There should be a punch line to go with that, don’t you think? I don’t have one. It’s what I worked on this week. In addition to trying to finish putting the Art room back together and figuring out what to do with the stuff that maybe doesn’t belong in there.
At the end of last week’s post I made mention that a date has been set for this year’s ZBrush Summit. As I thought about whether or not to make plans to go in person this year, I thought about how I haven’t really made a lot of progress in my ZBrush skills. I’ve
made a little, but not a lot. I haven’t been spending much time working in ZBrush, I’ve spent it in 3DS Max or Maya where I am comfortable creating lower poly characters that I can then, hopefully, rig for posing in a variety of different ways. In ZBrush, I am still venturing through “the valley of suck”. That’s not to say that everything I do looks awful. It doesn’t. But it’s certainly incomplete. So I got to thinking that I might want to make another effort at improving my ZBrush skills. With that in mind I popped over to YouTube and watched some of the ZClassroom videos as a refresher. That also provided some inspiration for a little experimenting.
The results of the experimenting in ZBrush are this character, or rather, start of a 
character. I have previously tried to create a Squid in ZBrush and as I was doing it I discovered that I started too small and didn’t have the room to create the mouth or beak that is in the middle of all the tentacles. The video I was watching was doing a lot of moving a mouth around to open it and hollow it out and reshape it and so on. It’s a technique I’ve read about, and then tried to implement, and I’ve probably even seen it
before. This time the lesson stuck. So back to this beak. I decided I would give the squid a try again only this time I would start with the beak on the inside and then work out from there. I’m not sure how well it’s going to work but this is the start of that.
The squid head then led me to messing around in my sketchbook and I came up with Squiddy. Don’t let Squiddy’s slouchy posture and apparent delinquent attitude fool you. Squiddy is extremely intelligent, did well in school and all of that. Squiddy just can’t be bothered to explain it all to you. I’m thinking this sketch will be my model going forward on the Squid sculpt. We’ll see. Though, it is a design I would like to be able to rig for animating. Who knows, maybe I’ll get that figured out.
I got a little more work in on the FunkyBird. I’ve got some shape to the leg and kind of know what I’m going to do to finish it off. I just can’t decide if I should go ahead and model feet to go in the bulky boots and then model the boots separate. That’s probably what I should do. Now that I’ve decided that I’ll be able to move forward with the foot and get started on the arm. I still need to work on the face too. That will be interesting. Or not. I have a suspicion that I might not have enough polygons. Guess I will find out. Here are a couple of views of the leg. You can see that once I got a length for the thigh then I went ahead and tapered it. I’ll want to put in a knee and then get in the lower leg and foot.
I didn’t sketch the lower part of the FunkyBird originally so when working on that part, I’m really making it up as I go. Which is fine but it can make it slower to make progress. I’ve got a better idea of what I want to do there now so with enough effort, I could start to make good progress.
I was thinking about how my dilemma with wanting to progress in ZBrush and yet wanting to be able to rig and animate my characters, with relative ease, for me. And I think I’ve got an idea. Sometimes when I doodle I do a sort of bust of a character. Most of the time I don’t get it all filled out but I’ll have an outline and it may include a slight pose which can give a hint of attitude and personality. But not all of these busts, do I want to turn into models to animate. At least, I don’t think I do. So it occurred to me that I can use some of those doodles as reference for sculpts in ZBrush and that would give me something to practice. I still have my other characters and then I have these. And if one of them turns out to be something I want to expand on, then I guess I get to learn how to do that.
That’s my plan for now. I don’t really know how successful I will be at it until I get started with it. It could end up being a lot of fun. Who know’s what you’ll get to see.