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[SalmonGod]

So I'm working hard on my portfolio now.  Going to start updating a thread to try and maintain a high level of motivation.

I'm going to start with my most recent D&D character.  He's a beefy alchemist juicer type guy and an animal-person race based on water buffalo.  I can't find the specific species/pictures that I originally based him off of, but the part I was most interested in were the horns.  Something like this, except straight and angled back a bit more.  So big, thick skull and a badass set of v-shaped horns shooting back off his forehead.

I started today by making his tower shield.  It has lots of pouches and a fold-out shelf on the back, so all he has to do is jam that spike into the ground and he can do his alchemy stuff wherever (and sell drugs).  It's about 550 vertices with 1024x1024 diffuse, normal, and specularity maps.  So this would be perfectly suitable for importing into a modern game like Skyrim or something.  The character is supposed to have a sort of shamanistic background, so I wanted to make it rough-looking.  Like it was made with heavy, unrefined materials and primitive tools.  Not sure how I like it, though.  Will probably try to refine it tomorrow, as well as get started on modeling the character himself.

I really should post videos.  Screenshots just don't do this stuff justice.  You can't see how the normal maps make for depth in the wood grain and stuff.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Hubris Incalculable]

He's a beefy alchemist juicer type guy and an animal-person race based on water buffalo.

ISWYDT.

Nice work.

[SalmonGod]

He's a beefy alchemist juicer type guy and an animal-person race based on water buffalo.

ISWYDT.

Oh!  Yes... yes you go ahead and believe that was intentional

[Sheb]

Dang, and me who was hoping to find Occupy-related stuff. :p

Nah, just kidding, nice shield. I always liked complex weapons like that, even if they are in all likelihood less practical, never let your GM argue that! My favourite was the lantern shield. And yes, I dual-wielded those.

Spoiler: Lantern Shield (click to show/hide)

[SalmonGod]

Yeah.  It's fantasy.  Rule of Cool and all

[SalmonGod]

Bam.  Two week detour.  Just as I'm getting started.  Thanks, life.

I'm getting back to it now.  Trying to tackle the character.  Just started pulling shapes from a dynamesh sphere in zbrush.  Focusing on the bust first.  I haven't tried to do humanoid anatomy in so long.  I'm trying to be more creative about this and actually blend human/animal features instead of just making him a minotaur/bull head stuck on a human body, but oh god this is so hard what am I doing.



*deep breath*

I'll have this looking like something more than a lumpy space person before the weekend's over. _{(just keep telling yourself that)}  Have I mentioned that lips are the devil?  Noses are evil, too.

[Spaghetti7]

Looking nice, can't wait to see how it turns out. It's really detailed already: nice bones visible by the horns.

Have I mentioned that lips are the devil?  Noses are evil, too.

I think you've done a damn fine job of them.

[SalmonGod]

I'm actually becoming quite happy with this.  Didn't take as long to reach this point as I thought it would.  Still wrestling with the mouth, but I'm definitely getting closer there.  Made major adjustment to the style of lips and shape of the lower jaw to better express the animal aspect.  He's looking less like some kind of weird demon now and much more like the animal-person combination I'm going for.



And this is it.  I'm calling the head done here.  I'm pretty happy with it.  Time for sleep.  Tomorrow: the rest of the body.



Saw the interactive 3d model viewing web services someone posted in Euld's modeling thread, and decided to give them a try.  p3d seems to have a better looking renderer, except it can't seem to read normal maps without producing artifacts.  So I threw that shield up on Sketchfab.  Doesn't look great, but then still shots don't do justice to 3d models.

Actually... it's not so bad after some further exploration.  I rather like this thing.  Looking at some other people's uploads, it looks like this thing can be pushed pretty far.

Alchemist's Tower Shield (click to view in 3D)

[SalmonGod]

Aaaaaargh anatomy is hard!!! *whimper sob*

It's slow, but it's progress.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[wierd]

You should consider the skeletal structure underneath, and how the muscles attach.

I sometimes sculpt in clay, and muscles are additive over the skeleton. Zbrush is a LOT like sculpting clay. That's its strong point. 

Here's a female nude I did a LOOOOONG time ago. (photobucket didnt like the front pic! Deleted it from my library! Might have been the boobies. Seriously. Crap like that would delete images of Michelangelo's David. Art isnt porn, and they shouldn't censor it.)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Note the bone and tendon structure in the hand.

