Week two of my CG Society ZBrush course just wrapped and you know what that means...uh, recap time. This week was all Photoshop and no ZBrush, though I did sneak in a few extra speed sculpts just because I wanted to explore the skunk ape possibilities a bit more. Here are the speed sculpts:
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| Gollum-esque skunk ape |
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| Swallow your soul skunk ape |
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| MMA fighter skunk ape |
The last one looks a bit too human, like a dude with serious cauliflower ear and a wicked underbite! Anyway, onto the meat of this week's coursework. Our main goal was to use Photoshop to paint over our yeti/skunk ape busts and add fur, horns, extra appendages, really anything just to allow us to further explore design possibilities. We were also encouraged to take our renders and warp them (or my favorite the Photoshop CS5 and higher "puppet warp"), liquify it, and just plain old distort it to try something new. This was all done in greyscale so we weren't bogged down with color and could really focus on character.The goal was a minimum of 20 painted over busts (typically this would be 5 versions of 4 different sculpts) to get a better handle on the ultimate design. I did a bit more because I had created extra speed sculpts. My final sheet of painted busts can be seen below:
The cool part about this is you can get a real feel for what is working just from scaled down thumbnails. If it works zoomed way out odds are it will work when viewed in greater detail. The instructor commented that the fourth row is the strongest and I tend to agree, this sculpt was my favorite from week one as well! The addition of the orangutan mutton chop only kicks it up to the next level!
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| Skunk ape wants to borrow your beard groomer |
That's it for now, in week three we're moving into picking those aspects we like best from our thumbnails and refining a single model in ZBrush. We'll then push that sculpt into the final phases of this project. I'm starting to think I might get this bust 3D printed just for shits and giggles, plus I'm always on the lookout for more crap to pile on my desk and accumulate dust!