Zbrush artists

The Golygon studios project consists of us having to go through creating a lot of surreal and organic shapes in a low poly art style. A lot of our concept art reveals this so for my research on I decided to look up artists who worked on Warframe. I looked at a lot of Lucas Hugs work who did plenty of zbrush sculpts for the game Warframe. (Hug, September 2009) I'm a personal fan of the game Warframe and seeing I'm responsible for the 3D art stage I decided to see how the artists from digital extremes approached their organic shapes in the game Warframe.

Lucas Hugs Workflow(Vimeo Link) (Hugs, 2014) is something I'd like to mimick in zbrush for the project and any future projects. Unlike most zbrush artists he doesn't use the dynamesh function for the sculpt. Throughout Lucas's workflow he just sculpts the mesh from the base mesh to the detailed version and he was able to maintain a good poly density to get the proper shapes he needed to mimic the concept art.

As described in the video description he first starts off with the general shapes, then goes to first pass detailing and lastly second pass detailing for the whips handle. Like many workflows this is a safe approach when creating any kind of art piece (mainly 2D and 3D) where you start with the basic blocking and then do more detailing once the proportions are figured out.

 

There aren't any tricks or skill requirements when sculpting in 3D. The most important thing for this kind of work is to figure out the best methodology to achieve the form and detail needed. This will require a lot of experimentation figuring out what sculpting tools are best and even have to create your own custom brushes to achieve the desired look. Here is an example of one of the brushes Lucas made for his sculpting.

Another art piece I'd like to look at is Vitaly Bulgarovs Atom Eater (Vitaly Bulgarov, 2015) who didn't just use Zbrush but other programs for his project. He first used Zbrush to sketch out the form he needed and then used a Kitbash he owned to add in some detailed pieces over the Dynamesh sculpt. Once he was satisfied with the body shape he then used the Zremesher to convert the mesh to quads. After converting the mesh to quads he then exported the mesh to a polygon modelling program Softimage.

 

Using these programs he was able to first get the general shape in Zbrush using the Dynamesh and Zremesher scripts to his advantage. For first pass detailing he used his own Kitbash (Bulgarov, 2015) to achieve and for the second pass detailing he did modelling in Softimage which took up the most time in his project.

Though both these artists have different techniques they both use the same basic method where they start from basic shapes and then slowly go into first and second passes for detailing. For someone who  has a basic understanding of Zbrush and is new to digital sculpting it is easier to use Vitalys method. If using Lucas's method you would have to keep topology and poly density in mind while sculpting where with Vitalys you can continually Dynamesh and not have to worry about either. All you need to focus on with Dynamesh is shape and form then Zremesh once done.

Hugs, L.U.C.A.S. (2014). Vimeo. Retrieved 23 October, 2015, from https://vimeo.com/109131114

Hug, L.U.C.A.S. (September 2009). Zbrushcentral. Retrieved 23 October 2015, from http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?183326-My-work-on-quot-Warframe-quot

Vitaly bulgarov, V. (2015, 20 May). Atom-Eater Robot - 3DModelling/Design Timelapse. [Weblog]. Retrieved 04 December 2015, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi6Rg4RaIR4

Bulgarov, V. (2015). Vitalybulgarovcom. Retrieved 11 December, 2015, from http://vitalybulgarov.com/3d-kitbash/