Hi Everyone,
This is my first ever complete sculpt. I bought ZBrush a year ago, and I started with Madeleine Scott-Spencer’s Introduction to ZBrush 4R7 tutorial at Gnomon Workshop (excellent tutorial for beginners). Feeling overconfident, I jumped right into Maarten Verhoeven’s tutorial “Sculpting a Dragon with ZBrush” (LINK). This proved to be very challenging at my level of inexperience. So… I worked through the tutorial, on and off, for about 10 months - and the result is below. Although it is a tutorial, every brush stroke is my own - the tutorial included no ZBrush files.
I also rendered out a turntable here: VIMEO LINK
Going forward, I hope to be more dedicated to sculpting, and not get hung up on a single tutorial again for a year.
I guess since I went through the whole tutorial, I will give my review of Maarten Verhoeven’s Gnomon Workshop Tutorial “Sculpting a Dragon with ZBrush”. The tutorial takes you through all of the steps to making the dragon. I had two issues with the tutorial:
- Martin rarely speaks. I would have liked more commentary during the sculpt explaining his process. This is especially so, because there is no concept art being used - you are following along with an artist who is sculpting from his imagination - always tinkering.
- A lot of work is done between a fade-to-black and when the video returns. This is ok for a learning exercise, in that it challenges you to reproduce work without watching it being done. The problem is that the changes made between video sequences are not identified. After a cut, I would have to scrub along the video to see if there are any clear views of what has changed. Sometimes you don’t notice a change was made until much later, at which point adopting that change can be difficult.
I hope to follow this up with some of my own original work in the near future.
Question for anyone who reads this post: I notice a lot people’s sketch work is displayed in a sort of grey material that displays details nicely. I scoured the internet for advice on which matcap to use and came up empty. I suspect people are rendering in Keyshot (I don’t have keyshot - I bought ZBrush as a hobby). I ended up with this gold material, but I’m not entirely satisfied. Too shiny I think.
Cheers!
~Nick.