Mermaid

I skipped hard surface task as I done a lot of hard surface sculpting for my Spec 3D project. Though I played with new tools when was making the necklace for my mermaid. I liked the shadowbox, however sometimes it's very hard to cleanup the mesh. For no apparent reason dynamesh was creating thousands of holes in my mesh. Panel loops are good for concepting, but when I tried to remesh the model, it separated all the panels like if they were separate meshes from the very beginning and created a gap between them. In the end I decided just to go ordinary way and sculpt the necklace by using Dam,Trim,Clay Bild and hPolish brushes. But I will give new tools a go again sometime later.

To made actual strip with beads I created custom insert brush.

I started my mermaid design with Zsketch. From the very beginning I knew that I want to give her octopus tentacles instead of fish tail. And also I wanted to sculpt a beautiful long neck, like swan or deer neck (don't ask me why, I don't know, I just wanted to). I wanted to make her a good kind of mermaid, not evil, not like a witch from Disney's movie. Now when I look at it I can clearly see that at the time I totally decided to skip the legs and the hands day XD. I am not afraid of hands anymore, not after making male and female figures. I probably just decided that I will take a break from them. It wasn't intentional though. 

I made myself a nice moodboard to help me with a design.

I wanted to make my mermaid very feminine and gentle. I wanted to make her that way, so you can still be attracted to her character, even though there is not much from a human in her. To give her more personality I had think about the way she would dress. For reference I looked at different sorts of Asian traditional dresses, as well as at some African and Indian tribe costumes. 

I liked how some of the tribes used scarification in patterns of dots. I don't like when it is too pronounced, but when it's subtle it looks very beautiful. 

On most of my reference pictures women were decorated with all sorts of handbands and bracelets. However I didn't want to add too much.

Even though I think that this kind of decoration looks absolutely stunning, I wasn't sure if it would be legit in underwater world. I wanted her body do be her main decoration, like a white swan that is very beautiful all by it's own.

Lots of small things can disturb movement in the water, but then something big, that would be considered too heavy on earth, can be used as accessory under water as gravity is different there.

To create tentacle circles I sculpted one of them, then grabbed doc and edited it in photoshop.

It worked pretty well with intensity set 25-40 depending on the size needed.

For her face I didn't really use any reference, I just sort of tried to find it. I think she came out quite Asian looking, and i must say I like it. And she's not evil at all, at least to me she looks very friendly.

Some basic hair accessory.

This is not the end, I will pose her and render same way I rendered dragon. It may not happen by the end of the module, but it will happen in next few days. So if you are interested you can follow me on ARSTATION  I will post her there.

Edit:

Here I posed her using TPose Master. I took zsketch with which i started and edited it to make it work. I made her pose a bit more asymmetrical. I turned her head a bit, changed arms and tweaked tentacles. I will be rendering her in approximately this angle.

EDIT! - FINAL PAINTING LINK - http://www.artstation.com/artwork/mermaid-5ca975ae-e658-4b9e-9c2b-71642ee6cd51

Female Pose

Even though we were provided with reference photos for female pose task too, I decided to find my own reference. Not that I thought that reference provided was bad, poses were good and one of them looked very challenging. But after male figure I wanted to go with something more subtle and gentle. 

(masked just in case if any children will ever view my blog XD)

I was lucky and found 360 turnaround animation on DeviantArt by lexlucas. Animation was good wuality enough to use as a reference and pose was just what I wanted.

I followed steps from the tutorial and started with the mannequin.

Doing this sculpt was harder and easier at the same time. Harder, because there were no symmetry on this time. Easier, because my understanding of the human body in 3D space improved after doing male figure. I followed all lines as tight as possible, but still allowed myself some space for adjustment in few areas. 

I also used mannequin hands. Connecting the head and hands to the body was a real pain without using dynamesh. I didn't want to use dynamesh, because it would ruin the feeling of limbs being separate. Clay brushes didn't work as smooth as you would expect them to, sometimes it felt like brush is only sculpting on one mesh but skipping another, that produced blobs. Anyway, I managed in the end somehow.

I also sculpted the head for female figure. I didn't follow reference exactly, my goal was just to create appealing female face, and I quite like the outcome. Especially considering that it was my first time ever sculpting the female face.

Like with dragon sculpt, I decided to make a nice render with a bit of Photoshop. I wanted to get that metal figure look. So I simply done metal render pass + some rim light and AO shadow passes. And played with blending modes in Photoshop. Have't really done any painting here, just random stuff on the background.

You can find high res images of her at my artstation

LINK>>> http://www.artstation.com/artwork/female-anatomy-practice

Male sculpt

I started sculpting straight away without using ecorche technique. I felt confident enough to go with sculpting from the start as I've been studying human anatomy for quite few years now. But even though I haven't painted anything, I still used my clay brush to make identification lines first.

This exercise was extremely helpful for me as I was able to fill my blind spots, the angles that I never drew before. After all those years of studying it was embarrassing to find out that I still don't understand how armpit area is connected. Scapula and clavicle connection point became more clear to me too.

As reference I used photos that we've been provided with+ my own reference scans from books.

 Sculpting hand was the most hard task from all the body. I am still not happy with a result, it probably will take me about 10 sculpts more to get something decent. But it helps, hands were my weak spot, now I really want to study them and not skipping them every time I draw.

Sculpting head was the most fun bit. Though I failed a bit here too. There is some level of similarity, but not really high. I wanted to sculpt Vin Diesel, found some good reference images, unexpectedly it was quite hard, especially considering how famous is this actor. The main problem with my reference images was that almost all angles were of a person of different age. At least it felt that way.

Second reason why I failed at it, is beacuse I wanted to try how similar I can make the model without using spotlight. Next time I will definitely go with the spotlight.

Despite all the trouble, when everything was joined into one piece, it looked much better. When head or hand are on their own, mistakes look more critical, but when they become part of something bigger, you don't pay that much attention to them. I am quite happy with how whole thing came out, and it definitely was a very good practice.

Dragon bust

Our first task was to get familiar with Zbrush sculpting tools by creating character bust. As I already been familiar with most of them because of my Spec3D project I decided to use this opportunity for something more. I wanted to explore rendering in Zbrush.

At the lecture I started basic sculpt of some sort of lizard. I went with sphere->dynamesh method as it felt most appropriate for that kind of task.

When I got back home I made myself a moodboard. I always work with reference as I feel that it improves the quality of my work. There are too many things in the world to simply remember how all of them work and look. 

At that point I decided that I want to go with some sort oh humanoid dragon creature. So I blended the anatomy of the dragon/lizard head with human shoulders.

I gave him very large trapezius muscle to create more gradual transition from body to the head, like on actual lizards.  At that point I had about 70% of mys design do and it was just a matter of polishing and putting more details. To create some patterns on armor and jewellery I made some custom alphas.

I used a bit of gaussian blur on both of them, it helps to get rid of harsh pixelated edges. 

When all sculpting been done I used default Zbrush alphas to create skin texture. I didn't use it on all the surtface, just on some spots, it is enough to trick the eye into thinking that this is a skin.

All the colours and textures been added in Photoshop. I made many different render passes in Zbrush, some were for rim lights, some were for shadows. Horns and gold bits were on separate subtools, so I just rendered them with different materials. 

You can find a high res image here - http://www.artstation.com/artwork/dragon-concept