zBrush - Sculpting Sessions

First rough practice sessions yielded some nice results. We started out by simply sculpting on top of the default head to try and create something interesting; I chose to exaggerate the forehead, lips and ears to create an alien creature inspired by African art. I envisioned the character as a small tribal creature, possible the elder or chief of the tribe, and so I aged him and created the suggestion of robes. I really enjoyed using zBrush in such a free way; I am very into clay so this is the first time I've really felt like I was sculpting in a tangible medium. It is very satisfying to use zBrush for sculpting as it allows a certain freedom and spontaneity when designing that other programs like Maya don't allow you. It has definitely been the thing I have enjoyed most so far, which surprised me since I was firmly set on the idea of concept art when I came to university. I still enjoy concepting characters but the process of turning a concept into a 3D sculpt is so much more satisfying. We also used the zSpheres workflow to create forms from scratch. I like this workflow and respect the way in which it allowed me to create quickly block out a shape, however the somewhat finicky controls and temperamental nature of the zSpsheres make me much more likely to create a mesh in Maya and import it in that way.

A few sessions later I then created a quick sculpt of a character I usually turn to when it comes to inspiration, one of my own characters called Abbas. He showed up in the first term as my Steampunk character and now I wanted to try my hand at sculpting him using the default skull as a base. I really like how he looks and will definitely carry on at a later stage to add more detail and further refine his features. It's nice to see my characters starting to finally take shape somewhere other than in my head.

In our session on creating armour and clothing from the base body model, I couldn't help but create my own design for the Marvel character Daredevil. I absolutely love how he ended up looking, so much so that I grabbed a quick screenshot and brought it into Photoshop to create a final image. This process just highlighted to me how powerful zBrush is and how quickly I can use it to push out great looking ideas.