Zbrush Modelling

Currently on my Masters course I am working on a project called software 1, which allows me to experiment within my chosen software to create a 3D model. I am currently working towards creating the pre production for my film 'The Cheese Moon of Hillsville' and if it was ever made I would produce the characters faces using 3D printing techniques. I chose to do this as Laika, the fairly new Portland based animation studio, uses this technique to create highly detailed faces. For their first feature 'Coraline' Laika printed only the eyebrows and mouth shapes, painting them by hand, and this allowed them to have around 200,000 different facial expressions with the combination of parts. For their second feature 'ParaNorman' they printed the entire face using rapid prototyping printers which built colour onto the model as they were produced, after digitally sculpting each one in Zbrush. This allowed hem to creed around 1.5 million different facial expressions for Norman alone allowing them to do "proper filmic acting" and giving them a degree of acting that hasn't been seen in the faces before (Butler as cited by Robertson 2012, pp.33). I have been a massive fan of Laika since their first feature 'Coraline' in 2009 and I wish to create a similar level of detail achieved using their facial printing techniques in my own work. I have researched the studio through books such as 'The Art of The Boxtrolls', 'The Art of Paranorman', 'Coraline: A Visual Companion' in articles featured in journals such as 'Computer Graphics World' and through the special features on their DVD's. I also love how they created little featurettes such as 'Making Norman' which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlUxuAG2Ac8 to accompany their films and give people an insight into their film making process.

   

I didn't want to just automatically assume that Zbrush was the best software to use when creating faces for 3D printing simple because Laika use it, so I looked at other options. First of all there was Sculptris. I used Sculptris, a free software from Pixologic, just under a year ago before I bought Zbrush. It was a great introduction to 3D modelling but I found it highly problematic when creating complex shapes. Unlike Zbrush Sculptris is highly easy to use and anyone can create something having only basic software knowledge. The downside to this is it doesn't have a lot of the features that Zbrush does, so there are only so many options you have. I kept finding my model was joining together in areas that I didn't want it to and I had no way of separating it quickly. Overall the software was too problematic for me and although it was easy to use initially with fewer tools than Zbrush the problems it caused outweighed this. Mudbox was another option that I considered. I tried Mudbox last summer after I downloaded it for free under a 3 year student licence from Autodesk. This is a great idea to help students learn a software that would otherwise be very expensive. I spent a long time in Mudbox and it seemed in ways very similar to Zbrush. Overall the reason I chose Zbrush over Mudbox was I struggled to get to grips with the software as easily as Zbrush due to less quality tutorials being readily available, the interface wasn't as easy to pick up, and generally I could create the base sculpt much quicker in Zbrush due to the naturalistic tools. I also considered Maya and SketchUp, but both software seemed more orientated towards hard surface modelling. I have used sketchUp before and I think it is a fantastic software but inappropriate for this project, and Maya was incredibly hard to understand with no great knowledge of 3D software and I really struggled to use it. There was other 3D modelling software options that I could have used for this project such as Modo and 3ds Max, but unfortunately I have been unable to get hold of either of these programs to experiment with. The Foundry (creaters of Modo) offer a student licence for a year for £99 but since I didn't know I would be using the software this seemed a lot of money to simply experiment with, and Autodesk offed a free 3 year download of 3ds Max but unfortunately this is only for Microsoft computers and I only own a Mac.

 


Coming from a traditional fine art background and having previously sculpted using plastercene and clay Zbrush was the easiest for me to move into initially. I purchased the software last year as I liked the look of it and it was a natural progression from Sculptris, therefore I don't have to worry about acquiring it or using another machine such as at University with it on. I know the basics of the software and can produce something simple easily, but still the confusing interface and hundreds of menus and options eludes me, and I now wish to work towards creating a polished high quality character. Previously I have only created 5 models in Zbrush and none of these have been human. I have also never done anything other than sculpt them, and even then I don't feel I have achieved a high quality. During this project I work towards creating a high quality facial sculpt in Zbrush, using brushes and techniques which I have never used before. I wish to add hair and experiment with facial expressions. I will add separate eyes, teeth and a tongue to achieve this. Overall I feel this will be a very challenging project due to my lack of experience in Zbrush but I hope to create all this in the next few weeks before my deadline on the 4th of March.

Here are some of the Zbrush models I have previously created So you can see what sort of level I'm at:

 

Robertson, B. (2012) ‘Face forward: to create ParaNorman, a stop-motion animated feature, the crew uses state-of-the-art technology’, Computer Graphics World, 35(5), pp. 32-37.