Hey! Let me use the opportunity to say THANK YOU for all the comments and critics I received on every thread I made on my website! I know it’s sometimes difficult finding the time to write a few lines. There is so much amazing stuff around and you can’t post everywhere. I value every feedback! Thank you!
In December I had the honor to create a few models for the amazing Lee Perry Smith (http://infinite.cgsociety.org/gallery/) He gave me his basemesh and reference pictures and I did some sculptures and passed them on to Lee again for further shading, lighting, texturing and rendering. He is a true genius when it comes down to let this stuff look real. So, don’t forget to visit his portfolio. I’m sure you will be amazed by what is possible today! Soon these models will be released through his site for purchase and study. So stay tuned! I completed this project with some personal “clothes studies” as you can see above. I’m not that happy on how the rendering turned out but I had not enough time for further tweaking. Additionally we have tons of snows here and I prefer going snowboarding than sitting in front of my workstation As always, I did the rendering in 3ds max with VRay. I have placed some directional spotlights to enhance the shadows and achieve some nice rim light. No HDRI was used this time. For the material I have interlaced some falloff maps together with a VRay dirt map. The overall look maybe would be somewhat better if I would change the main color, but the folds and wrinkles turned out quite nicely. I have worked only on the character itself with normal and displacement maps. The clothes parts are full resolution exports from ZBrush.

Shari

It was great fun to do the clothes. I tried some new techniques and made a few new brushes. If you should be interested in the process, feel free the check out the short breakdown in the article section. I made the brushes and one part of the robe also available for download. The sculpting process was quite straightforward. First I made some large scale changes on a very low subdivision level and then I stepped up immediately to the highest subdivision and worked there on all the details.

Inspiration

I love the Christmas time. The year is coming to an end, the whole stress is almost over and what can be better than some white powder snow and you with your board on top of a mountain… We have some Christmas rites that we are practicing every year. Without them, it’s not Christmas One part of the preparation is not only the Christmas tree but also the nativity scene. When I was a child, I was building it together with my father one day before Christmas Eve. Now I’m older and doing it alone I was always fascinated by the small painted figures. I can remember unpacking the stuff sometimes already in summer because I couldn’t wait until Xmas to see them again… They are old but not precious. (Maybe they would, if they were made out of wood) Actually most of them are looking pretty sleazy. Nevertheless I could look at them for hours and was captivated by the clothes. I have even tried to rebuild bigger versions of them out of wax and wood but have always failed. Today I’m able to do that digitally. Maybe I should make one for next Xmas, print it out and place it in the scene? I’ll see…

More models

The following screenshots show a few other models I made for Lee Perry Smith. You will find a textured and rendered version of the first one, “Dimension J” in his portfolio (http://infinite.cgsociety.org/gallery/702969/) I made the hands and feet only for the first sculpt. For all other versions I have changed only the head and truncus and made some scale adjustments on the extremities. The hair is nothing more than a placeholder. Lee will replace it with “real hair” later on. I have noticed that the style of the hair is very important for rebuilding a characters face. If it has to look similar to the reference images, the hairline can give you some great landmarks for the rest of the head. For me it is much more complicated to recreate the likeness of a face without the hair…

Interesting Links

Once again, here is a link list of some websites and stuff. Some of them helped me through the last project; some are just useful on everyday’s work.

http://tomaskral.cz/ great artist, great portfolio, great website
http://www.pointpusher.com/ beautiful work! don’t forget to check Daniel’s blog
http://www.artrenewal.org/ most of you will already know this site. VERY important!!
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/ visit the “sketchbook” forum. It’s exploding for all the creativity…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7FQzZqPAnQ&NR=1 keeps me motivated

Finally, after a few weeks I had the time to sculpt something new. I did this work mainly to stay tuned relating to anatomy and the human body while I was searching for a position as digital modeler. After I had done the human figure I couldn’t stop modeling and so I created the tentacle swinging around his body. This was one of these “lazy ass” ideas that comes into your mind at first, when you think about what you could add to make it more interesting. I have noticed that I have forgotten many technical subtleties and tricks that helped me on the modeling process. So it was time to go over these things again. I love doing that as much as I love the actual sculpting The final rendering you see above was done in 3ds Max and Vray as render engine. The settings are very basic. There are two Vray and a directional light in the scene. The yellowish tint on the left and the bluish one on the right are coming from a HDRI, placed in the VRay environment slot. The rendering itself takes only a few minutes. As I noticed in some projects I did in the past, it’s sometimes not necessary to crank up all the render settings to highest quality. The noise that you get on medium settings can look good too. You save time on rendering and you don’t have to add it in post. The final look could be OK for first presentation but there should be much more space for better quality if I would work on the light setup and maybe on some maps for the model – next time…

