that Mac just like a 8-track cartridge if anybody remembers what those are right just comes into the back snaps into it and then lifts it up so then I had to make a little animation of how what happens to these legs it's not going to fly around like this right so I made an animation of how these legs would fold up right and so this is what it would happen and this in first I had propellers on it and then I'm like that's not futuristic enough by that point you know they'll take the Dyson fan and make a a flying drone out of it so this thing will fly it out and then land it right so it lands drops it off and then the drone would detach and go off and be a high in the sky for it right and then come pick it up and take it back to its carrier or whatever so again a lot of these things in design really make a big difference is if you really start thinking about a story and again this mech is from the story that I'm putting together and I probably will have to go back to it and revisit it and and modify a few things in it because my story's changed a little bit but again it's kind of a real nice way to approach your subject matter is if you always think of storytelling as the primary objective and that's something that's really missing right now there's a lot of you know like you watch transformers and you have no idea what's going on with those robots I mean they're they're beautifully designed and some of my friends did some of them but I don't know how those parts could move I don't know how they wouldn't clash into each other like nobody does any studies they if they move fast enough your your suspension of disbelief kicks in and I guess that it works so I'm always think of a good way to when you're doing your your mechs or your whatever your modeling always think up a story for your character and then once you think up that story it makes it a lot easier to create the character alright so let's go on to the Mantis Mac this is the latest one I did which was on the brochure and I have it loaded up here in keyshot so a lot of times you see something it looks really needs and as a model but you never get to see this right so now I can rotate and move around this thing and notice again here that I just have a few items that I have here these basically I got from quick silmido scans there photogrammetry rocks and the scale of these things is pretty small but apparently if you take rocks and make them big big rocks look like small rocks right so all of a sudden it's my Martian train and the purpose of this mech here and I don't know maybe I should I have a beefier machine at home so it usually eats this thing up a little bit faster but let me go ahead and go into the rendering here change it to basic you know performance mode I think and then I can just Mesa Kaleem ou've around and again this is a mech that I designed thinking that we're gonna go in explore space right we're gonna go explore space yes and we're going to go on mind space because you know we are going to run out of resources on earth at some point so we're in space mining resources if a place we are gonna mined for resources does not have an atmosphere it has a lot of craters and if it has a lot of craters that means that a lot of asteroids are coming in to crater those craters right so we'll need some mechs over there to kind of protect our mining and scientific people while they are mining for their for their ore so I basically created this mech and it's going to be a tall mech because it has to manage a unpaved terrain it's got to have elastic legs and then once it kind of sets itself where it wants to be it opens the legs up and then starts shooting those asteroids down again if I didn't have that story in mind this design would not have made sense but now that I have that story in mind this design does make sense and it helps me the other thing also is it's got to figure out where meteors are so it's got to have a nice antenna it's got to have some really cool antenna technology this rhinoceros thing looked really cool so I stuck with it it's got to have a lot of bullets it's got to have some missiles and also it's got to have a really interesting way to walk so if you look at the joints here it actually looks like it could work I mean I'm sure you know somebody somewhere who's designing a mech maybe the people are designing Vitelli mekin Korea will come and say this could never work but you know for all we know it could right I've got two ball joints here we got one ball joint on our hips why not have two and then this thing could run around and shoot meteors down and again I love a key shot because once I rendering key shot it's like I'm photographing my subject so I can position them any way I want and I can shoot like a whole bunch of pictures of the subject and performance mode I can even on this machine which has about I think it's got about how many processors doesn't have it's got quite a few so it's got four by four it's got 16 processors or 16 threads running at the same time it's got 27 Meg's a ram it's actually a really nice way of doing this and once I'm happy with it I can go to basic or product and get a better render of that one of the things that Keisha did not have was atmospheric perspective but with key shot 7 they have a new material now which is milky Pratt plastic that you can get atmospheric perspective and here I was cheating it by a method ed Joseph dress told me about which basically is putting in a plane and using x-ray material and as you turned around it kind of creates a wave atmospheric perspective for you ok so again you can look at this Mac from different angles and then I'll go ahead and load this up in ZBrush as well and again if you have questions please ask wow this is loading up do you guys want to see to it with closed legs or open legs closed okay all right so questions yeah we're there we've got a question we're on the right side I think what's that question oh sorry till we find okay so I used to start with Maya but now I started in ZBrush I you know honestly if I what's that what makes you decide that I can do everything in ZBrush now most everything I can do in ZBrush every once in a while I might need to shoot a part