ZBrushCentral

SonOfWitz zbrush musings

zspherePremonitionWeb.jpg

Hi all,
this is my first post after lurking for a couple of months. Amazing work on display here.

I don’t have anything impressive with Zbrush to show yet, I’ve only had a chance to spend a handful of hours with it over the last month, and that’s all been basic learning stuff. But boy, the ideas are rolling. what an amazing program! (and I’m still stuck with v2 on my powerPC Mac).

Anyway, I’m starting this thread because I had a curious find last night.
I pulled out a very old sketchbook to see if it still had some room. ( I just wanted some brown paper to work on) and I opened it and found this sketch. (attached)
The sketch is no great shakes, but users of Zspheres might see why I found it interesting. It’s like I had a premonition of Zspheres back in 2003, well before I’d ever heard of them. I mean, tell me that doesn’t look like a zsphere setup with the mesh preview…
the idea for this character was a skeletal character with a beefy forcefield type body. Other versions even have wireframe drawn into the forcefield, but look less overtly like zspheres.

ok, so it’s a geeky tanget, for what it’s worth.
hopefully there will be some cool stuff added to this thread soon.

gulfSketch.jpg

This ugly duckling above is my first attempt at digital painting in Zbrush 2.
I’m really surprised with what you can do, and how nice it was to work this way. what an amazing program.
This is a redux of a real world sketch called GULF. There’s definitely some half-assed areas that I hacked out, but the idea was to just get my hands dirty, so to speak, with digital painting, a medium I’ve previously dealt with very cautiously and without much confidence. Zbrush allowed a very comfortable working situation that felt very natural. This is all one layer, really fast and loose. No big deal, but i’m sharing it because I don’t have anyone to share my enthusiasm about this program with.

So, I started off with Zketchpad, which I suppose is the origin of the new Paintstop, which I can’t wait to use once I get a new computer. I tried to figure out more or less what Zketchpad was doing and it helped me figure out A LOT about how to paint in Zbrush. A lot was demystified. I’ve only used Painter a few times, and only painted a bit in photoshop, but I think I enjoyed using Zbrush more than either.

Edit: oops, forgot the staples on the seam. hacked in now.

hey! cool illustration. like the unique style. Hope to see more soon.

thanks, Maverick. Thanks for looking & commenting. I hope to see more too. two kids & a full-time job, + freelance illustration gigs put a damper on my output for this free time art.

I enjoy your work. Great to see another original style. Looking forward to more.

Apraxos01.jpgApraxos_Closeup.jpg

These are some quick screen grab renderings from my first attempt to make a zbrush character with subtools and such.
This is a zsphere base turned dynamesh. The robe was made by exporting the low res zsphere base into Blender where I loosened it up to be larger than the figure in all places, set some stiff seems and ran some cloth sim on it to get it to natural drape over the body, then solidified the result as an OBJ brought into Zbrush for additional tweaking. The hand was made using the hand mannequin and dynamesh insert brush.
This is all pretty low grade first attempt without worrying about retopo. The mask was made from mesh extract. Now I would use the topology brush I guess. Can’t wait to try and Qremesh this guy.

Koshari_Summoning_render_lo.jpg

So this is a Work in Progress Book Cover illustration, sans titles.
I find lighting and rendering very arduous. I’m open to suggestions on this.
This is BPR with a lightcap made from the Milky Way HDR that’s in the background, along with a couple of standard lights.
all Zbrush, all polypaint. the materials and glass look pretty bad still.

So the box is like a steampunk Victrola psychic machine for summoning beings on another plane (in the book this will be the cover of) and it takes place in a starry limbo.
I’m thinking that maybe the Victrola horn and robot crow maybe look like they’re coming out of the skull, rather than being attached to the box. Guess I got to fill out some steampunk junk in the back behind the skull.

Good god I love those insert brushes and panel loops. I’ve NEVER had a fluid session in CG where adding complexity was easy until Zbrush 4R4. What a treat it was to work like this. I added a lot of low rez insert brushes to a high rez textured subtool, then split them out by polygroups into their own tool. This made it soooo much easier than anything mechanical / hard surface thing I’ve ever tried.