Work Horse Zbrush

I did all the sculpting work in ZBrush. Last month I had the chance to work with the Autodesk Mudbox 2009 trial version. I think they did a good job on the new release. Some new features seem to be really great, assumed you have the right hardware that supports them. But overall I miss some tools that I use every day when I work in Zbrush, like the transpose tool for example. I hope that people at Pixologic are already working on crazy stuff like real-time HDRI lighting or viewport depth of field for the next release
On this project I was working with the same basemesh that I already used on all the other models that you can find on this website. If you should be interested in using it for you one project, go to the article section and download the free model. Delete all the subdivisions and use the smooth brush to get rid of all the details. The basemesh for the tentacle and the bowels was done in 3ds max – just simple poly modeling. As you can see in the screenshots, I have saved my one brush palette. Basically these are the same brushes as the standard once that come with ZBrush. I did just slight adjustments on the brush intensity, the brushmode, the falloff curve and the used Alpha map. During an early stage of sculpting on a low resolution mesh I use the Clay brush in combination with the standard brush. When I work on a higher subdivision level, a tuned flatten brush does a very good job. When I have to pose or rescale certain parts of the model, I use the transpose tool or the transpose master plugin. Pixologic.com has just made a new download centre available, where you can download many of these useful tools. Sometimes I export the lowest resolution of the model and load it into 3ds max for really subtle changing. Make sure that you leave the vertices order as it is, otherwise your model will mess up when you import it back at the lowest subdivision in ZBrush.

Model: Haruto

This time I tried to record some parts of the modeling process. It was the first time I did this and I wasn’t confident enough to record the whole sculpting session. It feels like someone is constantly watching you… By the way the recording process inside ZBrush slowed down the viewport speed a little bit. I will try to record the whole process when I do the next sculpt. At the bottom of this break you will find ten minutes footage that shows me working on different part of the figure. To be honest, it’s quite boring, just simple pushing and pulling.

I stay on a very low resolution level as long as I can. The main shapes have to be in balance. Until I’m not satisfied with the overall composition and the way how the skull, thorax and pelvis relateing to each other and to the extremities, I don’t step up in subdivision. At this stage I work with the move and clay brush. Later, when something isn’t looking as good as it should, I come back to this lowres state and try to fix the error here. Keep an eye on the outline of your sculpture. The lines should “flow in rhythm”. It’s good to change the materials sometimes. Some of the Matcap materials are great for displaying fine details, with others it’s easier to concentrate on the overall form.

I start to refine the model on a higher subdivision level. You can call it detailing if you want, but for me it isn’t really detailing in terms of adding more and more details. Let me try to explain this: When you begin to hide certain parts of the model to focus on the arm, the feet or the head, only your work area becomes smaller. The hand on a higher subdivision level gets as big as the whole body on a lower subdivision level. That refers not to the size the model takes on the screen, but the way you look at it as an “artist”. I try to see the hand as a whole body for example. The fingernail is in relationship with the knuckle like the feet correlate to the knee when the whole model is visible. (I’m sure I could explain this much better if my English would be better…)

Download Haruto Turntable naked 7 MB (right click, save as)
Download Haruto Turntable Complete 7 MB (right click, save as)

Conclusion

I’m doing this modeling stuff for more than one and a half year know. I have learned all the anatomy stuff to a certain degree. I have tried to build a working pipeline from concept drawing to the final digital sculpture; from a rough basemesh to the final presentation. I am much more into art in general as I was it a few years ago… A few days ago I was jogging through the snow in the forest near our house. The mountains were tint dark red by the evening sun. They were glowing between the trees like coal in the fire. It was fucking cold. These are the moments where your mind is able to think completely clear. I could remember some people told me, that you can already see by the way my models look, that it is my work; that it is my style. I believe that should be foot for thought. I feel that style is sometimes nothing more than bad habits. In my opinion, parts of my models have my “personal style” when I stop trying to become better, to make it more realistic or more crazy or real or unreal; or whatever you want. Style is standstill. When I was back home again, I decided that I will try to forget all the rules and stuff that I have learned over the last years, start from scratch and make everything new. Reinhold Messner (mountaineer and explorer) wrote in one of his books: “Possession is boring. Only the challenge is important.”
Wish me good luck…

