ZBrush Sculpting Workshop Part Three: Eric Keller

hey I'm Eric and I've been in jury duty for the past two weeks so I've been listening to people talk about stuff I really don't care about so I haven't been able to sculpt so I'm gonna do a lot of sculpting today and probably not as much talking I'm just gonna kind of goof around and wing it and you know everything that you know Aurra was talking about and Steve been talking about it is very important but I'm also good there's nothing wrong with going on the opposite end of the spectrum and by that what I mean by that is sometimes just sculpt some stuff and don't worry about what it is and don't even think about what it is and just see where it takes you I think it's important it's a yin yang thing I'm gonna sound very Californian here but it's the yin yang thing where you've got to kind of start to turn off that technical side of your brain and just see what ZBrush can do and I was I'm not a particularly good musician but I was trained as a musician so that's kind of how I think and sometimes when I'm working with ZBrush I like to think about it if you're practicing like you know licks on the guitar or something like that sometimes you just got to sit there and just pound out some goofy blues licks a thousand times so that on the off-chance you actually are playing with a bunch of people or something like that you don't have to think about every single thing you're doing you build up some muscle memory so one of the things that I've been doing lately especially so I teach the digital creature sculpting class here at nomen on Sunday nights it's a fun class but what I started doing with the class is the first 30 minutes of class I have everyone just load up like a poly sphere or a dynasts we dynamesh or something like that and for 30 minutes just hammer away at it without any idea of anything in particular that they want to create in fact is you kind of want to every time you start to see yourself or think of yourself as trying to make something push that thought out of your head and just mess around with it there the reason this is very useful is it's because it's like hammering out those blues licks or those jazz licks or whatever else on the guitar you're building up kind of a muscle memory so that when you are in a situation where you have to sculpt something quickly like in a studio or something like that you already have kind of a catalog of things in your brain that you can work with so that's kind of what I'm gonna do and I'm just gonna kind of do the typical thing that I do which is I usually start with maybe a sphere or something like that and I like dynamesh a lot I tend to these days at 10:00 my work flow is kind of the opposite I start with the forms in a very sloppy rough method and if they turn into something that's worthwhile or even if I'm trying to do something like an insect anatomy or a spider or something like that I'll do it all is one big kind of blob and I'll worry about the topology later and personally I I will use dynamesh for some things and then a lot of times I'll take stuff into Maya and actually do a reit apology using the modeling toolkit but you know there's some cool stuff that you can discover and I'm actually I'm gonna do i'm going to just drive our crazy let's start with this poly sphere or this horrible horrible pole on there and let's do things that are wrong and just see what happens because you can start to discover some coolest things so I'm just going into the initialize this is still a parametric 3d object and I'm just gonna pick kind of maybe like a low polygon count here maybe something like 20 by 36 I don't know something like that's cool and then I'm just gonna hit you know make polymesh so now it's a polymesh3d and then what I'm gonna do is let's let's fool around with this let's go into dynamesh and let's see how 128 looks so I'm gonna undo that maybe get it up to baby let's try 256 so I'm gonna hit 256 you notice that you know I've got actually a fair amount of geometry here but you know I've also got kind of this faceting that's come through from the original low poly model and there's like some really cool accidental stuff that you can do with this I'm always a big fan of like you know happy accidents like like you know Neville page likes to do and all that kind of stuff so I'm just going to some get some symmetry going here because we all love bilateral symmetry that's that's where we came from it's been a big hit for most life-forms since the Precambrian very very successful we don't need those people with the radial symmetry every here's an interesting thing so basically what's have if you've ever happened for those of you who are new to ZBrush if you ever have something like this happen like I'm holding the shift key to try and smooth it but what it's actually doing is doing the opposite of smoothing let's see if I can get this to work here yeah it looks like there we go it's still annoying yeah for somebody there's a weird bug where everyone smile the Z the smooth brush does the opposite of what it's supposed to do so I just had to turn it on to Z sub to get it to actually smooth when you see it doing like you know this kind of thing is actually doing the opposite of smoothing which is sharpening which is really strange but it's just a weird little bug but let's just you know let's just play with some stuff get out my favorite brush which is the Damien standard brush and make sure that my s still got my symmetry here and I'm just gonna start by you know doing some weird stuff here and getting some marks onto the page sort of the Jackson Pollock style of sculpting I don't know what that means so I've kind of been the one thing I need to warn you guys about is that when you're working with symmetry and in ZBrush the accidentally making pornographic images is really easy so I'm not doing anything intentionally I apologize ahead of time so if you see something horrible will start to emerge on my sphere just hide your children or something I don't know but there's some there's some you know really interesting things you can do when you're just fooling around I'm kind of like you guys for those shouldn't who know me probably know him a huge biology