I’m way open to feedback if this captures anyone’s interest.
Thanks.

beautiful…the sound of the universe

kaios_composite_1024.jpg

This is a finished illustration for a book called Weird Luck. (the Work In Progress above is a sequel)
The skull was a found object with heavy zbrush modification both sculpturally and texturally. The human figure was sculpted in zbrush (off a manequin base if I remember right) with clothing extractions made in Zbrush. Everything was posed and rendered in Blender Internal Render after many terrible attempts to use Cycles. Hair made in Blender. I used Blender mainly because I had no idea how I might approach doing that sort of lighting setup in Zbrush. Is it even possible? Also because I love Blender!

Wait a sec, there is a newer update I should post with shorter hair. Where is that dang file?

Thanks LVXIFER.

TTB_Cover_5x8_unlettered.jpg

Here is, hopefully, a finished version of this book cover.
I had to take a long while away from it.

lots of different bpr renders stacked in photoshop. The blue effect comes from some layer experiment results selectively applied over the otherwise final comp.
Lots of fun with this. It was hard to let go of the original straight angle composition idea, but I’m glad I did.

I guess I should include the cover titles as well, but I guess I’d better get this thing approved first.

Whatchathink?

I did originally want a bit more glow from inside the skull, but I have no idea how to do that in zbrush, except maybe with a material and a lot of masking.
Back in Zbrush 2 I remember using some script to place the lights very specifially, but i don’t remember the name or if it’s been updated.
Does anyone know how I might get a glow as if a light were in the skull? In the other cover I posted above, I used Blender to get the light in the skull. This one needs to be kept in zbrush, for expediency.

Koshari_Summoning_Comp_d5.jpg

I figured out how to get the glow!
The original glow was a happy 2D compositing experiment/accident. I extended that out with 2D paint into the wings.
The interior skull and box glow was really easy in the end, I just inverted the AO, screened at 70%, colorized and masked a bit.

There is also some masked curves work to reduce brightness on the box so it’s not quite as dominant.

Man I love 4r5 It came JUST in time to make so much of this thing possible. I was really happy to have a job that allowed me to experiment with the new tools at the same time. This was experiment/ concept / finishing all in the same basic flow. I love this program.

i knew about inverting the AO during some experiments…this effect fits perfectly in your illustration

yeah, I love it when those things you notice look cool during experimentation can actually be applied to a real project.
When it dawned on me how easy this would be I was so happy.

working on this guy over a couple late nights lately. Haven’t used zbrush in almost a year, despite wanting to.
Just trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing with this character. My panel loops might be a nightmare later.

Here is the beginning of a character sculpt, based on my Atomic Ape character illustration from the band Atomic Ape’s Swarm album cover. (which was almost completely created in Procreate on an iPad.)

Terrible quick-ass BPR render. Quick flood painted materials, just to see how much I could actually accomplish before I fell asleep at the keyboard.
It’s low poly with dynamic subdiv and a quick crappy first attempt at Fibermesh fur. Manequin > adaptive skin > zModeler >Transpose, Move Topo, Inflate, Dam Standard.

I just made this for fun. I think I might get rid of the fibermesh fur and try sculpting the fur and printing out a figurine.
I really can’t believe how fast this happened for me. A combination of understanding how to work between the tools more efficiently combined with massive improvements in the tools. Using zModeler to add hands & feet and elbows and such to a simple skin output from a zsphere mannequin was really really quick and comparatively easy. I would have previously gone completely dynamesh, but this is all low poly. I think this guy is about 3k without the dynamic subdiv on. What a great tool.

AtomicApe-Stage3.jpgatomic-ape_swarm_itunescover_w490_h490.jpg

AtomicApe-Stage4.jpgAtomicApe-sculptBegin.jpg

Took it a bit further last night.
cleaned up the mesh a bit, after looking at an exported obj in meshlab. That highlighted some intersecting geo.
Separated into subtools and started sculpting fur. Course layer build up so far.

image.jpg

Posing a bit.
Redid the gauntlets.
getting there.

Seems like I don’t get to work in Zbrush very often.
Here is my current work. Everything created in Zbrush and rendered in Blender cycles.
I know it’s a far cry from the busts people are showing here on zbrush, but this is the first time I’ve attempted to do anything close to a realistic human 3D model and rendering.
Anyway, this was a lot of fun and is for the cover of a book called Cannibal King by Andrew M. Reichart. This is the third part of a trilogy, the other two covers are in this thread if you are curious.
Hope you dig.