Nuggetty Goodness

I'm like a kid in a candy store with ZBrush right now! >.> Or, as an old friend says, like a Pikachu on crack.

Butbut... so many TOYS!

After sculpting the model, I started playing with polypaint, which lets you paint textures, material, and colour directly onto the 3d model.

Then I kinda got distracted by trying to render skin using skin textures, and running around the interwebz checking out lighting and stuff.

And then came render... look at all those buttons, OOH SHINY! *has a Kikigasm*

As a result, half the poor fellow's hair (well more than half, to be honest), is unpainted, since I ran off in all directions at once, poinging in glee. XD

In some ways, I think being a newbie at anything really opens up so many possibilities, because you do things in strange ways, before you realise that people don't do them that way.

Apparently, it's generally not done to render hair directly in ZBrush, without extensions or plugins of any sort... which is what I've done here.

I think the eyebrows work well, and with some work, the main hair could be decent. However, I haven't figured out how to do eyelashes and still keep my model in 3D form. Those are apparently either modelled with the snake brush tool (among others) in 2.5D, or added in post-pro in Photoshop.

Still...SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

...really should at least block in the rest of the hair though. XD

So, a mere 4 months after buying my new PC laptop, I suddenly realise that this means I can play with zBrush!

What I really love about zBrush is how totally intuitive the sculpting process is. If you know how to sculpt in 3d (as in, with real, traditional clay, etc), you know how to sculpt in zBrush. I do understand that there's a lot of things like polygon counts and whatnots that models made in zBrush have downsides in... but I hope in my nuggetheart that this is the kind of interface that 3D programs can move towards. I have no idea if that's practical within my nugget shelflife of course, but in the meanwhile... VIRTUAL SUPER SCULPEY! WOOT!

I've also learned that the top part of the sphere should not form the front of your 'face'. -_- It only took me 4 hours to figure out how to patch the hole in the mesh. Ah noobie goodness.

Part of what I'm trying to do with these weekly sketches, (other than prodding myself into not being so darn lazy about sketching) is to get myself to 'loosen up' stylistically. Not to have this neurotic desire to delete each and every single 'mistake', and instead, to work the 'feeling out' lines into the sketch.

Intellectually, I know that madly deleting lines left and right can lead to a piece that isn't as rich as those where the feeler-lines (can't think of a better term right now) are left alone to do their thing. Soooo here's me mentally slapping my hand going, 'No! No eraser (tool)! Bad nugget! Leave it! Erase only for highlights!'

I think it's working - especially compared to my first sketch of this series (bleck!) but still a long way to go towards training myself NOT to twitch for the eraser. XD

^_^ This week, I actually know who the random person is! Or is supposed to be.

Inspired by Hal Duncan's Book of All Hours Series (Vellum and Ink), here's Josef Pechorin.

Soooo... every year I tell myself I should be less lazy about sketching/painting, and do more un-work related stuff. Of course, being a sluggy nugget, I usually fail to be less lazy. *mourn self*

However, in yet another one of these twitchy attempts, I am now attempting to whip myself into doing at least one random sketch of someone, something, whatever, at least once a week.

And sooo we has: Ze Weekly Random Nuggetsketch!

I dunno who the chick is. These random people showing up on my screen, who are they? Who knows?

Character gestures and frames done for a Sun proposal involving their Java mascot, Duke. Done in Freehand.

Project Blackbox came to Singapore in 2007. I'd worked on so many collaterals for it, including this shirt.

And when the time came, I was in Australia and couldn't be there to PET MAI BABY. :( *nuggetty tears*

A quirkier way to present e-mail address collection requests to our client base, and hopefully get them to forward stuff along because it was cute. Plus, they'd get karma for the festive season good deed of saving the snowpeople. >.> Honest.

An accompanying 'petition wall' website was planned, with names (but no email addresses) of the kind, snowman-loving petitioners being shown.

Didn't get off the ground though. :( Was deemed too frivolous.

Illustration was done by yours truly, in Bill Watterson's style (Calvin & Hobbes author). I always did love Calvin's dysfunctional snowpeople.