nerd I love insects particularly and that's something that I've been focusing on I actually when I first got into doing CGI I was doing it professionally for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute which is actually a real place started by Howard Hughes and and and I did a lot of biology animations for them and so that's kind of why I'm such a big science nerd that's why I got into it but so I really got into doing insects for a long time and that's something I still love doing spiders and all that kind of stuff I want to lower my Z intensity here there we go pressures acting kind of funky what I can do I'm gonna try this going to brushes where you set all brushes hope I know what I'm doing I swear I'm gonna restart ZBrush it's for some reason it's an opposite mode so okay what was that rambling about yeah so but recently I've been rediscovered of a love of good old Geiger you guys know him as the crazy guy who did all the alien stuff I actually got into Geiger when I was way too young for it back when the original alien came out and I don't profess to be any kind of expert on his stuff but but I've kind of been enjoying getting back into his stuff recently so this is a piece that I started working on last weekend just kind of like this crazy sort of I guess I'm also a big Trekkie so this started out is that kind of an homage to Geiger and now it's turned into kind of like a Borg Queen Geiger style in a way so I do want to kind of talk about some of the things the techniques that I used for making this and let's go into preferences initialize whoops config there we go and let's just go back into dynamesh my basic material yes I'm sorry what I have to tell a story thank you I so I taught ZBrush here for eight years so I appreciate that yeah so one of the things that I like to do when I'm working in dynamesh here or whatever is I like to get some of this faceting and kind of start to play with it a little bit so I'm gonna up that resolution here and 256 and so this kind of like cool kind of grid work is something you can actually turn into a detail so what I'm gonna do is I'm just kind of making some little blob O's here and then I'm gonna go into geometry clay polish and I'm gonna hit the clay polish button and the cool thing about the clay polish button is it does clean up the side geometry and smooth things out really quickly but it also if you can see it leaves this very thin mask here on the edges you can control the amount of masking if you want but I'm just gonna leave it at the default and then I'm just gonna do ctrl I to invert it and then ctrl H to hide the mask so then what I can do is I can come in here and start to use this kind of grid work pattern is kind of like a cool you know mesh like cyber or whatever detail and I do this a lot I probably do it too much it's one of those tricks that I like to throw out whenever I I'm kind of looking for some cool ideas and so I'm just kind of messing with this kind of thing and I'm gonna clear the mask and let's get the Damien standard brush again and there's another there's some other cool things you can do with the brushes that are just kind of fun to play with one of them especially with the Damien standard brush it's it's such a it's such a wonderful all-purpose brush but it's great for creating straight lines and that kind of stuff well one trick you can do is you can go into the brush palette and under orientation turn up the spin rate a little bit and then the spin the center what that does is it's gonna spin the Alpha around while you draw but it's also the spin center is gonna offset it so what you do is you if you play with this you can get turn of the spin rate a little bit you can get this kind of like wob leanness and you can even make it look kind of like curly Q's there we go it's a little extreme but you can get some kind of cool details here and this is also cool for doing like a kind of like a modeled kind of zombie skin kind of thing as you overlap the strokes you can get some really interesting details in here a little bit so it's just a little bit more subtle so if we're doing organic stuff you can get some really interesting effects that way and again so what sometimes I'll just bash out some of these wild details and it looks like garbage but that's okay since I'm an organic model or I can afford to be nice and sloppy and then maybe I'll hit it with that clay polish again invert that mask hit ctrl H and the other brush that I like to use a lot is the form soft brush it's kind of like a kinder gentler version of the inflate brush and you can get some of these really cool details that look like random you know markings at first can start to look like some really interesting kind of biological kind of surfaces so I'm just inflating it out and then hitting up the smooth brush right afterwards to get this kind of nice kind of look to it maybe I'll do that for a little bit control dried to clear the mask go up to dynamesh let's we're at one hundred and eighty five thousand that's nothing so let's go to five hundred and twelve and the dynamesh resolution we die in a minute so now we're up to like nine hundred thousand that's still not much better good enough another another brush that I like to use that I've been playing with is I love the spiral brush you know it has this effect of I usually turn the Z intensity down because it is kind of an intense brush but you know it twists the mesh around yeah that's pretty cool you get kind of this baroque kind of quality to it but if you start to mess with it like maybe throw on and alpha even it's just a simple alpha like the circle and maybe like a spray his brush stroke you can get this and the intensity here this is great especially if you're doing some kind of like weird zombie skin thing or you're just messing around so the cool thing about the spiral brush is the more you draw the more it kind of Wiggles around so you get this kind of really wild psychedelic zombie kind of thing going and it's fun to play with different alphas and see what you get out of it so again okay so I've got this is spherical mess here that's cool let's play with a little bit of the cliprect brush so I'm just gonna clip off the sides here and