Between one thing and another I miraculously managed to carry on practicing with ZBrush.
My progress is still quite slow (did I mention Zbrush’s learning curve being STEEP?).
But it’s steady, and in the past few weeks my lunch breaks have been dedicated to awkwardly mess around with subtools and geometry and Dynamesh and stuff.

Now, I believe I got a good grip on soft surfaces, which is where ZBrush sculpting gets more natural and intuitive.
There’s a bunch of ugly faces on my hard drive, which I will post once I’ve cleaned them up a bit.

Hard surfaces are a bit more fiddly and require more care.
Since I’ve been crap at them from day 1, that’s where I focused my practice on.
So, last week I came up with this.

 

 

Now, it’s not a masterpiece nor particularly imaginative (in fact, it does remind me of the octopus looking things in The Matrix), but I did it!
I mean, I did things that I considered beyond me just a few weeks ago, so I’m quite happy with it.

No fear, I’ll never be a modeller. I find all the technical aspects involved in making your geometry usable by other people quite outside the Kingdom of Things I Like.
Sculpting itself, however, is just pure fun.

It also allows you to do pretty cool things like this with no time or effort:

The reason why I’m starting to love ZBrush more than I should, though, is a bunch of features that could eventually speed up my design process immensely.

IMM (Insert Multi Mesh) Brushes allow you to save bits and pieces of sculpting and reuse them indefinitely, and most importantly, in a very quick way.

Straps, buttons, belts, but also ears, arms, teeth, various body parts, can be saved as brushes and added to a model in no time.

This means that if you’re designing a monster with a hundred noses and eighty stubby wings, you just need to model one nose and one wing and then insert as many instances of them as you need.

Well, it still takes an awful amount of time for me to get anything done in ZBrush, but I guess with more practice I could eventually introduce it in my normal drawing pipeline, and make quick experiments with 3D shapes before committing to a final design.

by Paolo Puggioni