Friday 12 August 2011


Ok. first of all this took a lot longer than I thought because this was supposed to have been done almost 4/5 days ago but somehow I have tore apart from the sculpting detail syndrome and started doing a texture blockout! The reason it took this long was pretty much because of Mudbox, I basically decided to sculpt some fine detail here and there but  got carried away and the result looks like some 1 hour speed detailing at the very most.

This is something almost everyone suggests and students including me feel the need to indulge oneself in, yes you've guessed it! It is the need to sculpt detail on every damn organic character or the just anything. The best part is how ironic the whole situation really is because tools like zbrush and mudbox are supposed to speed up the workflow and almost eight to nine times out of ten that's the critical step that slows most students down, (i say most students but mostly me).
Now i wonder why its such a big deal to feel the need to put every charcter in and out of zbrush? I think that my initial response would be that because its something that is widely used by industry professionals and students see the results from these professionals and their incredible sculpts and they anticipate the sculpting process like sweets before even the design is finalized. Let me demonstrate a classic scenario, teacher says " Make a next gen cave explorer" right about now student is thinking of concepts and visualising the character and since the words next gen was mentioned he or she is already having a possible domino effect game-art syndrome.

Making of this character = first he/she's modelling the basic block out of the character and now i must add a lot of detail? how? Zbrush!....and thinks in his mind " I know i have not done the full concept idea yet but lets forget that and jump on to the sculpting process in zbrush because I somehow believe that in zbrush I will find my answers.......eventually"

I know I did not digress as blatantly as that but rather got over zealous with adding detail. Despite the fact that I was using reference this time I was tweaking things such as clothing folds for too long and in the end i ended up scrapping a lot of the sculpted details and of course wasted time with this process.

However when I finally got the maps out and saw some of the results 5 days later, it was slightly satisfying but wondered why I spent all that time? I think it was good that I went through this process now rather than in the middle of uni attempting my mortal engine character. This could have been avoided by having a time restriction because i knew that I can get a block out and uv's done within a day assuming that I have a concept and the texturing done in a day if i REALLY pushed. The fact that i have not attempted sculpting in the middle of the workflow slowed things down because sculpting like painting is an obvious artistic process ( i know modelling is aswell but some people disagree) so its a lot easier to get carried away and waste time. I think this whole digression could be avoided by setting a realistic time limit, follow the concept and try not to make new stuff up just because you can (obvious i know) and finally avoid revisiting areas.

4 comments:

  1. Nice one man, cant wait to see it textured. Im going to have to step up my game man. :b
    Blair told me to look into ambient oclusion bakes on my next charcter, odly enough my next character isa statue, but Im going to texture it normaly anyway and than just change the texture at the end. haha ;b

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  2. Oh by the way, this doesnt count towards the " at very least two charcters over the summer " we were talking about. I know you been working on this one for ages now. :b

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  3. thanks tristan, ye this doesnt count cause i started this at like april and kept modifying the base mesh and uvs for ages and i was supposed to practice sculpting with this almost 2 months ago but been sidetracked with other mini work (2d). but on a positive note this char should have about 3K less tris from the model u saw in april/may time:)

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