PolySculpt

I had the opportunity to discover the “new”  Cintiq 21 UX from Wacom six weeks ago at Wacom france offices. To do it very short, this is an update of the “old” Cintiq 21 UX with the technology of the Intuos 4. Then do you need to do the jump or not? that’s the purpose of this review… only available in french (translation in progress).

Then I invite you the read the french review, with the help of Google translation

If you miss that news these last days, The Gnomon Workshop, the famous Art School in Los Angeles just open a new Subscription section on their website, which give the access to all their video training available in DVD.
This is a review of this offer and let’s be direct and simple, this is a fabulous one (the offer )!

The Gnomon Workshop offers three different plans at, as you guess, different prices.

• Plan 1: all the Gnomon tutorials for $499/year
• Plan 2: visual effects & games for $299/year
• Plan 3: design & traditional for $299/year

To preview the content of each plan, you can browse in their content navigator and discover what are they offering for each section, or chose by software / media. And for each video, you can view the details by being forwarded to the web page of the DVD description. One of my “negative” comment (I have to find some of them!!) is that you need to go out of the webpage to view the details. A couple of screenshots and a short summary may have been better. The content listing for each plan is available in the last tab, with the title of each DVD and a link to its description.

After choosing your plan, let’s start watching… well, let’s find where to start! So much learning material in so many different fields. This is the very good point of this Subscriptions: tons and tons of content ready to be watched.

On the left, the software or category of content, and on the right, the listing of the titles available. Clicking on the title display the chapters to watch.

All the videos are done by the best artists in the industry, and these videos are really targeted for the artists: for the artists by the artists. I already own several Gnomon DVDs and for someone like me, they are excellent and I’ve never been disappointed by the training. I can’t judge all the material training because I need to watch a lot more, but my first feedback is very positive.

My first choice was the last videos of Ryan Kingslien, dedicated to the ZSpheres II and ZSketch. I won’t comment the video here, I will do a dedicated post for this training.
The quality of the video was very good with a crystal clear sound and the streaming speed was very fast for me, who is located in France, far from their US servers. Then, instead of taking a look at the website for a description, I can just pick a video and start watching a random chapter to have a first feedback about the content.
You can switch to full screen view at anytime, pause, move to a specific position in the timeline without any troubles. My other negative comment is that you can’t download a training for an offline viewing (when I’m in the train..) but well, it’s an “-online- training subscriptions”! The DVDs are here for this purpose

The online player (Flash based) with the last Ryan Kingslien training. Click to enlarge  for a 100% size.

Conclusion

One of the best training school/company which offer all its content for$499/year, with the best artists teaching you the most important software and medias. Where is the daylight robbery? There is not!
If you need to learn then, it’s the best deal available! Tons and tons of content to learn, to improve your skills, what else?
Sorry for the short review, I have to go watching more training!

Pros:

• Really worth the money!
• Tons of content for all kind of medias and software.
• The best artists and trainer in the industry.
• High quality and fast streaming.

Cons (it’s to say there is cons…):

• No cons in fact, I write some to avoid saying that it’s perfect
• Gnomonology.com content isn’t available (or I didn’t find it).
• No download for offline watching.

KURV has organized several webinar (live presentation) and several of them have been/are dedicated to ZBrush. Yesterday night was the first one of a series of three, presented by the artist Leigh Bamforth. The purpose is to create an Orc with ZBrush 3.5 with some of its new features like ZSpheres II. You can find more information on the KURV Website.

This is my review of the first session, “Creature sculpting with ZSpheres II” (and ZSketch):

During 20 minutes, Leigh built a ZSphere Skeleton which will support the strip of ZSpheres from ZSketch. The shape of the model created was very close to the final model. The purpose is to do easy deformation later on the ZSketch by editing the ZSphere skeleton.
Leigh also show an interesting way to build the foot of the Orc. I never thought of that way to do so as I always thought of a classical hierarchy, but now, it’s no more a restriction because of ZSketch. Good to remember for my own work.

The finished ZSphere Skeleton

When the ZSphere skeleton has been finished, Leigh start to sketch the model by small strip of ZSphere which are close to what the muscle would be positioned on a real Orc. Even if the muscle structure is not anatomically perfect, it allows the ZBrush users to discover the muscle structure apply on a humanoid model. Slowly, the “look & feel” of the model is visible and we can imagine its final form.

The ZSketch of the body almost done.

To build the head, Leigh loaded a previously made skull as a SubTool, and then, use it as a support to build the head. This is not a trick, but I think a lot of users may not be aware of this way to create their model.
In the same direction, Leigh refine it’s ZSphere skeleton to fit it to the added skull/head, and then, added the support for the hears. This is something that a lot of users have to know! Thanks Leigh!

The Skull added as a SubTool and then, used as a support for the sketching.

The edition of the ZSphere skeleton while doing the ZSketch of the head.

Most of the ZSketch tools has been shown, and also the classical Move Tool to do local deformations. It has been a good demonstration of which kind of result you can do directly with ZSketch.