maybe read dynamesh and then the next thing that I'll usually do and so usually in the in the mornings when I get an opportunity I will do this exercise well I'll just set my clock for thirty minutes and I will do this for thirty minutes put on some groovy music or whatever and this is the same thing I have my class do so the first 30 minutes of class we basically everybody assists there and I silently sculpt for thirty minutes the goal is not to make anything it's not to make a face it's not even to worry about whether you're not you what you're making is good or bad or what the person next to you is doing or what somebody who you saw online the more you can push out of your mind that whole idea of trying to be good or bad or great or whatever the more you can discover it's it's a I'm gonna start sounding like Yoda here in a second but you have gotta unlearn what you learned you know you got to like take some time to just screw around and not worry about sucking because it's that whole ego thing that that starts to mess with our heads and we once we start getting caught up and what we're trying to do you realize that all of our artwork might be good but it starts to all look the same after a while so you got to stop trying stuff and just start doing stuff yeah I know I sound like Yoda whatever so you know okay so alright what's the big deal we got this kind of thing here another way you can improvise is I'm going to just append a sphere here and let's scale it down and so this is a this is another way you can use the live boolean is you can actually use it as a where's the labelling them is down here isn't it said it again it's under render yeah that's weird yeah so if I put a boolean here and then maybe take the move brush and I'm gonna turn on symmetry for this model as well you can start to kind of use this so I'm actually I'm editing this sphere right here but since I have it on a negative boolean I'm kind of improvising another way of creating this this shape you know playing around with sculpting the interior shape that is the subtractor rather than the positive mesh and doing this you can start to get some really cool ideas going all right and then when you're happy with it you can go down and say make boolean mesh and I'm not even going to worry too much about the geometry in this boolean mesh let's just go back and make sure that I'm gonna make sure that dynamesh is on let's actually set this to 512 well so when that happens is basically it's having a hard time solving the boolean mesh so I'm gonna undo this a few things you can try doing it you can try lowering the resolution of the of the dynamesh and then read ina meshing or sometimes you can go in and just see if you have some geometry that's kind of gotten crinkly and folded on itself and if that happens you can just try and smooth it out and then read ina mesh that usually fixes the problem but if I do something like this then let's just play with a little bit more and then the next thing I usually like to do and I'm improvising is get into the array mesh settings because that's when you get some really cool stuff going all right so it looks like some kind of bizarro waffle cone or something like that so I'm going to go into a ray mesh and just turn on a ray mesh and maybe sit at something like five I like odd numbers and then maybe do the like Y offset right here you know and it's like some of what I like to do you know I think that Geiger was probably the first ZBrush artist before there was ZBrush but a lot of these sort of repeating forms especially in these rib cages and this kind of stuff this is where like the array mesh you really start to get some of these ideas going when you're playing with it like this kind of stuff so the idea for those of you who have who haven't used arraignment rolls right here determine how its making these copies at the moment these copies are instances so it's not actually geometry but you can sit here and just play with this stuff and I try not to go too crazy because I am going to convert it into a mesh and then we'll get kind of heavy so and you can you can actually layer and make multiple layers of array mash but I'm improvising I just kind of want to keep it simple and just explore some forms so if I change the for the mode here to scale then I have my controls for X Y & Z the amount of scaling and then what's really cool is of course underneath underneath the amount sliders I also have these graphs that I can use to kind of change the way it's scaled right so if I look at the profile here and as you can see if I increase the number of repeats you can see that we're already starting to get something really guy Girish that's a new word I guess just a little bit so I'm playing with scale and offset we also have rotate which is a lot of fun to play with we want to get some kind of cool spiral motion going and then of course we also have the pivot so we can kind of adjust the pivot there's also if you go into lightbox there's a lot of presets that you can use under array but for me if I'm just fooling around I just want to turn off the brain and and just see what I come up with so let's set this down to maybe I don't know 6 or something like that and then I'm gonna go down here and turn on make mesh I'm going to turn off extrude this is the point this can be a little nerve-wracking because it's you can make a really heavy mesh it takes a while and it will sometimes crash so that's why you don't want to be too attached to what you're making that's the other advantage to improv on improvisation if things crash and go away you just sort of accept it and move on so I got this kind of cool little shape here that might be some kind of cool detail I can go into geometry and under modify topology it's fun to play with mirror and weld if I hit mirror and weld this is currently set to X so it's mirroring across the x axis which isn't really doing a whole lot for us because it's mirroring from this axis over to here right so it's going from this side to this side which means if I do a mirror on the x axis mirroring nothing over to this side so I want a mirror this side over this side so one thing you can do is go under deformation and if I hit mirror that will