One of the major highlights of my journey at the Los Angeles convention to attend sigGRAPH this year was the Zbrush User Group. It was an accidental discovery, thankfully, but one in which I was grateful to be present as my learning curve for Pixologic's new release, dubbed R4R, was considerably preschool to the feeling I had after leaving the meeting which was comparable entering highschool. I am still bashful to the full potentials of each sense-slapping update, so these meetings and any outside knowledge of Zbrush is welcomed by me with open arms.
Even for experts, there's always some piece of advice, some tactic, that can be learned and applied to speed up a workflow or cut some corners.
And, no doubt, I was surrounded by experts.
So what I learned along with the fact that there is such great talent out there, I also have the privledge to learn from that great talent, too.
Presenting the opening demo was Mr. Eric Keller, the author of the book I've been progressing through -- "Introducing Zbrush". Suffice to say that he has now completed his Third Edition of this book, the bare necessities of what it takes to operate Zbrush on a fundamental level are definitely within his first edition. That book has helped me tremendously with getting comfortable navigating a foreign interface such as zbrush, and meeting Eric in person was a nice entrance into the start prior to opening of sigGRAPH's exhibition hall.
The meeting had also given me the chance to become familiar with Scott Spencer and the opportunity to watch him at work. Scott was mentioned early in Eric's book. Eric sourced the reader to Scott's book if an artist was considering working with zbrush in animation versus creating sculptures for still renderings. The book sited was a called 'Zbrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital Sculpting' (which I believe is on its second edition currently). As Scott walked through examples of his work, it was clear Scott could flaunt his saviness in anatomy and he has a books out to prove it.
He took us for a refreshing breeze through of the latest updates that r4r offers, which currently labels zbrush as a benchmark alongside other 3D software. After watching the link demoing the updates via Pixolgic's direct website a week beforehand, I was then able to take a closer look that these modifications and the variances of options available working with them.
This may be old news to the most avid and up-to-date users, but the new release as of July 2012, some of the largest rave has been going to the topology brush. It allows the user to step back from sculpting and focus in on the underlying components to help make a character more functional for animation, or retopolgy. In a simple way of understanding what the brush does, one can fix a model beneath the 'surface' or structure in sections called "quadrants". A model can also be built from scratch this way structuring the quadrants before sculpting by interactively drawing on the surface. Quads can be made, connected, redrawn, and removed by adjusting and dragging the curves and points between one quad and another. The plane can be extruded to create shells, which enhances the ability for drafting a hard surface model, which was sometimes a difficult feat in previous versions of zbrush. In the summary of this wordy nutshell, the topology brush makes this all seems too easy. If you haven't yet, take a look at the Pixologic demo on the Topology Brush Demo. Only eyes can interpret what my words might fail to explain.
Other handy features are the ability to scoll backward and forwards through sculpting history, the insert multi mesh brush, a multitude of abilties with working with curves, and an extensive list of added features to more organized stack of collapsable menus.... There's so much, really, both covered and unconvered in the span of 3+ hours of the meeting. To view all of the features: Link here.
My excitement mostly came from in the usage of the insert mesh brush in tandem with the curve and snap modifiers demoed by Scott, and the idea of using MatCap modifiers to mimic viewing shaders, but with a real-time updating-- something which is not predominant in some 3D packages yet.
The remainder of the demo was commanded by Paul Gaboury, who has quite an ease up there as well as well a great sense of humor. It really makes his presentations easy to sponge. He breezed through some shadow-box modeling techniques with the dynamesh/subtools combos and blocked out areas of rgb's in order to get a sense of where he would be cutting up his model for extruding seperate plates of armor to dress up his character with the topology brush. His demo was quick, humorous, and to the point, consistent to the way he had been at the last meeting I attended, commading the mic at these meetings and keeping the energy of the audience flowing.
It was a long day for me-- Up all night packing and preparing my work, and a sleepless seat in the middle on a six hour flight from New York. By the end of the night, my head was throbbing with an overload of knowledge but unwelcome painful exhaustion. With all I had left in me, I teethered at the back of the hanger watching Paul cover part of the final Q+A before heading to get some aspirin and stop in at Denny's for a quick late meal. All in all, the Zbrush meeting was well worth renting a car to me. I hadn't realized until that day it wasn't part of the convention itself!
The booth at the exhibit itself covered the same type of material, except different artists were debuting and raffled prizes were being given away. Danny Williams had the run of the show at one point or another and the maquettes being raffled were pretty damn amazing. I didn't hang around too long at the booth, but passed by and hovered occasionally, of course, in case I had missed anything.