At the end of the shape sketching part, Leigh switch to an adaptive skin and start sculpting the model in a more “traditional” way: using the Move tool to change the global shape and refine locally some parts (like the jaws, ears, etc…), the Clay finish brush (his favorite one, well, same for me!) to add some extra details and in after several minutes, the model was done (without the details, next session).

The final sculpted model, after 1h50 of work (excluding the skull).

The last part was the usual session of Questions & Answers. I had to shut down at the end of the Q&A session because of a scheduled meeting at work, then perhaps I missed one or two questions.

___________

To conclude, this presentation was interesting for all the new comers to ZBrush 3.5 as it shown at this stage (1st webinar), a good way to build from scratch a model and generating an accurate shape before moving the the detail stage. Leigh did a good sculpt in less than 1h50, which is a good timing for a full body and show some nice tricks. Everybody had something to learn and I was happy to watch it and I’m waiting for the two others webinar.

My two small negative comments are that Leigh don’t speak enough on some parts (but it’s perhaps because I talk too much when I do webinars!) and the other point is the quality of the sound when Leigh was speaking: it was like speaking on a distant microphone, then, for a non native english speaker like me, I had to focus a lot to understand. Wes (from KURV) voice was perfectly clear, it was definitly not a problem of bandwidth (26 Mbits at home). This is only minor points which doesn’t remove the quality of the work and presentation !

Note: I will try to do the review of the two next webinar (next couple of Saturdays)

I’m continuing my self learning of modo 302 while waiting the launch of the 401. I still have several troubles and spending a lot of times in things that I’m thinking should be more easier to do. I also installed several scripts to enhance my workflow.

I think that I’m very negative in my feedback about modo, because right now I’m on the modeling part and because of my strong background in this task. To be honest, I deeply think that modo is far behind than Amapi 8 and Hexagon 2 on the polymodeling tasks but, and this but is important, modo offer a lot of customization, a lot of scripts to add the tools that you don’t have, something which was simply impossible in Amapi or Hexagon. When you start to know better the modo toolset, it become easier, but still far from being easy and productive.

But I started to work on the shaders, maps (not visible yet), and UVs and for this part, modo really rocks (even if the shader tree is not really understandable at the first glance. Where is the node view?? ) And I don’t speak of the render speed. How easy is it to setup the shaders when you can have a live preview on your model, changing the lights and a couple of seconds seeing the result on your screen.

This is the evolution of the same WIP, still progressing. Some parts have been hidden as they were the resulting of tests

I forgot to say that I started to work on the pivot point to have some easier pose for my robot

Well well well… Not a lot of free time recently for my modo learning, but I when I can, I do. But, as I said previously, “hell”, it’s hard… Some simple feedback from my way to use and understand it. Positive first, negative after:

Positive:

• The UI is very flexible and allows me to setup my views as I want and insert scripts where I need. It’s possible to create new pie menu, new tabs and others in an editor which is great. Same for the shortcuts!
• Very nice display properties and presets. The Normal Maps are perfectly displayed, it’s really cool!
• A lot of modeling tools, which have most of the time a lot of option for different results. It will be long to learn all of them and what can be done, but it brings a lot of power to the software.
• modo is now more a complete 3D software : it offers a good UV editor and a fantastic rendering engine, not only a simple modeler like modo 101.
• Speaking of rendering, I’m really impress by the speed of its engine. The preview render is a great tool to do the material and lighting setup. you can see in a couple of second a good preview without waiting longs minutes to see a result. Very productive. I don’t have the fastest computers on earth, but I guess it must be excellent on high end computers! When comparing to Carrara, no way to come back to this software. Just the blurry reflections and the SSS rendering speed put Carrara directly on its knees. And if I do the comparison with Mental Ray, modo provide very nice results without spending hours in the rendering setup. I don’t need to program advanced shaders, I just need to use them. Then I think with time, and modo 501 with I hope CA tools, I will stop using 3DSMax completely!
• Uvs… our friends! I’m currently using modo for my UVs. It have some good tools. Perhaps not as good as UV Layout, but its unwrap and relax are pretty good. I need to spend more time on it since I still have some troubles of unwrapping just parts of an object: I need to hide what I don’t want to unwrap. no way to use a selection or a material?
• Tons of “maps”: UV maps, Morph maps, vertex maps, weightmaps… damn, that’s great! Multiple UVs in a click, easy morph targets easily animated, it’s really cool!
• With the Items manager, you can create hierarchy between the meshes which is in some cases, very interesting. By creating groups, you can create what could be layers in other softwares, which is useful for complex scene!