just flip it over go back to here and weld there we go so now you can see we're getting something that's kind of cool it's five million polygons which is not too bad but if I'm fooling around I don't want to worry too much about things getting too heavy so I might go down to dynamesh and say let's lower this to I don't know 128 sure let's do 256 control drag to read dynamesh hope it doesn't freak out didn't freak out yeah that's cool you guys feel free to ask me questions if you want to I'm just making stuff up as I go along and you can shout stuff out because I'm looking at the screen I can't see a variant so I'm gonna do the clay polish again invert that word that control H hides the mask I like to hide the mask when I'm working just so I can concentrate on the forms so this is the kind of cool little stuff that you can get going here you know it's just like laying down paint on the canvas so I'm just going to do this a bit and like this kind of branching stuff is really cool and then I'm going to clear the mask get the old Damien standard brush again and set this down turn on lazy Mouse and just start to kind of play with this and so what I do is like you know I just kind of sometimes if these things are good I'll save them sometimes you know just if they're not I won't but I've kind of amassed a little bit of a library on my harddrive of these types of things and brought I just kind of grabbed some at random from home but I have a few dozen so I have z.z tools here so I usually call them something ridiculous I like Gorbachev I thought that was a cool name I don't know what it means but so some of these things are more detailed some of them are less detailed if I have bubble guts I don't know what that is but it sounds hysterical okay so so checking out my time here so I want to show another thing that you can use which is some of the techniques I used on this one which is kind of building on the same idea again it's just all about improvisation and what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about multi alpha brushes so that's a new feature in ZBrush for our eight it's one of my favorite features I've just started getting into it so this is another great warm-up exercise that you can do so I'm just using the plain 3d here just a primitive and under initialize I don't know I'm gonna set this to like a hundred by a hundred and then do make polymesh and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make a multi alpha brush and this uses vector displacement maps so that I can take the detail that I sculpt into this plane and turn it into an alpha but a really cool alpha that includes things like undercuts so a lot of these repeated structures here these kind of random things are all made with this special type of alpha and they're kind of similar to using like an insert mesh brush in that you can make one brush that has a whole bunch of them and then just load that brush up whenever you need it so I have this it's a 10,000 points right now I'm gonna turn off smooth and hit divide a few times so that guess there's a couple rules I'm just starting to learn this technique so hopefully I'm correct in this but essentially the main rule that you have to follow is that the geometry use has to have it has to be a flat plane and it has to have the polygons laid out as a grid so in other words I don't want to dynamesh this I'm gonna keep it just as a grid but I'm going to subdivide it so that the highest subdivision level it's like two million polygons or something like that which should be sufficient and then let's have some fun with some symmetry maybe radial symmetry I'll set this to something like five or something like that and again just start to kind of play with some ideas here so give me a standard brush I'm just gonna start to pull out this kind of thing and again I always like to use the clay polish it's my latest addiction just because you can get these kind of cool bubbly kind of weirdness you know this kind of weird gritty detail there's a lot of fun you know and some of this kind of cool grid stuff you know that looks like an artifact it is an artifact but it's a cool artifact I kind of like it so I kind of keep it so you know I might spend ten minutes on one of these mites been an hour or whatever it seems to make the most sense I'm gonna clear that mask of course the more you pull this out the more of a form that you create the more interesting your alpha is going to be especially if you have things that have kind of undercuts in other words true three-dimensional geometry and like nooks and crannies and that kind of stuff it's the English muffin approach I guess I don't know be like these things Oh like this stuff oh these things yeah I mean I don't know no basically a lot of it is just kind of like going in here and you know hitting it with like Damien standard brush and this kind of stuff right which I've done before obviously and then as you do that that kind of clay polish thing it cleans it up it leaves that sort of hairline mask so I'm going to invert that mask hide the mask you could also you know if you want a more straightforward approach might be just use mask by cavity or mask by smoothness or the other types of mass but basically that mask is still there and I'm just using the inflate brush to inflate it and then hitting it with a smooth brush so it's just kind of like inflate and smooth inflate and smooth over and over again and sometimes these little teeny weeny you know barely visible artifacts as you inflate them with that mask on there are going to start to produce that kind of overlap that you get these kind of cool you know kind of organic folds in the surface and usually I haven't you know if I was going to turn this into like a displacement map or something like that to render in another piece of software that would probably be a problem but since I'm going to convert this into an alpha matte a an alpha I haven't noticed that that kind of kind of overlapping fold has become a problem and you'll see when I actually converted into an alpha I haven't noticed that yet it might be just that I've been lucky that I haven't seen it but for the most part that's does that answer your question okay cool so you