This is how we Roll… yo

So, last time I was here I mentioned our pipeline which now bears its shiny polygon fruits and I thought I’d go a bit more in-depth and reflect on why and how we “Roll” as we “Roll”. I’m not going through our ENTIRE pipeline right now, so let me point out my favorite part of it.

All hail Zbrush, the mightiest of sculpting tools. Grant us shelter in times of crunch and deliver us from the time-consuming tasks of lesser Apps etc etc. Zbrush plays such a vital role in our Production, and here’s why: Detailing characters and doing so QUICKLY. I’m struggling to become a Concept artist and I take a healthy amount of pride in my sense of detail. As I splash down 2d concepts on a digital canvas or whatever I try to include as much details as I can, but now more than before I catch myself leaving certain areas of the Concept with less detail because it just doesnt feel that important.1

However: I feel that when working in a 3d space, your brain goes into turbo-detail mode. If you sculpt a shoe in Zbrush, you feel the need… or atleast I feel the need to put in the seams on the edges, the underneath pattern and some extra details to make it pop. Whereas in 2d, I might not have considered the shoe worthy of such detail, and succumbed to slacking. This is a bad thing because you never know what will end up selling your character, It might very well be those shoes.

You pay attention to areas you might have left out in your 2d concept, and you might even begin to re-evaluate your whole design. Taking your concept into a 3d space means you now have the ability to view it from all angles, not just that awesome pose you drew it in, or your classic turn-table. You might figure out what works from one angle might not work from another, so being able to sketch in 3d with Zbrush could end up saving you a bunch of time and grief!

I saw an Interview with Neville Page the other day, which by the way is one of my favorite artists, where he shared some knowledge about the work he did on the upcoming Green Lantern movie. Due to the number of characters he needed to design, he found it faster to just skip the 2d rendering and jump into Zbrush to do his concept there for the director to see. Not every director has a art degree or the ability to look at a napkin drawing and go “aaaah, I understand that design”. Some directors need to actually see it from every angle or even fully rendered in enviroment to get the idea. Does Zbrush produce better quality Characters or Designs than a 2d medium? Not necessarily, since it all comes down to individual skill and so on, but in general i think it will make it fully readable for everyone involved in the project alot quicker.

I love drawing, both digital and “traditional”, and I’ll never fully substitute this with Zbrush. However, on some projects or specific designs within a project, you might discover that a 3d concept reads better or simply save you some time. Another great advantage of building your character up from scratch in Zbrush, even if you built it from a 2d concept, is the chance to take this mesh into 3dsMax2010 (or 2009 with polyboost) and build your topology on top of this high poly mesh. It should be possible, once you built your topology, to reproject the details from that high poly onto this new topology for smoother rigging and animation. More on this later!