I cheated somewhat when I made this. I created a generalized mirror symmetric humanoid body in another program, then brought it into zbrush with the OBJ import for detail work. The standard "sphere" starting material has a pernicious pair of verticies at the top and bottom that I hate with passion.

While it may draw unwanted attention, the internet is FULL of pictures of naked people of both genders. Dont be afraid of pulling some good samples from this resource for use as artistic models.

[SalmonGod]

Thanks for commenting!

In the past when I've done humanoids (only a couple times), I've started from a pre-made human model or blocked out shapes directly on top of photo reference (multiple perfectly aligned views of the same model).  I also have a couple skeleton models I could work directly on top of.

But I'm trying to develop my character modeling skills a step further by just eyeballing it.  I'm using reference, of course, but finding appropriate reference is difficult.  I want him to be fairly large, without being fully obnoxious juggernaut orcish physique.  It's difficult to find stuff that hits that in-between.  I've had the most success with bodybuilders.  The internet wants to feed me the most obnoxious examples of people deformed by steroids, but I've found some more moderate ones.  What really tops off the difficulty there is game characters need to be modeled in a T-Pose for animation purposes, so finding references in a pose that's actually useful is really difficult.  Escorches are useful, too, but not as much as a good well-lit real-life model.

Just need lots of practice is all.

[wierd]

hehehehehehh...

You could always do it the way I often am forced to, given the tools I have access to. (rather, the lack thereof...)

Take for instance, building a humanoid head using hand drawn splinar sections, like this...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Literally, purely eyeballed/imagined curves drawn freeform, at radial intersections, for the purposes of controlling the creation of NURBS surface features.

It's how I made this ugly guy.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

To model in that program (Dassault Systemes CATIA-- its high end industrial CAD.) I have to build generalized sectional contours, and then drive surfaces through those. Think, building a body from CAT scan slices type approach, with some interpolation between slices.  Building in Zbrush is FAR more intuitive/easier! LOL!

What I did for the naked lady was build a generalized head, minus detailed figures, with a head, torso, arms, legs, hands (with fingers) and feet (with toes). It was only a rough approximation, given the limitations of the software. I exported that as an STL, opened that with blender, saved a wavefront OBJ, and pulled that into Zbrush.  Naked woman there is 100% my work.

Zbrush sucks hard at creation of the initial humanoid form, as you have no doubt experienced. Turning up the texel level high enough to bud out individual fingers and toes, and still have enough detail level left over to put actual lifelike features on them results in billions of polygons in places they arent needed, and pernicious verticies can ruin your day.  That's why I elected to build the general humanoid body outside of Zbrush, and use Zbrush just for fine detail and tweaking.

This was the very ugly generalized humanoid trunk + arms + primitive head I used, in it's NURBS form:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It had hands, legs, and feet when it was ready to be made into an OBJ for zbrush.

and this was the primitive hand with individual digits in nurbs form:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(shiny plasticy texture is default color for nurbs data in catia.)

You can do it however you like, just dont be afraid to do certain things outside of zbrush.

If you practice enough you will get good, regardless. Just keep at it. I note that I am getting better at the splinar intersection build method I often have to resort to myself! I can do some pretty wild stuff now.

[SalmonGod]

Zbrush sucks hard at creation of the initial humanoid form, as you have no doubt experienced. Turning up the texel level high enough to bud out individual fingers and toes, and still have enough detail level left over to put actual lifelike features on them results in billions of polygons in places they arent needed, and pernicious verticies can ruin your day.  That's why I elected to build the general humanoid body outside of Zbrush, and use Zbrush just for fine detail and tweaking.

You should check out the Dynamesh feature, if you haven't.  It maintains a perfectly uniform polygon density across the surface, and you can control the density.  Bad vertices aren't a problem at all.  That whole body so far is about 900k polygons, and I don't expect it to get over 1.5 million.  If it gets too high, I can just turn down the density slider.  It's great for the shape-building stage.  Then you re-topologize that into a more production friendly mesh (I use Topogun) and you're ready for the high-detail work and texturing.  This is my basic process for anything made from scratch now, even hard-surface stuff.

[wierd]

My foray into zbrush was over 4 years ago. When was this feature added?

(I just model for S&G, with no real intent for a use, so I don't bother with making texture maps, normal maps, and pals. The models I create don't use polygons since they are nurbs. I can generate them with as few or as many as I want on stl generation.)

[SalmonGod]

A couple years ago.  It's fairly new.