Brief 1 Reflection

What Issues did you face?

One of the main issues that I faced inside Zbrush was accessorising my superhero character.  I have been exposed to many superheroes ever since I was born and have been fed images of what superheroes should look like. Usually these images are of men and women in tights with not much else. Because of this I found it exceedingly hard to stray away from what has already been created in other hero universes such as Capcom and Marvel. I found it rather easy to make the base mesh of the character but when it came to adding more features to tell a story about the character I hit a brick wall. It was a combination of not knowing how to model complex objects and also because I felt that accessorising would take attention away from the detailing of the body I had created. I really wanted to stray away from just creating a being wearing spandex and add to the personality and form of the character. My character was large and muscular and I wanted to emphasize this fact with the accessories.

Another point to add is that I did not originally start with the final concept you see before you. I originally was aiming at designing a paladin character which was hyper realistic. After a few days modelling I realised that this would not be possible in the time frame we had so I changed my character to become more ‘cartoon-like.’ This drastically changed how I worked within Zbrush.

In what ways did you interact with other members of the group, where these actions beneficial?

For me personally I did not have much interaction with the group because I already had a little bit of knowledge about Zbrush. I stayed isolated during most of the modelling process because I felt helping others and guiding them through the program would slow down my rate of work. I did not want to be spending my time teaching others and wanted to focus instead on what I didn’t already know. I felt distracted working around other people. Essentially the only help I needed could be found on the internet. However that was just for me, I can see how it would be beneficial for people to work together who don’t have much knowledge of the program. In the brief time that I did with the group I did try help out as much as I could which also benefitted me in a way because it made me think about someone else’s model and ways to problem solve around their particular issues. It made my thinking more intuitive on fly.

In terms of your process, is there anything you would change to increase your workflow or solve any issues you have faced?

To increase my workflow I would have definitely produced concept sketches beforehand to have an exact idea of what I was modelling. This definitely slowed my workflow down because I was simply making it up as I went along. I knew I wanted to create some kind of war fighter with a huge sword of gun and that was it. This was one of the main reasons my first models did not work out as expected. Another factor that could have really sped up my workflow would have been to use both Maya and Zbrush together. Maya is great for hard surface modelling while Zbrush is best for organic modelling. At the very end of the model I started using Maya for the rockets but the rest of the accessories were hard surface modelled in Zbrush which proved quite challenging and tedious. The polygon count was also a huge issue for me because I included so many accessories that were heavily subdivided it slowed down Zbrush a large amount and caused it to frequently crash on me. This was perhaps one of the most time-consuming issues that I faced. Another issue I faced was the fact that the glove and the body had two different lower subdivision levels. This meant that when posing the model using transpose master they would each deform differently instead of together so I had to leave the character in a neutral pose.

What skills did you learn throughout this brief?

I learnt a variety of skills through this brief including how think abstractly about stylized approaches to characters instead of trying to replicate real life, it showed me that whatever you imagine can be modelled and that the process is never linear. I learnt how to look at an image and problem solve as to what the best method would be to model it. Everywhere I go now I always examine objects and think to myself, “How could I model that?” Although I have just scratched the surface of Zbrush I feel as though I have a base knowledge to do with most of its primary inner workings such as insert brushes and shadowbox. I feel knowledgeable enough that if a 3d developer asked me to generate a conceptual sculpts I would be able to do so with confidence.

How does each individual’s process differ? What do you think affected these decisions?

I think the other group member’s models were impressive for a first attempt at Zbrush. They accomplished a great deal in a short period of time. I think that the fact that they had never modelled before affected the final outcome however. I think they needed to draw inspiration from real life objects such as anatomy. In doing so, they would produce much more convincing models. Not only that, but a lot of key features not utilized such as shadowbox, insert meshes, and curve brushes etc. Many of these tools can bring about a whole new level of detail to a models appearance and are very easily used. The integration of a hard surface program would have also helped a great deal.

My Process

I first started by researching a large variety of superheroes to draw inspiration from. I looked at not only modern superheroes but also heroes from other universes such as World of Warcraft and Greek Mythology. I thought that by exploring outside of the traditional marvel and Capcom I would be inspired to create something that had not been done before. I also talked to a lot of people via Facebook asking them what they wanted to see in a superhero. I wanted to keep all my options open as long as possible so that I did not become short sighted and focus on one thing in particular. Even after spending 4 days sculpting my paladin I was not happy and ended up throwing out that model as I did not feel it was portraying my vision of what a superhero should look like.

I realised soon enough that in order to make life that little bit easier I would stylise the character to reduce the amount of detail needed. If the body was stylised it meant that everything else could be simplified down. I felt this approach fitting because most superhero designs are very stylised such as in comic books. I started by using Zspheres to block out the base mesh of the model. I left the density at level 1 and made it an adaptive skin. The reason for the low density was so that I could move around each individual vertice to ensure that the subdivisions would increase in favour of the features I wanted to add to the model. An example of this is moving vertices around the pectoral region to block on the shape and also around the eyes (adding edge loops to ensure that more polygons could be used for detailing facial features). I slowly went up subdivisions blocking out the overall shape and using the pinch, standard, and Hpolish brushes to detail. I wanted to avoid organic looking surfaces so I tried to give ‘edges’ to the physiology of the character to make it look more cartoon-like. For the straps, shoe sole, belt and gloves I used extract and also retopologized geometry using a Zsphere. The knife and sheath were created using shadowbox. Most of the accessories were modelled inside Maya and imported into Zbrush. The chain and grenade insert brushes were attached to the mesh using the curve stroke while the spike insert mesh was attached using the drag rectangle tool. Insert meshes create their own subtool which makes them very easily editable and textured. The gun was created using Zbrush hard surface modelling techniques however it would have been much more efficient if this had been created in another program such as Maya.

As for detailing, I was not after a hyper realistic model so I did not want to add any fine alpha details. Instead I wanted to entire model to look sleek to reinforce the comic themed look. There was one alpha applied on the belt which is the atomic symbol (it’s hard to see), but this was to add character to the hero.

When it came to texturing, I solely relied on matcaps within Zbrush and simply changed their colour and material in accordance to the type of accessory I was trying to texture. It took a bit of experimentation to find the right results but in the end I was very pleased with the result. I changed a lot of the render settings and included a ‘sharp’ Photoshop filter overlaid on top of the render.