Negative:

• The workflow is tricky as you have to always switch from a selection mode to a tool, and when the tool is done, drop it to do another selection. To quit the current tool, you have to hit Space bar or pick another tool or switch to a selection mode. If you click in an empty part of the scene, you don’t unselect or quit the tool. In fact, you are using the tool since most of them are using the mouse click-drag to modify a value. It’s interesting, but I think it shouldn’t be the default behavior. Then, the trick is to go in the Pipe menu and activate the “See through” function… for all the tools as its a way to customize the tools. Perhaps a general preference exist, but I missed it.
• These damn manipulators oups… Action Center: you have a lot of different present (selection, origin, automatic, etc) or you can even create your own by choosing its position and its orientation but you don’t have by default, a manipulator that is by default in all other 3D Softwares : centered on the current selection and aligned to the universe axis. Then you can build it (but how can I save it as my default one? I must be able to do it, but I have to find how…). Well, great! Well, no. If you do a click by mistake on another part of your scene, it will move your manipulator where you clicked, and it is not undoable. Then you must quit the current tool (lets say Transform) and pick it again. But the good point about this freely movable manipulator it that it allows you to put your pivot point where you want to do some specific operations, which is great. See Through will disable this possibility. I have to build two manipulators: one with See through and one without. And because of all these presets, these possibilities, I need sometime to switch one after the other to each Action center to find the good one. How productive…
• Falloff are nice… when you know how to use them! A lot of deformation can be made with them, but you need to master them first. I’m still looking for a simple soft selection one: you select a polygon to manipulate, and you will have a falloff which will affect the polygons around this selected polygon. You can do it with the  Element move Tool (T) and the right click, but I didn’t find with the default transform tools.
• Working Symmetry is working only when your model center is aligned with the center of the universe. I though that it has been updated in 30x to work based on the object axis. I may have miss something here as it is now a basic feature in all modern softwares!
• No selection means all selected. It’s the default behavior of modo and for some tools, it’s great. But for other like Edge Extend (Z), it’s a nightmare. I had several discussion with that with one of the modo developer who told me that it’s like that, because of the default modo behavior. I told him that perhaps it’s like that, but I don’t see a single reason to have the ability in the Edge Extend tool (duplicating all the edges other themselves, which generate a fucked topology, then, killing the model)
• The shader creation is not really intuitive. i have to explore more this part, but it lacks some visual feedback of the current edited shader. A node editor would be a greaaat addition to modo!
• The item management is not usual for me. You have an empty mesh, you add your geometry inside, even separate geometry which are not connected. If you want to have another object, then you have to create another empty mesh and put your stuff inside. Etc.
• Who loves this trackball 3D navigation??
• As said in the positive part that the UI is flexible… but in fact, I think it’s too much flexible and sometimes, you create floating menus, duplicating ones and you are lost.

Tools/features missing: I just added this part as someone may help me to find them or some workaround!

• An Extrusion/sweep/bevel tool “a la” Hexagon/Amapi, to create fast extrusions in a set of clicks. You can pick the Bevel tool and use the Shift key to continue using it, but it’s tricky in some tools.
• A way to convert an edge selection to a polyline and then convert it to a pipe/tube
• Surface tools !!!

Conclusion of this today’s post: Modo looks for me more and more powerful, but it also looks more and more to be a “technical” software, which is for me, opposite to an artistic ready to use software. You need to learn a bunch of things before starting to enjoy it, which is very frustating. I start to enjoy it and the more I spend on it, the more I think that I did the good choice. But why some simple things are not by default in the software and you need to know so much things for so simple tasks? I’m far to be as productive with it than Amapi 8 or Hexagon for modeling tasks and I guess that I won’t be as productive with it, even after years of modo work, but everything else outside the modeling part do wonderfully the job! This is the progress of the small Robot

Next part of this learning  soon!

Why modo?

I bought modo 201 some time ago, because I was looking for an alternative modeler for Amapi and Hexagon because these software in a short future will “die”: Amapi 8 development has been stopped 1 month before its public beta, with less than 3 months of development to have a full product ready to be shipped, and Hexagon is no more developed by DAZ, or nearly not, except adding content specific stuff (well, let’s hope I’m wrong!)

I also needed a new render engine as an alternative of the also “dying” and restricted  Carrara, and too expensive 3DSMax (thanks for the license of my job!). Then modo was a good choice: company with a strong background in 3D, new architecture, full feature set Sub division modeler, very good UV editor, a killer renderer at a price that a freelance, a small company can afford. Another important point: finding resources. modo have a great community and Luxology, the editor, provides a lot of learning content, free or not.

But hell! It was and it’s still hard to learn modo and I’m far to be a beginner in 3D and with 3D modelers. But i’m still thinking that I did a good choice and I will post on my blog my progress, my learning and what I find weird or crazy in this package!

Because I  lack of free time and because I always have 2457 projects at the same time, I try to focus on a simple project which will makes me see all kind of features that modo 302 (my current version while waiting the release of  the 401): A simple robot, freely inspired from the movie Robots from Dreamworks. It will be basically some hard modeling, but with traditional modeling, copies, I will have to see how the hierachy and rigging (for the 401) will work, spend some time on UVs, work on the shaders and lighting and finally, the render. When all that stuff will be done, I will be able to start on the animation!

At the same time, I’m checking, redoing the videos I bought on their website to learn again and again. Then you will see a mix of various projects while I provide the feedback about how I’m progressing with this software

This is some screenshots, which will be commented later, in another post about my progress in modo:

And the beginning of an Austin Mini Coper (you may recognize the Digital Tutors tutorial