Interesting Links

I will post a few links on every new entry I write on this website. You will find here not only work from diverse artists but also any other stuff, that helped me doing the project and keeps me inspired and motivated. Maybe some of you will find something useful for your one project.

http://www.avatarsculptureworks.com mind blowing artwork by Jamie Salmon and Jackie K. Seo
http://www.malanjo.net amazing portfolio of Miguel Angelo
http://www.fx81.com stunning portfolio of Mashru Mishu, great character sculptings!
http://infinite.cgsociety.org/gallery/ the most realistic digital girls I have seen so far by Lee Perry Smith
http://www.jelmerboskma.com great portfolio of Jelmer Boskma, beautiful renderings and very strong traditional skills
http://www.ryankingslien.com Ryan Kingslien is one of the main forces behind the fusion of traditional and digital art.

Finally it’s done! It took me quite a while to get the content together for my sculpting reel 2008. It doesn’t turn out as good as I planned it initially but anyway, it’s always good to know when there is room for improvements. All in all it was a great experience bringing the sculptures to life, based on initial sketches over sculpting to the final rendering.

At the beginning I did a lot of research and collected everything where I thought it could be useful during the modeling process. A few months ago, when I was learning all the anatomy stuff, body structure, faces etc. I already had some ideas for the kind of character that could be interesting to sculpt. And so I have watched some movie classics again that I have seen years ago in hope for finding an already elaborated character, which I could use as a basis for further studies. A movie character has already a lot of personality, assumed his role is well written and the actor did his job. But the most important fact is, that the character is already part of a story; part of something much bigger than him. A few of this stories induces me to build my one virtual environments where a character had to play his or her role. With this foundation I could focus more on the sculpting work than designing a completely new character from scratch.

I have learned that the designing process could take weeks and can be very intensive if you have to come up with something never seen before. It can be an amazing but also very frustrating time, when you try to reach your deep inner, where you eventually will find what you’re searching for. (Yes, I know that sounds scary).

To cut a long story short, this is my digital sculpting reel 2008. If you want, just click on the video at the bottom of this page or use one of the download links. Enjoy!
(A hint for everyone who is going to create a show reel: don’t use any kind of gradient as a background for your reel. You can get into trouble when you compress it for online presentation)

More Picture: Sebastian

More Picture: Susan

More Picture: John

Digital Sculpting Showreel 2008

Download HighRes Mirror 1: 50mb (right click, save as)

Download HighRes Mirror 2: 50mb (right click, save as)

Download HighRes Mirror 3: 50mb (right click, save as)

Show Reel on YouTube (very low quality)

This post contains my first attempt in figure sculpting. Before that I adventure myself only into body parts and not the body as a whole. As reference I used the amazing photo collection on http://www.human-anatomy-for-artist.com. I spend a few days on every model and started always with the same basemesh, except for the female body. As always I did some sketches to grasp the overall shape. After this I subdivided the mesh in Zbrush once and blocked-in the main masses. At this stage it’s important that you see the single parts in relation to each other.

I left myself time on the lowpoly mesh. If it looks kinda wrong with a few polygons, it will definitely look wrong with many polygons. I think for defining a human face on a basic level, you never need much more than ten to fifteen thousand polygons. I took a step forward not until I was satisfied with the look of the model at the current state. It gets harder and harder to make large changes on a higher subdivision level. If I had to correct large parts of the model, for example the position of the head, I stepped down through my subdivisions and made the changes there.

Male 02

Because I build the models only for testing purpose, I considered them as finished before I add the last subdivision level for final detailing. Don’t forget to check the article section. I have made this model available for free download.

Head and hair are made out of the same piece of geometry. If I would shape this for production I would definitely keep them apart. If you use the same basemesh to build different human characters, a lot of pinching and stretching is going on. So it is necessary to retopologize the mesh. Only a clean mesh with logical edge flow can be used for rigging and animation.

Female 01

The female body is something very special. The basic anatomy is almost identical to the male body. The bones, muscles and ligaments are the same, but it’s different to model a female character. You have to be careful when modeling muscles and boney landmarks. It’s easy to push them to hard and end up with a sculpture that looks to masculine. On the male body it’s not tragic when the biceps brachii becomes too big.

Wireframe

The last image shows the basemesh that was the same for all three models. Only for the female sculpting I have moved the vertices a little bit.

"I cannot draw!" Almost everyone says that more than once, including myself. And that’s totally true if you do nothing to change that. It would be correct to say that actually everyone can draw. Most people were drawing in their childhood until some adult made the huge mistake to tell them their scribbling looks crappy. So it happened to me.

In elementary school I was asked to draw a squirrel on the blackboard in front of the class. (Maybe because the teacher wasn’t able to draw it) And so I went to the blackboard and tried my best. When I was done, the teacher start laughing. She said that it never ever looks like a squirrel and maybe everyone else in the class could draw it better than me (you have to know that where I live these animals are quit common). So I looked at my sketch and noticed that she was right, it looked more like a cat hit by a car. This was the moment when I realized that I cannot draw and it’s better to put away my pencil. But tell me now, who can draw a fucking squirrel out of his head without any draft?

This is my story about losing the ability, the passion and foremost the fun at drawing. But I’m sure many of you can report similar. From there on every time I made a line on paper, a voice in my head told me that it doesn’t look good enough. Drawing is hard work; you have to learn how to see in order to learn how to draw. It’s not something that happens over night. If you’re telling yourself that you’re 100% untalented, make at least 500 drawings within the next 12 months (take your time for every attempt) and I bet you will never say that again.

I thought I should give it try, no matter how bad it gets and I arrived at the point where I’m having a lot of fun again. My scribbles are still far away from good (if you would like to know what I mean when I say good, then go and visit http://www.conceptart.org/forums/ and you know immediately what I’m talking about).

In this post you will find a mix between master copies (mainly Michelangelo, Raphael, and Dürer) and drawings from photos that I found on Google or did by myself. Last year I attended a figure drawing course. I recommend this to everyone because drawing from two dimensional sources isn’t the same as drawing from real life.

When I start a drawing session, I try to familiarize myself with pencil and paper. To get a sense of security I always do a warming up. I take a blank piece of paper and draw straight lines (as straight as possible) and circles (as round as possible). I fill the whole page and if I feel my arm or my body is still kinda stiff then I do yet another round (you should always draw with your whole body, so relax .

The last two heads are copies of drawings that I found on the web. I can’t find the website again and I don’t know the artists name. So if somebody has seen the original, please send me the link so I can list it here and give the artist credit for the wonderful work.

When I was done with my anatomy studies, the next step was to transfer the knowledge into form. This sounds quite easy. When you know where the muscles and bones are, it should be no problem to sculpt something that looks correct. So I started sculpting and put in all the muscles, bony landmarks and everything I have learned. When I was finished, I stepped back, examined what I have build and was happy with the result – for a few seconds. Then I was really shocked. Although every anatomical part was on the right place, the model looked “death”. I moved on to the next sculpt, but same problem here. It was a stiff something that had similarity with a torso, an arm, a hand or a head but it had no life in it. It was a boring accumulation of body parts.

Bodyparts: Pelvis

Knowing the name of muscles and bones, their origin and insertion, is something totally different then knowing how they expand in three dimensional spaces. I think you need both to solve the task of building a working figure. I’m still trying to bring these two worlds together. To reach perfection it would take more than one life (except you’re the next Michelangelo). If you are able to use your anatomical knowledge and the knowledge about shape together during the sculpting session and doing that kinda intuitive, then the door is open to express yourself through the sculpture (at least I think so, I’m still far away from that point).

Bodyparts: Antebrachius

I’ve deliberately left myself time for many speed-sculpting sessions. I jump from hands to feet, from thorax to face features and back to hands again. When I wasn’t able to sculpt a part decent, I went back to my drawing table and the anatomy books.

Bodyparts: Cranium

Sometimes a shape can be that complex that you need days to understand how it works. For example, the bones of the pelvis are twisted a few times and it’s everything else than obvious how they are connected. Now you’ll say that you never see the pelvis of a human figure because it lies deep under muscles. Let me tell you, that’s a false conclusion. You can’t model the outside if you don’t know a little bit of the inside, too. And it’s not true that you can’t see anything from the underlying structure.

The only way to improve your skills is training. Do as many of these quick sculpting sessions as you can. The models don’t have to be perfect or ready to be published. Do it just for your one. If I browse through my speed-sculpting folders I can see that I became slightly better from one model to the other. But there’s still a lot to be done.

A few years ago I held one of John Brown’s Gnomon workshop DVD’s in my hands. I was amazed by the quality of his work and the technique he used to define basic shapes and work out details. Back then I was totally in environment modeling and not so into characters. As I started to focus my interest on the human figure, I thought it would be the ideal time to unpack the DVD again. No sooner said than done, I found myself down in our cellar with a bunch of clay. It wasn’t easy to collect the tools Mr. Brown use in his lessons. Sometimes I had to improvise.

The sculpting task was an amazing experience, although the result wasn’t that great. Somewhere down the road I noticed that I was using the wrong clay (wrong clay doesn’t exist, it was just not the one John Brown used in his tutorial). The clay I used was way too hard. It worked very well on small parts of the sculpture like the fingers, but it harden out too fast when I was working on large masses. So if you’re going to buy clay and if you don’t want to build total crazy stuff, make sure you buy the normal one (usually it goes somehow from soft over normal to hard).

It was difficult to transfer my basic anatomy knowledge into form. You think you know how things work until you sit in front of your model and everything looks wrong. I did some sketches before I began sculpting the truncus of Michelangelo’s David. I tried to sculpt from the inside to the outside. At first I defined the position of the two main parts, thorax and pelvis. Then I filled the space between with bowels to get the underlayment for the muscles which connect the two masses. After that I worked on the pectoral girdle, brachius, antebrachius and hands. At the end I did the legs.

The Giving

The experience that you make during such a project is very enlightening. The oddest thing was that you have no CTRL-Z when something goes wrong. Maybe that sounds obvious but you can’t imagine how often I pressed this key combination in my head and nothing happened. It always takes a split second to realize that you don’t sit in front of a computer and you have to correct any mistake by your one. But you get used to this “limitation” and start working with much more precision. I noticed that when I was working on my computer again. You work faster without pressing CRTL-Z every five seconds.

At the end of the day you appreciate all the benefits that modeling software brings with it. Nevertheless I recommend trying traditional sculpting to everyone who would like to enhance his/her modeling skills.

A friend of mine borrowed me the digital sculpting DVD by Zack Petroc. I was hooked by the way Mr. Petroc uses only a few simple tools in Zbrush to create a wonderful human figure. I was amazed how he was able to bring his knowledge into the modeling process. It was much more than just pressing buttons and knowing every corner of the software. He used the computer really only as a tool. And then I asked myself what I need, to do the same? A software application like ZBrush or Mudbox works a little bit like photoshop (if you do digital painting) or a normal piece of paper. You have a toolset and a blank canvas to work on and the rest comes out of your mind. I thought if I want to create decent results, I have to start somewhere else and not necessarily in front of a computer. In the DVD Zack Petroc talked a lot about anatomy and how shapes relate to each other. So I went to the local university library and searched for a beginner’s anatomy book and found "Anatomy for the Artist" by Sarah Simblet. After reading the book I felt quite comfortable in that subject and I want to learn more. So I spoke with a friend of mine who is studying medical science. He recommended me some books they are reading in the first semester. I bought "Bewegungsapparat" by Werner Platzer (I’m sure it’s available in English, too). His literary work is brilliant and gives you a compact overview about the human body. I love to memorize the names of muscles and bones; the more the better. In addition to that book I searched one, that was more art orientated. I found one written by Gottfied Bammes. As far as I know it’s only available in German. He describes the anatomical subjects with regard to form, but still uses medical terms. So it’s helpful to know at least the most important names in Latin to understand what he’s talking about. Because there is so much content in books like these and almost everything is important, I constantly made nodes and did sketches. By the way of example you will find some of these in this post. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but it helped me a lot and I always use them when I’m at a loss. George Bridgman’s Book "Compete Guide to Drawing from Life" is a classic when it comes down to illustrate the basic shapes of the human body. His drawings speak more than a thousand words. And finally I found Robert Beverly Hale’s book "Anatomy Lessons from the great Masters" very useful. He shows up how the best of the best where aware of the human form and its variations. Of course there are many other good books available. This was just a selection of a few that I find quite valuable. You could read them ten times and I’m sure you will still find something new.

