Aaand back to spaceships.

Honestly, browsing my gallery the other day I realized that the number of spaceships in my portfolio is shamefully close to “no spaceships”, so I tried to put a remedy to that.

After a looong hiatus from ZBrush I eventually managed to clumsily put together a mesh to render and eventually paint over.

The endeavor was a confirmation of how terrible my memory is.
I hadn’t touched ZBrush in about a year, and all my recollections of shortcuts, menus and commands were gone.

Muscle memory, gone.

Tricks and slightly more uncommon procedures, gone.

Sure, I kind of knew what I had to do, fortunately that was well settled.
I just couldn’t remember how to do it.

So, well, the sculpting phase took about a dozen lunch breaks or so, as I had to re-learn a whole bunch of things.
Hopefully next time it won’t be as hard. I’ll just have to make sure I can do it again in less than a year.

As an exercise, I tried to stick with a very simple shape – pretty much a box – and see if I could make it interesting anyway.

As always, all my digital painting now happens with the help of Krita.
For this illustration I had to make a whole bunch of brush presets (lasers, scattered stars, noise etc), which I’ll make available for download shortly.

Sure, the most of this drawing comes from the occlusion shadows exported from ZBrush, but still, I’m quite happy with the confidence I’m gaining with the new tools.

Mostly though, regardless of the result, I’m content I managed to get something done with ZBrush.
So much saw that I rendered the turntable animation.

Look at her spin!

AH! The beauty of a spaceship spinning over and over again.
It reminds me of EVE Online.
Good times.

by Paolo Puggioni

2 Responses

1. Bas Mensink says:

   June 2, 2016 at 12:32

   Honestly, send this to CCP! 🙂

   Reply
   • Paolo Puggioni says:

     August 22, 2016 at 11:46

     But it’s in Iceland!

     Reply