I’ve been a fan of Superman since the late 1950’s. I haven’t been following the books in recent years. Lately, however, I’ve been reading a lot of graphic novels carried by my local library. I grabbed a recent Superman graphic novel and discovered the blue underwear uniform has been changed.
I decided it would be fun to sculpt Kal-el in his new duds and try out some of the recent goodies added to ZBrush.
This sculpt started out using a DynaMesh sphere. Dynamesh really makes it easy to get gross mass blocked in. I’ve discovered staying under 500K polys is great for most of the structure without taxing my 2008 iMac. Initially this was the maximum size of the entire figure for all the DynaMesh work until I divided the figure into individual subtools for the head, hands, hair, costume, superman insignia, boots and belt.
I tried fibermesh for the hair but didn’t like the look of it. Sculpting a mesh extract was worse than result for fibermesh hair. I ended up using Zspheres because Zspheres allowed me to easily sculpt the hair mass and keep the poly count reasonably low - 200K or so.
The head is the highest poly count around 2 million polys. the entire figure is just a little above 3 million. I figured that hig a poly count wouldn’t put to much of a strain on my mac when I merged the subtools for posing. My iMac doesn’t like polycounts above 8 million for a single subtool.
The sculpt is still a WIP. I have more detail I want to add to the overall figure. I sketched up a dozen thumbnails of poses I plan to get to before I call this project done.
Overall Dynamesh has been a great and easy addition to use for getting mass worked up quickly. I love the way it reconfigures topology so that stretched areas are easy to sculpt. The additional resolution settings added in 4R4 make adding additional resolution, when needed a snap.
I love Lightcap. The recent changes to BPR rendering are great fun!
Happy ZBrushing
CHEERS!