Wednesday, May 16, 2012

3D Self Portrait Bust

 This is the final render of my project from Production Modeling class. This class is focused on making one model of either a car or a Zbrush bust. I played around with Zbrush about two weeks beforehand but this was my first time modelling a high poly bust with texture and hair. I watched some of the tutorials up on digitaltutors.com and that helped tremendously in understanding the program better. I knew the class was focused on zbrush and I didn't want to start without any knowledge of the program. That's not to say I didn't learn a lot in PRM because I did, and it was really great finding something I liked doing so much.

This is a natural expression for me " ..??"


 The teachers were very helpful, and I felt that I grew as an artist in that month more than I had in a couple of classes. The difficult parts of this project was getting the re-topology to work in Zbrush. I had so many headaches each time I made adaptive mesh and had things blowing up and not knowing how to fix them. Retopology in Zbrush isn't their strongest point, it's very hard to move around and draw topology compared to just doing it in Maya or Topogun.

"What are you looking at? I'm bald?? oh... "


 Bust in Zbrush before texture and hair.

The high res mesh wire frame, the low rez is at about 7 thousand points, the one I used for the render was under 50 thousand I believe ;  I now realize was unnecessarily high because the difference in detail between 20 thousand and 50 thousand isn't a whole lot. . In fact a mesh under 10k polys would of worked fine since I discovered using the approximation editor for upping the resolution only while rendering.

 The texturing wasn't very difficult, Zbrush made that part easy with the poly paint projection. The hair system was a bit confusing, it takes a lot of tweaking and test renders to see how it looks, and I was never really 100% satisfied with the results. Thankfully I learned more efficient ways of creating hair for next time's character. The rendering took me forever, because I tend to be obsessively nit picky when it comes to my lighting so I kept going back and forth with different angles and lighting set-ups.

Disturbing looking texture map curtsey of Zbrush.

Well that's all for now. I've been working on more bust and full body characters since this, will post WIPS and finished renders soon.

-Ana

4 comments:

  1. *shudders* the texture map is creepy, lol.
    Nice job on making your bust, I think your features are softer then the bust... just some constructive criticism. I wouldn't know how to do this stuff at all.

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    1. Haha, yeah all texture maps look like flattened out peoples skin. Maybe, I actually started off with it looking more "soft" going off photo reference, but then I switched to a mirror and the features became more prominent.. It also looks softer without the expression we had to make for it I think(like the last picture).

      I want to eventually re-do this bust, thanks for your comment :)

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  2. The work paid off because it turned out great. The model looks exactly like you. Good work!

    http://the-renaissance-of-inner-fashion.blogspot.co.uk/

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  3. it's great :)
    i swear i love it

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