know when you get when you start to abuse a technique too much it starts to become a cliche in your own work and and and you start to run out you get stale on it so in addition to the clay polish sometimes it's cool to go down here and experiment with like masking by smoothness or that kind of stuff just so you get like a different type of mask and a different type of detail looks like this little itty-bitty mini corn things so that's something that's kind of cool to play with and what I'll do is I'm going to take this sub tool and duplicate it so I have this one right here and I have this one I still have to say construction history so this very Maya I still have the tool history on here so I might go back a bit I could leave and go back all the way and just make another one you know and just keep doing this kind of thing and build up a tool that has a whole bunch of different brushes so and I'll usually save this out as a tool right so in other words I have a few right here that I've made before again this is just yeah so if I turn on the solo button you can see that you know after just playing around for like an hour or so you can get some of these really cool designs here and then what you can do is to make this into an actual alpha brush you just go up to the alpha the as from what I've seen I believe this is the correct way to do it but again I'm kind of new to this technique I'm just gonna load in the chisel 3d brush right here which is kind of the premade alpha brush and when that's loaded I'm gonna go brush create create multi alpha brush then take a few seconds by the way our I apologize for being snippy with you it's it's the jury duty man it's been getting to me can't these people solve their own problems anyways so you can see now I have this multi alpha brush and I can choose between the different alphas here all right so again now I have another tool for basically doing improvisation so if I go into let's just get another sphere going here drive our crazy with the sphere with the pole and then I'm gonna go down here to geometry and let's just say let's do make polymesh blah blah blah and then dynamesh 512 and now I could just drag these out and I get you know okay it does look kind of like cyber boobs but you know it's Geiger man what do you want yeah I was a weirdo and if I hold the Alt key they can you know do this kind of stuff so you could just go to town with this kind of stuff so you know you build up these libraries and then making a composition you know something like the one that I had before this thing is pretty straightforward because I could just sit there and play around with you know get my geometry place it place the head in there and then start kid bashing basically with all these different alpha so I'm doing kid bashing not only with geometry but also with some of the Alpha bosses that I've that I've used this by the way is rendered in in in octane I currently work for the people who make octane so I gotta plug them so Oh Tony makes octane it's my current favorite renderer although I use all different types of renders and there I like to experiment with different ones but I find the octane if you get enough graphic card it's as nice and fast and it's great for it's great for basically look development because since it's a you know it's GPU based it's very fast and it starts to resolve very quickly and while you're working they all kind of do in different ways I think the nice thing and and Steve said this before there's so many different renders to choose from that you can almost find a different renderer for your various different moods when you're working which i think is kind of cool the other thing that I wanted to kind of talk about in terms of new features of that things kind of cool so you can see this is where I kind of went went to town with this kind of waffle effect by taking advantage of the faceting and the geometry masking it and then hitting it with inflate brush to get this kind of wild the kind of stuff and when you render this kind of thing it looks really nice when it picks up the light but another feature that I've been playing with a lot that I really like in zbrush for our eighth let's see if I can use the old gear this is the gear primitive so I'm just going to go down to initialize and just play with it real quick it'll just create some kind of cool a mechanical looking deal is that a question is there a third-party program to do what I haven't tried that yet but what I suspect since from what I understand of the way that the brush works when you convert it into the geometry into the brush it has to be that flat plane right so let's say you had a three-dimensional object that you really liked I haven't tried this but I've thought about it what you could do is you could bring in that flat plane bring in your 3d object you know import it into ZBrush as a sub tool and then use maybe use like projection to sort of wrap the plane around the parts of the geometry that you like then convert that into a brush that might be overthinking it but that should work but yeah I haven't I haven't tried doing doing the technique that you're you're thinking of and I have to I have to talk to Paul and see what are the limitations in terms of converting the geometry into the brush and see if there's some wiggle room on that but that's that's the way that I would try doing it it's I believe it's creating some type of vector alpha but it's a little bit beyond my understanding in terms of the technical aspects of it but I'm just gonna make okay let's say it creates some some kind of piece of geometry like this and then you know what I'll usually do is again I'm gonna use the array mesh but sometimes what I'll do if I know if I'm going to make a whole lot of these using the array mesh is I'll take the zmodeler and just really quickly go in here and maybe delete some of the unnecessary edges I'm sure there's other fast ways to do this but I'm just gonna go into I've got the zmodeler brush I'm gonna go to the edge actions hit delete and do edge loop complete and just go in here and just delete a few edges just so did get the polygon count down to something that so I'm not wasting geometry because if i duplicate this a lot I