Zbrush Workshops class, summer 2014

Below is the character I created for my summer course at zbrushworkshops.com.  The goal of the course was to create a concept for a character, then a digital maquette, and finally a production friendly mesh with good UVs and topology.

This is the final character with effects and lighting in viewport 2.0.  All of the materials a standard Maya materials (lambert, blinn, phong) no DX11.

This is the T-posed, neutral character prior to rigging with UVs and textures in Maya.


 Here is a version of the costume in Zbrush.  This is all dynamesh/zremesh geo and no retopo or UVs. As you can see, the design continued to evolve into what you see above (no satchel or cape etc.).  I liked some aspects of this version of the character, but the overall silhouette still felt like it could be pushed  more.   

Here is a tutorial on the Dynamesh and Zremesh techniques I used in Zbrush.


Here is a breakdown of developing the ethereal flame on the sword.


Early stages.  This was the first pass of polypaint, after connecting all the skin pieces via dynamesh.

Here is what the rough, sculpted costume looked like.  I arrived at the costume by sketching over the nude character in photoshop and used lots of reference to help narrow my choices.

Next, I took a decimated version of the dynameshed skin in to Maya to see the sculpt through a conventional lense, and start to retopo.   I was experimenting with the hair, and it felt all wrong for this character.


After a retopo pass on the face, I took a stab at some very rough expressions to see how the topology held up.

Here are some shots at the first retopo pass.

Here is a WIP of the UVs for the costume....Zzzzz. :-)

Here are some shots of the texture process for the character.  This is on the lowres, re-topoed models with good UVs as polypaint.  No texture projection was used on these.  All the textures are hand painted or procedural.

More images coming soon!