PolySculpt

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.

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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)

ZBrush, the leading software in 3D sculpting is now available in it’s 3.5 version! Pixologic made lot of improvements, changes and new features with this new release. Some of them are visible, some other, not really at the first glance:

• The new ZSpheres II which brings a new Adaptive Skin which more accurate results and provide a good topology on complex structures (like hands-fingers connections).
• The new ZSketch, which will let you freely sculpt strip of ZSphere in the 3D space and will allowing you a more creative art. try it, you won’t be disappointed!
• The new Surface Noise, to apply dynamically a procedural noise on your mesh in a non destructive way. But at anytime, you can apply it definitely on your mesh, or use one of the new noise brushes, or set a noise to all the other brushes.
• The new planar brushes and brushes / stroke settings, to create “hard sculpting” models!
• The Perspective, the zoom and the memory management has been a lot improved. This is not the kind of major feature which is always announced, but when working on daily basis with ZBrush, you will love these enhancements! Oh yes, a floor grid has been added!
• A tons of small things here and their, mostly not so small! Ambient Occlusion Masking, Textures per SubTools, Merge of SubTool, Enhanced Normal and displacement maps creation, geometry HD supported for the creation of these maps (and also the Polypainting in HD!), tons of new brushes, Masks and Polypainting in 16 bits, Light Lightbox browser to a fast access to the files, .ma export, improved import OBJ with reprojection of details. Ayaaaa !

You can check all these new features at ZBrushCentral on the announcement page. Check also the previous published movies (1 and 2).

Note: ZBrush 3.5 R2 is now available for download. If you have some troubles on the installation, install the vcredist2008 available in the troubleshoot folder. Check also that a “vmem” and a “ZStartup/Tempfiles” folders are created in the ZBrush 3.5 folder.

We worked hard on this new release, and we hope that you will enjoy it as we love it!

A small ZSketch I did quickly. I will post more soon: