ZBrushCentral

Deja Vu Challenge

Deja-Vu.jpg
Hi everyone. I haven’t ZBrushed in about 4 months now, and I have decided it’s time to get back into it. This past weekend my niece visited me. Back in 2002, when she was 5 years old, she used some of my ztools and made a ZBrush picture. Here is a link to Her Picture, if you are interested. Anyway, she is 11 years old now, and her art skills have improved by leaps and bounds.

That got me thinking about my own skills and how they have improved over time. I thought it might be interesting to rework a piece from my early years in ZBrush. Since purchasing the program in 2002, ZBrush has gone through many changes as well, including the introduction of zspheres (one of the greatest breakthroughs, in my opinion), subtools, transpose, etc.

I extend the challenge to the rest of the ZBrush community. Pick an image from your past, when you might not have been as skilled, and remodel, retexture, rerender!

I am very interested to see if this garners any takers. I have seen the skills of many ZBrushers grow over the years, and it would be fascinating to see an example of the evolution of their talent (Hmm, maybe I could have called this the Darwin Evolution Challenge?)

There should be no time limits on this challenge. Just stretch yourself to do better than you’ve done before. Consider posting your old picture first as you go through the process so we can all see what you are working on. Let’s post our WIPS as well. In the end, post your final remake along with the first version for a side-by-side comparison. Good luck, and have fun!

I have to look through my files to decide which I would like to re-make (unless someone has a suggestion. You can check out my gallery on the forum) and I will post my “before” picture within a couple of days.

hmm, i think this might be fun, however i really don’t have much from my past, either model or image wise.
it will be interesting to see which you decide to remake.

OK, here are the four images that I am considering for a remake. Anyone care to suggest one of them? The titles are, clockwise from top left: Wizard of Oz (orig. 06/24/2002); Uncle Cletus’ House (orig. 04/21/2002); Zombie Warrior (orig. 01/05/2003); and Alien Ballet (orig. 07/12/2002). All of these were done pre-zspheres, which also means pre-transpose, pre-retopologize, etc. They were all done in ZBrush 1.23b. I have a feeling I know which one will be chosen for a remake, but I don’t want to push any particular one.

Please let me know, I’m anxious to get started. Also, I am eagerly looking forward to seeing other entries.

Thanks,
Slosh

Choices.jpg

I’d go for the wizard of oz one personally, it’d make good use of Z3 features (such as subtools, etc)

Agreed with wizard of OZ , although making 4 characters will be quite a project again :slight_smile:

oz, be nice to see you make the emerald palace look more like the film version.

Just a WIP for my remake of the Wizard of Oz. I really had hoped more people would participate. It’s not too late, maybe seeing my WIP will get more of you into it.

Anyway, here is some of the background work I’m doing for this new image. In the foreground, I will have a hill and the yellow brick road, some trees, and of course the characters.

WizOz2.jpg

brian, thats looking really good, i like the foliage, its also interesting that you chose to make the palace not raised in the middle as is typical.
i think though that it could still use some more fog and flattening right past the palace, maybe some depth of field, you might want to wash out some of that detail in the mountain as well. One last suggestion is that you create some sort of tree columns on the sides of the YBR right near the palace. So far really it’s a great improvement over your previous image.
wish i wasnt so busy with the other projects right now to try this one out, maybe in a week or so.:rolleyes:

you know what i just realized about your original image, is that they are all walking away from the palace, weird. looking at google i see that in the movie, and how it fits the story they only walk to the palace, however on certain dvd covers and posters somone has combined them walking along with the palace, much like your image.
I know you are probably already working on the characters, but what i think would be neat is that instead of making them look like they did in the movie you could try to make them look as they do in the book as much as possible. that would be a challenge.

This is starting to look like a two-sided conversation :wink:

I agree about the majority of reference pictures showing the group walking away from the Emerald City. In my new pic, I’m going to have them walking toward the city, but in some way they’ve stopped (maybe for a break) so that they can face the “camera”.

As we talked about yesterday, I plan to make this version more stylized, instead of trying to mimic the movie’s characters, which means they may look more like Frank Baum’s characters. I haven’t read the books, although I had a set of children’s books growing up that had a condensed version of the stories in it. But it’s been about 30 years or so since I read that. Wow that makes me feel old!

I’m reaching a frustration level right now in that I am too lazy to really try hard on this image. For example, the foreground element I am working on is not coming easily, and I find myself stepping away from the computer. I am realizing that I both love and hate ZBrush at times. I love the freedom that comes with sculpting and texturing, but I hate the terrain modeling inabilities of it. To make something with that much landscape and try to get decent perspective is nearly maddening. To make all of those hills, I have layered several different landscape pieces. So, when I try to render the fog, it doesn’t recognize the hills in their proper placement on screen. I get fog on some distant hills, but not on others because in Zspace, they are not necessarily far or close. Make sense?

I’m about ready to scrap this version and start over yet again. Maybe not, but I am tempted.