over to Maya to do some of the topological tweaks I can't do in ZBrush yet but i you know beta this mech was 100% done in ZBrush and it was done during the beta and so I mean if I go to if I work at a company where they don't have my brush then I'll do it in Maya but if they do have ZBrush I prefer to work in ZBrush I'm a lot faster and ZBrush is great for concepting you can get up to millions of polygons really quickly and there's one button that you hit and it's in key shot so it's basically heaven for me especially new for r8 is really really neat so here's the Mantis Mac this is not as poly heavy so this is about well I guess I didn't include some other parts in here so this is it about it looks like 117 million Polly's on total and you can see I can move it around really fast and here's the scale thing okay so you see this guy over here right so I've got a guy standing on top I have one standing down below and I actually make the pilots too so you know this could be a pilot a thing a drone piloted thing or it could also actually have a couple of pilots so here are the pilots and what they look like inside the Mac right so I kind of make room for them again with the story so it makes sense so this is how they would sit this is the hatch that they would climb out of and climb into and since there's no gravity they probably use little jet packs to get to those areas and the thing I have for you is this file that you can download again it's I was going to do a gum road for it but I think I just have it on my website so all you have to do is just go in and and get it it's a folder called scale and then scale there's a one centimeter cube and one foot cube a one inch cube and there's also people like there's a five foot guy a six foot guy these are very low geometry so you can bring it in very easily into your seed and then start out that way so the first thing I do is I bring in a person right and I have get establish scale and then I start building on top of it so I think that's kind of the end of my presentation I wanted to do a little bit of poly sculpting but it we're kind of at time what I will do is see if I can either come back and do another talk where I can do a live kind of start to finish of a mech I participate in the ZBrush sculpt off so I should be able to crank something out in three hours or I could maybe do a live stream I don't know but hopefully this kind of gives you some ideas of how to work better and more efficiently and hopefully you got some good ideas to go back to your studio your home your job and create some new art so I'll take two more questions and then we'll open it up for Steve any last questions yep [Music] so question is where do I go for realistic reference right so I you know collecting reference is something I do you know I think a little bit too much I think I've got a problem of collecting records but more so to find out how things function there's this and I'll you know and I'll have a link dump and my website at blog post and I'll post a link to it there's a fellow that just has mechanical parts and how they work hundreds of them and he's got the parts as a PDF and then you can click on the part and then goes to YouTube movie and shows you that part in a CAD program and how it functions so I look at that I also look at human beings I look at different machines there's something to be said about taking things apart so if you have a computer that breaks or a vacuum cleaner that breaks or something that breaks take it apart and you can learn how it's made and that kind of can tell you how mechanical things work go to a mechanic shop and walk around a car you know and see what it looks like kind of bare bones and watch videos on YouTube on our things so and it's fascinating I mean again I have a problem I watch those things all the time and so that's why all my Macs and and things that I make look like they they could function I think we had one more question yeah in the back room oh yeah yeah I actually teach it I'm sorry go ahead okay so the question is you know if I work in ZBrush and I work in high poly right how do I take those and put them into a game engine okay a very very good question and again the way I work I usually start out with these parts as being very low poly so I've got levels of detail between very low poly to you know a million polygons and so I've got all those levels of detail I can go all the way down to the the lowest one that that game engine can handle and I generate normal Maps and then I just exported out and imported into unreal and and they look really really good I mean all the games that you see now that's what they do they basically have they decimate it down or they reach apologize it to lower levels and then they basically project a higher level on top generate normal Maps and then load those into the game engines and that gives you the surface detail and then you paint it in substance painter and that gives you that realism so if you start out with good topology that's free that's given to you already and then you just kind of crank it down generate the and I can show you that in ZBrush here too is that when you go to multi map exporter here sorry plug-in if you go to multi map exporter here you can choose for your if you choose export mesh you can go into the mesh options which is here and you can choose what level of detail you want to start from you can start all the way down from one all the way to where you know you feel the game engine can't handle it you don't see the faceting and then you can just basically generate that normal map between that and the poor's I guess or the tertiary detail and then it'll look like that in the game engine okay with that thank you very much for your time and I guess we'll open it up for Steve thank you [Applause]

Channel: Gnomon

Views: 21,956

Rating: 4.9475985 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush, pixologic, ara kermanikian, sci-fi, futuristic, digital sculpting, sculpting, workflow, 3d, tips, tricks, hollywood, gnomon, gnomon school, polysculpting, modeling, design, hard-surface, workshop

Id: VfIv723MiIc

Length: 59min 35sec (3575 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2017