From Dough to Boy

It always amazes me at the end of a Zbrush session to see how far the model has come. For the most part, I was practicing some anatomy, but after such a long absence from Zbrush I was rusty to say the least. I couldn't remember brush settings, I didn't have any alphas loaded, nor could I remember the optimal brush or tool for the situation.

Basically, what I'm saying is that this took quite a long time, but this sort of thing was never quick in the first place. The head gave me a lot of trouble, as did the hands. Oh god, hands, I'm still terrible at them, but I never find the time to really make good ones. For the most part I would think the quality depends on the basemesh, either from Maya or Zspheres. The head however, felt like an endless battle between realism and style. I think I reached a nice middle ground (depends on what the middle is though). I found each of the features to be hard to get right for a while, as you can probably see from the first 2 stages. The nose wasn't in the right place, the eyes looked weird and I couldn't get a mouth good enough to even look at as a work in progress to put on the face. Eventually everything came into place, the eyes last of all (being the hardest but most important feature on the face).


The body was fun to work on, especially mixed in with anatomy DVDs and books (which aren't as easy to learn from as they go so damn fast you can't follow along easily). I feel like this is another step forward, but then again I always feel like that, and 2 weeks later I hate whatever I've done. The body has a mix of correct (I think) anatomy and smooth shapes, mostly because I don't know what I'm doing with this yet. I'm thinking Wii style graphics, which means I don't NEED to do this, but it never hurt anyone to get some nice shapes. And if I do decide to use normal maps, this'll help, right?