Learning, turning and churning

I have spent the past few weeks getting stuck into some great Zbrush training videos from Eat3d - it`s all well and good chewing your way through manuals and reading lengthy tutorials on the web, but with a slightly addled brain such as mine, nothing helps it sink in more than by watching it in action. With my trusty Wacom in hand I set out with a cube and saw how far I could take it.

This is from after a half hour of pushing and pulling my virtual clay around. As you would expect the topology isn`t too pretty - it did originate from a cube after all.

This is the result of taking the alien head into 3d-Coat and retopologizing it. If you haven`t checked out 3d-Coat yet, let me just say how abso-frickin-lutely amazing it is. The retopology tools are brilliant and the voxel sculpting is insane. I thought Zbrush was like working with clay, 3d-Coat just feels totally natural. Unfortunately, due to the nature of voxels, the resulting mesh is somewhat fugly - but then that`s what the retop tools are there for, right?

This is where I am at currently, back in Zbrush. I decided to feminize the alien somewhat, as you can tell from the Angelina Jolie pout. I think the lips are a bit too prominent so may back them off a bit.

My tip of the day: don`t focus too much on one area at first - get the main forms blocked in and turn, turn turn: look at the model from every angle. What looks great from the front does not necessarily look so hot from the side.

Overall I`m loving getting to grips once more with Zbrush - I haven`t really touched it much for a few years and can see how it has come on in leaps and bounds in terms of development and usability. I used to be put off by it`s somewhat quirky interface but find now that it all sorta makes sense. I guess the video tutorials are really helping. Right...onwards and upwards.