3D Digital Sculpture - Life Drawing - Week 3

3D Digital Sculpture - Bust - Week 2

I have decided to do one 3D sketch per week, in order to improve my skills in the Zbrush software as well as my sculpting skills in general. There was something I read a while ago suggesting that sculpting also helps you gain a better understanding of shapes when drawing, I believe I will soon find out if this is the case.

For this sculpt I was getting to grips with the append and transpose tools a little more. The design takes a lot of inspiration from creature box, aiming for a very different art style each week will hopefully help to expand my horizons.

3D Digital Sculpture - Life Drawing - Week 2

For our second week I really tried to work on my planning technique, with the three minute poses. This is the best example from the few three minute poses that we did, as you can see I still have a long way to go in this area. If i'm going to make any improvements I am going to have to work on this in my spare time, really nailing a good planning technique will help me to complete much more expansive illustrations in the future.

Ignore the 15min marker above the sketch, that was an error in post processing the digital image....ooops.









Moving swiftly on to the fifteen minute poses, I believe that I have progressed from last week. I seemed to produce much more consistent work from that of last session, this could be in direct response to the planning technique that I had worked on in the three minute poses. Never the less I am happy to see a small progression even if the end result is still not up to standard in my eyes.

As we had started work on the mannequin task for the Digital Sculpting module, I thought this would be a great opportunity to note some reference of muscle structures from a life model. You can see this in my illustrations below but I was having some trouble recognising the exact placement of each muscle. With more practice and study into anatomy I am sure my recognition of these shapes will improve greatly.






















Marking out the muscle positions in the life drawing session helped immensely when it came to blocking out the 3D sculpt, having a greater understanding of the deformations that the muscles perform.

3D Digital Sculpture - Bust - Week1

To start my bust I used a Zsphere tool, entered edit mode and activated Dynamesh. I wasn't sure what to sculpt at first I just let the shapes come out with the move tool, re-meshing as I went along.

The great thing about Dynamesh, you can pull big pieces of the mesh and then evenly distribute the polygons. This removes the problem of having high and low dense areas on your sculpt.


As I continued sculpting I began to gain inspiration from Star Trek but I did not want to replicate any existing imagery. I introduced different features from different races of the Star Trek universe, eventually settling on the form that you see here.

Using Dynamesh allowed me to pull out the mesh and create the suggestion of an upper torso.



At this point more detail was added using the clay build up brush. The move tool was also used at this stage with a low Z intensity, allowing me to push and pull the forms and experiment.

Reference was used heavily throughout this medium detail pass, in order to get a believable concept. The ears for example could not have been achieved without reference images.


Now it was time to turn Dynamesh off as I had gained the basic form that I was going to stick with. Dynamesh is usually used at the beginning of a sculpt, to define the base mesh or add medium level details.

I realised that the clay build up tool is great for emulating muscle strips. Using this method and then smoothing the model can add the the realism of the sculpt.

deciding to use the Dam-Standard
brush for the creation of a scar on the aliens face proved to give the concept a little bit of character. As if he had been injured in some intergalactic battle.

Rummaging through the alpha stencils I found one that would suit my need for skin texture. This was used over the majority of the skin, at different scales for different skin types.



In conclusion I am quite proud of how this bust turned out, especially since it is my first time creating anything serious using Zbrush. If I were to improve this I would push the ears back slightly and maybe pay some special attention to the characters lips, as they are looking a little bit small and feminine. Over all I really enjoyed this task and am looking forward to the rest of the module.

3D Digital Sculpture - Life Drawing - Week1

For our first session of life drawing this year, I realised that I was a little out of practice. Completing the whole figure in the three minute poses became a huge challenge. Graphite pencils were my medium of choice, this is because I did not have much confidence in my unpracticed skills. This medium will be used until I gain some more confidence in the basic areas of life drawing. As you can see here, towards the end I began to get a little bit more comfortable but the proportions are still not 100% correct. If I want to improve my skills in this area, really need to find the time to practice regularly.



The fifteen minute poses I found, a little easier. I had the time to think about the motion curve of the pose and plan the drawing accordingly. I am quite happy with the way that these sketches turned out but of course there is always room for improvement and they are far from perfect. With fifteen minutes I feel like the sketch should be much more refined than what you see here. This means that I need to work on memory and recognition of symbols, so that I am able to plan out the sketch at a much faster rate.



When we got to the thirty minute poses, this is where things began to go terribly wrong. I really struggled with the reclining pose, it seemed that no matter what I did the figure would become elongated in the sketch. Giving this pose three attempts before becoming frustrated with myself, I then had to take a step back and try to relax a little. With the frustration of the first thirty minute pose I then began to put more pressure on myself which inhibited my drawing ability, as you can see in the second illustration here. This leads me to believe that I am a little too critical of my own abilities and need to relax a little more, in order to improve at my own pace.

Introduction to 3D animation - Nerdy Girl Rant

My animation, rendered and constructed using Adobe Premier Pro.

Introduction to 3D Animation

Nerdy Girl Rant animatic. Made using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premier pro.