don't need to add you know more thousands of polygons that aren't really being used for anything all right so I'll probably go do with something like that and just bring it down maybe some of the other stuff in the interior but you get the idea so what I'll do now is I'm gonna make this just a little bit thicker and then I'll go into geometry or a mesh and hit array mesh and this time I'm gonna hit I'm just gonna do this really simply do an offset along the y-axis and okay maybe not the y-axis let's do yeah I have this aligned or on this axis so let's bring this down to something like that let's scale it it's kind of like it's using the Z profile but I think that's kind of cool I don't know like I said I'm fooling around here so let's say I get something like that I could even have some fun and do a spiral or something really what I'm trying to do is I just want to get some kind of sort of mechanical repeating action here and then I'm gonna turn off extrude and hit make mesh and then what I'm going to do for creating things like these guys right here you know I spent some time okay so it's been some time modeling kind of like an interesting shape here then I used a ray mesh to kind of duplicate these over and over and then when I went to placing these the same width right here you know I've done it before where I've actually just converted a single piece of geometry into an insert mesh brush and then turn that into a curved brush but if you guys have played with the curved brush you know sometimes it's a little bit frustrating to use so a new technique that gives a little bit more fun is to use one of the deformers and I'm a big fan of the deformers I like the Bend curve a lot the basically the way this works is I'm going to use a curve to actually twist and Bend this thing so you have to sort of understand and play with these settings a little bit to figure out what's going on the first thing I want to do is right now the curve is going across this axis right here which is the x-axis I want it to go along the z-axis so this little cone right here you can see has a little message there that's saying X 1 is X 2 is y and 3 is Z so right now it's in the 1 position if I pull it out you see it turns green that's the Y position I pull it out again that's the Z position so now I have 2 dots here and the next thing I want to do is maybe change the resolution of the curve so if I start to pull this up it adds more dots to the curve and now I can start to move these dots around and I could start to kind of play with bending it around my surface and we also have this little cone here that can control the smoothness we can actually I'm gonna leave symmetry off for the moment and also this type of we have then we can actually control the twisting around individual points so again this is just something that I've been starting to play with but you can see it's a lot easier to use than making an insert mesh brush and making that into a curve because it's also non-destructive too and it's very easy to reset or I can even change the resolution say while I'm working on it without changing the shape here so now I could add some more points or even reduce the points without changing the shape make it a little bit easier to use lower shapes so so that's kind of a cool technique you know by combining a ray mesh with primitives and the curve deform or you get some cool stuff going so let me see I'm going to load the the the girl here let's see what I usually do you know depending on how much time I have if I'm just sort of improvising an image or something like that that I want to do in a cool render what I might do is for this particular one and I just did this kind of like on Saturday afternoon so I had a base mesh of the the face which it made her smiling I went in here with one of my alphas I this is a part that I think I'm still working on because I think she came out a little bit the detail is too much so especially in the render it just kind of looks like noise so I probably go back and change some of this detail right here just to make it look a little bit more obvious that there's a pattern there if you look in the actual render you can see that I went a little bit too far with the texture here so now it looks like noise and I've lost all the cool kind of patterns to it so I'm just gonna go back and maybe touch that up a little bit and make it look a little bit more obvious as to what's going on and the sculpt especially in the neck it looks pretty good all right like I like this detail right here it's just basically I exported this brought it in to substance painter and then got a little carried away so really it's just a matter of going back and fixing the textures and making sure that they really emphasize the forms rather than just too much detail but basically just kind of a lot of the detail that was created on her head was using the alphas and just really kind of quickly sketching and doodling to come up with something that was kind of cool but you can also see the techniques that I used for these little to be things back here in the background in some cases like this is actually a curve a curved brush which worked okay so that this technique for these curves right here I created an insert mesh brush from a piece of geometry made that a curve and then laid that out and realized that that was no fun so I tried instead for the second larger curves back here I again created some geometry used the array mesh to make like a long column of it and then use that new curved áformer to kind of position it into space and and I found that what's much easier to use much easier to control than the curved brush so I kind of really like that and then you know some of the stuff of the background I kind of knew in the render I just wanted something to suggest detail in the background so this is just one of those weird goofy things that I improvised you know my little morning sketch routine it just kind of threw it in there and to see if it would work and it worked pretty well again I if I decide to redo the render where I could see more of her I might go back and touch it up but for the moment it's doing what it needs to do which is just providing background and then then for these little lamp things again it's the same technique I used the the curve the curve deform er to kind of this makes a little bit of geometry there and for the this thing right here originally I had just kind of like a nice disc to create the halo and to hold the light in here but it was looking a little bit boring so I created I select this I have this polygroups and I essentially created an insert mesh brush out of this weird little spiky de nipple thing and converted that into a nano mesh and then inserted use the nanomesh to insert kind of repeating form on on these polygons does that make sense or am I talking gibberish sometimes you get into ZBrush land say what both yeah well you can blame pixologic for that and sometimes I have a theory that they basically and I'm gonna get a lot of trouble for saying this that when they're coming up for the terminology and the newer versions of ZBrush they just have some like freaked out little kid that's on like way too many way too much caffeine somewhere in the basement they just opened our doors like what should we call this kids like guy to mash like re called dynamesh you know anyways a question okay go ahead and the Jews radial symmetry and while inserting those details on the hello dere user what radial symmetry for this one you know I tried that for about five minutes and then you know for the details on on the actual geometry itself yeah what I did is I made I took a really simple cylinder primitive and then converted it into a poly mesh and then when used I think for this one yeah I probably did use radial symmetry but you know the nice thing about using the zmodeler brush is if I have you know if I have these like if I have this as I'm going to set the this to polygroup as the action right and I'm going to actually turn off symmetry so I'm going to turn this to poly group is my face action and then I could do polygroup use poly loop as the actual how where it's going to perform the action and then I could set this to checker right and then as you can see as I'm hovering over the polygon you see that little orange line that's telling the direction of where it's going so if it's going this way and I click you can see now I have this poly group which is alternating yellow and green so now what I could do is I'll go back to cue mesh and say polygroup all and it's just gonna cue mash the green polygons house right so I just kind of created these kind of extrusions using that kind of technique and then what I did is you know and this is all kind of just making it up as I go along I created this very simple geometry here right converted it into an insert mesh brush by going to brush create insert mesh brush and then I converted that insert mesh brush into a nanomesh brush I got to find that eight year old kid that match create an animation brush made sure that I had a poly group on each of these faces I probably did something stupid like had to go in and polygroup each of those individually because I I was making up as I went along but then basically it did a nanomesh on that and I didn't even have to use radial symmetry so but you could do it with radial symmetry as well either way it works just fine but I just did that on this side and this side because I just really wanted something to you know catch the light in the render and make it look like there's some nice detail going on here again this is gonna make a work of progress so I'll probably go back and play with this a little bit more there's a certain point where you know you start to get too much detail and everything looks like noise and there's nothing for the eye to land on like this right here came out as a completely unintentional happy accident just in terms of the shader that I was using that and octane and how it interacted with this really simple geometry right here but it does kind of like it reminds me in the render a little bit of our friend the xenomorph maybe his head or something like that that kind of thing I might go back in there and start playing with the shaders and make it look a little bit more complex but if I know if I start to put too much detail in there it'll start to look less interesting I mean it's nice to have the contrast it's kind of smooth low detail with kind of jagged high high detail kind of alternating like that so we'll see for a lot of these like I spent a lot of time texturing her face and probably too much time texturing her neck but a lot of the other details you see here is just basically like procedural shaders using octane so I might go back and start to texture them a little bit depends on how how excited I am about you ving some of this crazy ass geometry I could say crazy ass right I was too late now cool any other any questions other questions yes the sweat was obnoxiously easy all I did was I painted little drippy masks on her face and I used a mesh extraction so that's very old-school ZBrush you know I think the mount yeah the mask is still on there so I just painted the mask on here went down here did an extraction solo did an extraction accepted it hit the hit it with a smooth brush once it was geometry you know converted it into geometry so this is what it looks like right here hit it with the smooth smooth brush exported it with it's horrible topology but I didn't really bother me that this is the topology looks like and then put it on her face in Maya and rendered with octane with Maya with just a specular specular material on it it's something that I'm probably doing too much but it works so I'm going to keep doing it it's kind of like depth of field like depth of field is one of the best ways to get a client to love whatever you're doing even if it's crappy because because people just love it you know it gives this mystical kind of quality to things this is my website by the way so my new thing is to abuse water drops as much as possible so for example I have this spider that I'm working on and when I first you know so this is an orb weaver spider by the way if you guys want to meet these guys in person the spider pavilion at the Natural History Museum is starts up in September and you can go in there they're like right there they're not behind anything man you could walk right into