ZBrush

Woot! I finally broke down and bought my first 3D app (Houdini HD is next in line): ZBrush!

Here's some first stabs at things:

A 4 fingered quasi-alien hand:

ZSphere phase:

From Learning 3D

Adaptive mesh:

From Learning 3D

After some modeling and subdivision:

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Touchups:

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From Learning 3D

After a post I saw at The Gnomon Workshop Forums I was inspired to make a monster/humanoid like creature:

ZSpheres:

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

Mesh:

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From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

Refinements:

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From Learning 3D

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Mandy the Model!

I've been viewing a number of the Maya Advanced Modeling videos at 3D Buzz, and one the latest has been a model of a human female. Since I didn't have the actual profile shots that Zac was using, I decided to base it (roughly) off of the comic character Mandy by Dean Yeagle. You can find shots of Mandy all over the Internot, so I'll leave googling her as an exercise for the reader. Using a number of different images of her, I was able to put together a front and side profile, and use that as a starting point in the process.

Undoubtedly Mandy will be the princess that CP Bob rescues from some evil super-villain.

What follows are my attempts to keep up follow along with Zac in the Maya videos.

I should preface this with a note of caution. Being a female character, Mandy has breasts. Furthermore, being a cartoon character, she has a highly stylized female form, in other words, that's a polite way of saying that she has big boobs, a great butt, and is not a realistic depiction of the female anatomy. If these things cause you consternation, you may want to close your eyes, or go somewhere else.

Some reference images of Mandy:






Head shots (obviously still not complete):

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

Body shots (nudity involved!):

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From Learning 3D

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From Learning 3D

Latest Houdini work

I had an image in mind for a sort of mysterious Terminator like robot. However instead of a humanoid face, it would be blank, expressionless. Built as a kind of assassin for the military until it went AWOL, it clothes itself in some sort of robe with a hood or cowl, hiding it's mechanical structure, disappearing into the shadows...
Oooh, it's spooky Mulder!

Anyways, I got an initial bit of the head done:



The back is composed of a series of smaller units, roughly analogous to the vertebrae in the spinal column. Modeled the unit on it's own, and then used the trusty copy SOP to copy the unit along a NURBS line, something like this:



What's cool, is that this is already a kind of "rig", in that I can move the 2 end points or 2 control points of the NURBS line, and the spine units follow along, properly oriented. Many thanks to the guys at 3D Buzz for helping out with this.

Currently the whole thing looks like this:

More work on the spider, model mostly complete

For now at least...

This was fun to work on :) I'm not very happy with the materials that I have on it, however that's a whole new can of worms to deal with. This version shows use of sculpt nodes and several different subdivision SOPs that refine the initial subdivisions even more to use for sculpting with the Sculpt SOP.

From Learning 3D

I kind of like the way this shot came out:

From Learning 3D

Sadly I made a mistake in how the abdomen joins the thorax, and this results in an ugly crease or warp in the mesh that is really annoying. Fixing it would be possible but then the new primitives would screw up some of the later groups, or other nodes that refer to specific points/primitives, so I left it alone.

However I was able to repeatedly go "back in time" and alter bits of geometry, and or even make some drastic changes. From what I have seen watching videos with Maya on 3DBuzz, this would simply not be possible. For example, I'm able to keep my low level polygon mesh, tweak that, and then go back down the node graph to the high res subdivision mesh and make changes there as well with out ever having to discard either. Houdini rocks!

From Learning 3D

The Itsy, Bitsy, Spider...

Working from a set of lessons at 3D Buzz, I was able to duplicate the spider geometry below using Houdini. The lessons themselves were done with Maya, so hopefully I didn't lose to much in guesstimating the equivalent tools to use in Houdini. It's not quite finished, but I was pleasantly pleased with how far I got (only 2 more legs to go!):

From Learning 3D

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Krypton's last days

Playing with some shaders, using Houdini's built in Lava, Ice, and Glow shaders:

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

From Learning 3D

Playing with the camera

This is a test of animating the camera along a path, and then animating the path itself. Also played with animating an L System tree by animating various properties based on the current frame value.