Turntable

I've posted a couple of still from this mini project over the last couple of nights when I've been working on it. I'm very pleased with how its been going along my aim for the next couple of weeks and from then is to make zbrush the main program being used in my workflow, especially for character work. The aim when I started this project was just to get practise in and hopefully make something portfolio worthy. I decided to start with just a character bust as I wasn't working from any concept art and I wanted this to not be a long drawn out process as I still have uni work to balance with. So really the aim was to concept as I sculpted and create a snapshot of the full character using my full next gen workflow. So I would start with high poly sculpt in zbrush, polypaint and ZappLink for texturing, then construct game res mesh in maya and create maps for the low res. This turntable movie represents a pretty close to finished high poly sculpt. I like the overall simplicity of the piece and the combination of hard surface mask, battered flesh and tubing. When I was adding the tubes I didn't want to over do it visually, hence why I started to using some zsphere tubing as a place holder and sculpted the skin over it to do the impression of tubing just underneath the skin. In terms of short comings and things I need to improve on I think the main thing is just spending the time to improve the organic sculpting and sculpting things like scar tissue. I'm currently using version 3.1 of zbrush so I'm missing a lot of features added in 3.5 and 4, particular things like the hard surface brushed that would really help with the mask. But a good workman doesn't blame his tools, I think the result is good here just could be slightly more polished if I had a few of the features I am looking forward to using. The back of the flesh has had less time spent on it than the front, mainly because the mesh has a rather striking look from the front and 3/4th and seeing as I'm making it game res I like to think about the characters context withing a game. The obvious conclusion I game to was he isn't like to be the protagonist and thus you are likely to only be seeing him from the front and trying to unload a couple of magazines of ammo into him before he rips your head off. So front needs the detail and the back not as much, although this hasn't stopped me making visually interesting detail such as the spine tube, its just meant I've spent a bit less time on the skin on the back. Apologies for the length of the post, I was going to go into the background ideas that have come to me while sculpting this character but I'm waffling as it is so I'll save it for next time.

Untitled from Toby Rutter on Vimeo.