them but they're very friendly spiders they just they just look they just look evil but in any case so again I just put some like simple geometry on here through a specular material on octane and rendered it with some depth of field and it made an otherwise kind of like ho-hum render of a spider summly look kind of alive so it's a really cheap technique but it works like gangbusters because instead of just being a spider on a web now we kind of have a story we kind of know what time of day it is and that kind of thing and if the spider is thirsty or not I don't know did that's the story of the spider it's a thirsty spider but it's something that I've been doing lately and it works pretty well these are some of the vendors of some of the other like just experiments and sketches that I did in ZBrush just rendered really quickly an octane with different shaders on it just to kind of experiment with some of these ideas I usually if I'm feeling lazy I will do a which we call it a decimation master and I'll get it down the ZBrush I mean octane has a very high tolerance for for high polygons but still since I'm bringing into maíam I cut it down to like you know between a hundred and fifty thousand to a million polygons depending on what I'm rendering sometimes it does tend to soften the details a little bit too much octane does have really excellent displacement like micro displacement maps I just used that when I have time to actually do some UV so you know again it's like one of these things where we're in a really a great time to be a CG artist because it's so much easier to experiment and to not worry about failing as opposed to like when we were starting you know 10-15 years ago where you know you really had to make sure everything was solid before you could even bring it into your CG package and render it you didn't have as much freedom to bring in a two million two million polygons model hit render and just see what happens you know so that's kind of a nice thing about the way the technology is going these are some other renders that I've been doing recently that this is a little bit more more thought-out but still kind of fun of kind of combining my love for invertebrate zoology with sort of a Geiger kind of quality to it and again these are like all these models are something that I just kind of played with not not really with anything's particular in mind for about you know like 30 40 minutes or something like that so I consider it to be similar to you know sketchbook kind of thing you know what I mean so that's that and of course if you like bugs I have those too this is another earlier one that I did nice and juicy and then this is one there's a little bit more thought out where I was thinking this is something I actually did is it part of a demo for my creature class the assignment was to come up with a pair of alien creatures that had some kind of relationship with each other whether it's parasitic symbiotic sexual dimorphism or whatever so the the story behind this creature is this is actually this is very romantic actually this blue thing is the male and this pink thing is the female and they live in a stream and she uses her little hooks here her lovely little hooks to kind of grab on to twigs so as the water is rushing by let me see if we can get a good picture okay so she's hooked onto the twigs here and as the waters rushing by these little filtered things they pick up the particles of food and that's how she eats meanwhile the man of the house this thing is kind of clamped on to her belly and this thing is inserted inside her and delivers a package of little babies which turn into eggs and then she releases him in the stream just a goofy little concept for a lot of like demonstrating using sort of a biological principle as a story within within a creature kind of thing but again super fast kind of fun sculpting things without worrying too much about any particular direction that make sense cool [Music] Eric one of a live stream viewers would like to know if you ever used key shot surrender uh yeah I do I like key shot too I think some of these older ones are key shot this guy is sorry this is another there we go there's a key shot render of a wolf spider and her babies as I did for mother's day Noah came out pretty well I'm not totally happy with it I might III kind of like octane a little bit better but I also know octane really well so and also I since I'm a Maya artist I tend to like a lot of this is an octane render this is a just awful of Elana gaster it also it tends to render paint effects really well if it's like simple hair stuff and so I kind of like it a little bit better than ki shot the downside of using it is there's more the I can't just click a button and send it over to ki Shaw and have everything render with poly paint I do have to spend some time I'm really working on the textures the UVs and all that kind of stuff so it's not as instant as keyShot but I like the way that renders look a little bit better than Keisha but that might be an issue of me just not spending enough time in Keshawn but this is this is one that I that I like which is a Mexican honey wasp so that's octane render this by the way is an actual insect my friend Alex Wilde sent me some dead specimens of this thing this is the only other is the only wasp that actually makes honey the only other animal that makes honey that we know of is of course honey bees so it's kind of cool it's a cute little little critter so I thought that was really cool I don't I'm just going off on tangents now but is that answer your question yes thank you shots good I like key shot do you have any more last questions in the stage that's Jess no cool well thanks a lot for listening to me and let me ramble on aimlessly [Applause]

Channel: Gnomon

Views: 14,155

Rating: 4.9662919 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush, pixologic, sci-fi, futuristic, digital sculpting, sculpting, workflow, 3d, tips, tricks, Hollywood, gnomon, gnomon school, modeling, design, hard-surface, workshop, organic, giger, HR Giger, biomechanical, invertebrate, zoology, creature design

Id: AMBvp_I8ocQ

Length: 61min 30sec (3690 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2017