Anatomy Studies

It happened more than once that I didn’t understand how things work. In these situations it was helpful to draw it on paper, even you have no idea which way is up. It gets easier when you are able to reduce the part you struggle with in basic forms. A head becomes a cylinder, the thorax a simple box. This concept works not only on large masses but also on small one and much more complicated, such as the hand, the knee or the pelvis. If you don’t understand it right away, then draw it over and over again. Sketch it from different perspectives and in different sizes. I remember searching a digital skeleton model to check connections between bones. There are many websites online where you can find 3d models and interactive “anatomy – games” to check your knowledge.

On way to memorize and more important recognize muscles, bones and ligaments on the human figure is to paint over photos. If you do so, don’t use any pictures from fashion magazines because the people are reworked in photoshop. Use Google or flick.com instead. Go and visit http://www.theartofanatomy.com. You will find there some amazing explanations how the human face is build and how the face feature plays together. (Sadly it was pretty quit there in the last months)

It’s also very helpful to analyze anatomy drawings created by the great masters. I think about Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dürer or Raphael for example. They did a lot of this studies and it’s great to see how they handled such a complex topic and made unbelievable “body-positions” possible.

You shouldn’t forget that you’re human, too! That happens way to often when you sit too long in front of your computer. Everything you can find in anatomy books is a part of your one body. (At least the most parts) Muscles maybe aren’t trained like the ones in Michelangelo’s studies but nevertheless they are there.

This is where I started into the world of CG and 3d. All the projects that you find on this page are the result of an intensive study of Autodesk 3ds Max and Adobe Photoshop in 2004. I remember reading a few books about lighting and texturing and printing out the whole 3ds max 5.0 help file. (If you do this one day make sure to print on both sides to protect the environment. The help file covers many many pages) For the Arcadia scene I wrote a short story and did research on Nicolas Poussin and other artists from past centuries. This was also the time when I rediscovered "art history". When I was in High-School I hated that subject. I thought it is boring and artists are a little bit crazy. But I changed my mind on that when I was searching for solutions and found them exactly in the work of the great masters.

In the last years I was asked often about the content of Arcadia. Where are the two people in the background going? What kind of place is it where the airplane crashed? To be honest, there’s a very personal story behind it. It has something to do with leaving a familiar place and start into a new uncertain future. But I won’t tell you every detail. I heard so many different interpretations and all of them worked out well. People see parts of their own in the picture (as we often do when we fall in love with something) and that’s ok. If you should be interested in the technical aspect of creating this scene, don’t forget to check the short project overview in the article section.

The Soloist

The Soloist was the first finished scene that I have rendered in 3ds max. Before that I only rendered standard primitives and foremost teapots in all variations, big ones and small ones, with modifiers applied and without, with textures or in simple gray and so on. When I was at the point where I felt quite comfortable using the software I started to build up the scene bit by bit. I remember it was great fun to paint the textures for the bug in photoshop and applied these to the model. I couldn’t see colorize teapots any longer. I used the build-in scanline renderer and lots of spotlights.

Oma’s Honigglas

It wasn’t planned to build a scene for the honey jar. I was playing around with the Vray renderer and the amazing Vray material and tested out how far I can go with the settings. The empty jar turned out quite good in my opinion and so I thought I should try to fill it up with something. At that time Richard Roseman released his Vray absorption tutorial and so I tried to recreate a substance that isn’t liquid like water. For the lighting I used Vray lights, reflection planes and a HDRI in the environment slot of vray.

Bern

This scene was in inspired by Carl Spitzwegs (German painter 1808 – 1885) "Ein Hypochonder" I removed the leading actor from the window and replaced it with the falling suitcase. I wasn’t brave enough to model his head. Nowadays I would try to rebuild him with Zbrush When I look at the original I would definitely overwork my light setup.