I like to feed my brain with everything I can while at sigGRAPH.
I can get lost in just about anything on exhibit there. It's happened every years so far...
But, Zbrush was like desert for me this year-- A definite mandatory vactaioning treat.
And speaking of vacations.................
Even for experts, there's always some piece of advice, some tactic, that can be learned and applied to speed up a workflow or cut some corners.
And, no doubt, I was surrounded by experts.
So what I learned along with the fact that there is such great talent out there, I also have the privledge to learn from that great talent, too.
Presenting the opening demo was Mr. Eric Keller, the author of the book I've been progressing through -- "Introducing Zbrush". Suffice to say that he has now completed his Third Edition of this book, the bare necessities of what it takes to operate Zbrush on a fundamental level are definitely within his first edition. That book has helped me tremendously with getting comfortable navigating a foreign interface such as zbrush, and meeting Eric in person was a nice entrance into the start prior to opening of sigGRAPH's exhibition hall.
The meeting had also given me the chance to become familiar with Scott Spencer and the opportunity to watch him at work. Scott was mentioned early in Eric's book. Eric sourced the reader to Scott's book if an artist was considering working with zbrush in animation versus creating sculptures for still renderings. The book sited was a called 'Zbrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital Sculpting' (which I believe is on its second edition currently). As Scott walked through examples of his work, it was clear Scott could flaunt his saviness in anatomy and he has a books out to prove it.
He took us for a refreshing breeze through of the latest updates that r4r offers, which currently labels zbrush as a benchmark alongside other 3D software. After watching the link demoing the updates via Pixolgic's direct website a week beforehand, I was then able to take a closer look that these modifications and the variances of options available working with them.
This may be old news to the most avid and up-to-date users, but the new release as of July 2012, some of the largest rave has been going to the topology brush. It allows the user to step back from sculpting and focus in on the underlying components to help make a character more functional for animation, or retopolgy. In a simple way of understanding what the brush does, one can fix a model beneath the 'surface' or structure in sections called "quadrants". A model can also be built from scratch this way structuring the quadrants before sculpting by interactively drawing on the surface. Quads can be made, connected, redrawn, and removed by adjusting and dragging the curves and points between one quad and another. The plane can be extruded to create shells, which enhances the ability for drafting a hard surface model, which was sometimes a difficult feat in previous versions of zbrush. In the summary of this wordy nutshell, the topology brush makes this all seems too easy. If you haven't yet, take a look at the Pixologic demo on the Topology Brush Demo. Only eyes can interpret what my words might fail to explain.
Other handy features are the ability to scoll backward and forwards through sculpting history, the insert multi mesh brush, a multitude of abilties with working with curves, and an extensive list of added features to more organized stack of collapsable menus.... There's so much, really, both covered and unconvered in the span of 3+ hours of the meeting. To view all of the features: Link here.
My excitement mostly came from in the usage of the insert mesh brush in tandem with the curve and snap modifiers demoed by Scott, and the idea of using MatCap modifiers to mimic viewing shaders, but with a real-time updating-- something which is not predominant in some 3D packages yet.
The remainder of the demo was commanded by Paul Gaboury, who has quite an ease up there as well as well a great sense of humor. It really makes his presentations easy to sponge. He breezed through some shadow-box modeling techniques with the dynamesh/subtools combos and blocked out areas of rgb's in order to get a sense of where he would be cutting up his model for extruding seperate plates of armor to dress up his character with the topology brush. His demo was quick, humorous, and to the point, consistent to the way he had been at the last meeting I attended, commading the mic at these meetings and keeping the energy of the audience flowing.
It was a long day for me-- Up all night packing and preparing my work, and a sleepless seat in the middle on a six hour flight from New York. By the end of the night, my head was throbbing with an overload of knowledge but unwelcome painful exhaustion. With all I had left in me, I teethered at the back of the hanger watching Paul cover part of the final Q+A before heading to get some aspirin and stop in at Denny's for a quick late meal. All in all, the Zbrush meeting was well worth renting a car to me. I hadn't realized until that day it wasn't part of the convention itself!
The booth at the exhibit itself covered the same type of material, except different artists were debuting and raffled prizes were being given away. Danny Williams had the run of the show at one point or another and the maquettes being raffled were pretty damn amazing. I didn't hang around too long at the booth, but passed by and hovered occasionally, of course, in case I had missed anything.
I like to feed my brain with everything I can while at sigGRAPH.
I can get lost in just about anything on exhibit there. It's happened every years so far...
But, Zbrush was like desert for me this year-- A definite mandatory vactaioning treat.
And speaking of vacations.................
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