Mesh update - January 22nd

This week I have been able to amend all the problems I found last week and I even managed to get around 80% of my characters face complete, the last 20% are minor polishing amendments which will be completed next week along with polishing up the body further ready for the seminar presentations due in 2 weeks.

So first things first, here are a couple of renders that show all of the areas that had problems, that have now been fixed and enhanced.

• First + second render - What is shown in the first and second image is that I have taken into consideration the comments left on my previous blog posts and have changed the anatomy of my model accordingly, for instance a big chance I undertook was reshaping the size of the torso, I have now made it slightly shorter to match the references that I have been using, however I have still kept my characters legs long. I also changed the shape of the torso very minimally which has given the torso more of a straight look but with a very subtle curve in the main region.
• Third render - In this render I have the fixed hands, in the last blog post I took a render of the hands and what you could see was that the fingers had been fused together, using my knowledge of Zbrush and the tools it offers I was able to un-fuse the fingers and fill the holes in my mesh allowing for the hands to now look a lot better than they were before!
• Fourth render - In the final render you can see that I have fixed the problems that I had with the left foots toes, these are no longer squashed flat and now resemble that of the other foot. 

The most exciting and toughest part of this week has got to be the modelling of the face, while it was extremely satisfying to watch the face gradually form to how I wanted it. As I said in the opening paragraph of my blog, the face is 80% finished, I will just be adding a small amount of polish to it next week.

Here are a couple of renders of the face of my character:

A number of difficulties arose during the sculpt, the two in particular that stopped my progress the longest was the nose and the ears, these proved extremely difficult to complete, however through determination, video guides and a lot of ctrl z'ing I have got them to a point where I am happy with how they look. 

Next week I will be focusing on polishing the entire model and getting appropriate renders ready for the seminar presentation in two weeks time.

-J.W

Bibliography:

ZBDRipley. (2012). Quick Tips: Sculpting the mouth. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsHdcprF-gY. Last accessed 22nd Jan 2016.

Aleksey Bogatyrev. (2013). ear sculpt realtime. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyqkDJhZuKA. Last accessed 22nd Jan 2016.

Mesh update - 16th January

This week I have been working on enhancing the legs so that they are actually able to support a body of this size as well as the legs I attempted to reshape the feet and hands to give them a more human look.

This is what the mesh is looking like now:

As you can clearly see, the legs are now taking on a much broader look, and now they look capable of holding up this torso, While creating the new legs for the character, I attempted to give the feet and hands a more defined look, because before they looked too balloon like.

Unfortunately while I attempted this, the toes of the feet decided to fuse together as did the hands, this was caused due to me using a low resolution while dynameshing, I did however fix this problem on the feet but they are still looking slightly odd, and too long. Another problem I ran into was my zbrush symmetry went out of sync, causing my left foot to look different to my right foot. I have now rectified this problem however I have not changed the feet accordingly, that will be a task for next week.

Here is what the feet and hands look like now:

So, my plans for next week are as follows:

• Define the feet and toes more and fix the left foot accordingly.
• Un-fuse the hands and define the hands to look less balloon-like.
• Compare my model to a person of similar physic and adjust my model accordingly.
• (If I have time before next blog post) Start working on redefining the face, eyes, nose, mouth, ears.

-J.W

8th of January - Christmas holiday update

Hello again!

So this is the first blog post of 2016, in this blog post today I will be sharing with you all the updates I have done on my model and what I have done over the Christmas break when I had spare time.

So first things first, what have I been up to in the small amounts of spare time over the holiday? Well unfortunately I never got chance to actually sit down and work for a long amount of time on the model itself, so instead I decided to dedicate my time to researching the correct way of adding realistic muscle mass to my model.
In total I watched around 12 hours of videos detailing ways of adding muscle mass and I have been reading  Zbrush Digital Sculpting, Human Anatomy by Scott Spencer.

I started working on the model again on the 4th of January and I have been able to start my work on the muscle formation of my character. So far I have been working on the torso for around 5 hours a day from Monday (4th) until today (Friday 8th).

Here is my model as of today(8th January):

As you can see by the images above the muscle formation for the torso is coming along nicely, as a result of making my characters anatomy larger I also had to change his hands which I have also enlarged. 

When creating the muscle formation I increased the amount of polys from 1 million to close to 4 million so that I could add detail at an effective level, due to this the head of my model has lost some of its detail, therefore I will need to go back to the head at a later date to re-define its features and shape. 

The next steps of my model will be to add muscle depth and formation to the legs and feet of my model, because, as you can see, he now looks ridiculous, holding up that strong torso with those scrawny legs. 

I hope everyone reading this had a great Christmas and I look forward to continue working on this project into this new year.

-J.W