Z-Burshing !

Well its my trun to get stressed out over Z brush, lol and how ive been righ. I dont see why people have made it soo complex and hard to use this piece of software. Its like no other software that ive ever used that requires loads of thinking to do simple tasks.

The menu of all the buttons seem to be all over the place, the mouse controls seem to be quite hard to get use to and when you have been working in Maya, then go into Z-bursh the first couple of mins use start to use the controls from maya and obvouisly they dont work, so have to get use to the differnt set-up.

As Jared would say " Made for aliens by aliens " which is soo true because its is Very unfriendly to the user!

Well enough of slagging off Zbrush, I have been getting use to it now and have been getting some really good results with it ! You can get loads of definition into the model as compared to maya and lots of different brushs and and texteure to use to create different storkes to the model.

Ive have seen what other people have done in Z-brush and the results are "Amazings" as Elisha Would say, and it is very inspiring to get better and hopefully be as good as the other people in what they have created.

Fom looking at the images that I found for the skull here is what I created in Z bush.

Making the entrance and buffalo bones

For our scene we have a buffalo pen and a massive rib cage that surounds the entrance to the camp.

I had to do a little resreach for the buffalo skelons as i ruffly know what it looks like but i wanted to get an idea what parts I was to encule in the model as I need to keep it low poly as possible.

Here are some picture that I used for reference with was very usefull !

After looking at these pictures it gave me a better undstanding of the structure of the body and the shape of the skull and what sort of texture it need to be for later on in zbrush.

Render Images of the models + screen shots

This is the low poly model of the Buffalo which is going to be in the buffalo pen inside the camp.
Am quite please with what I have done here trying to keep the count as low as possible. As you notice it is standing up and obvouisly is Not going to be like this in the scene, but for the purpose for seeing what its actually looks like and to get the size and scale of the buffalo I arranged it like this. In the scene it will be on the ground and parts inside the ground where is has died and sunk into the ground over time.


Here are a small slection of weapons that ive reworked as they were far too High in the poly count. So I had to remodel some parts and reduce the count but losing some of the shape, but thats fine as there really small, and there not going to have any close up of them.


Some of the instruments that are going to be left around the camp near the teepees where the people use to paly them.



Form the pots that I made early in the week I strated to experiment with smashing the pots as they wouldnt be prefectly all new, as over time people would have droped them and and generally got older and weathered.

Here is the entrance to the camp with the massive rib cage leading inside with afew bones around it, but these might not stay there as they higher the poly count and may not be seen.

Blend shapes for Tala

Week5/6 ahhhh !

This week and last week have been quite stressfull as there is so much to do and soo little time to do it. As well as doing this project we have also had to balance doing the Affter Effect project which is almost there really so not worring about that too much, But this stupid presentation work is soo getting in the way of every thing and take up soo much time. Though its got to be done so just have to deal with it and work harder. The start of last week the animation was going ok but there was still area that need to be fixed when doin the walk cycles. This where DanC was helping me and showing me how to improve the animaion and making it flow better. Toward the end of the week I began to start modeling the bits that Anna had gave to me on the friday then over the weekend I finished them off to show them to the rest of the group on the Monday to get feed back and what need to be chanege.

Modeling obects in the environment

As we are running out of time Anna and Dan R decided to give me some of the environmentaly objects to model. These aint really the main objects within the scene, apart from the teepees, but they need to be in the scene as would look too bare.
The things that i have model are the Teepees, watch tower, the jem, the entrence to the camp, the buffalo skeleton, pots and baskets, weapons and untencil and instruments.
These didnt really take too long to do, but getting the defromation in the objects and keeping the poly and tri count down was really hard, at first as the model was too high and going overt the poly count for the whole scene. ! !
After I show them to the rest of the group they all said that they need to be lower in the poly and tri count. and some need to be aultered in the shape to lower the count.

Pictures of the first attemps on all the objects are as shown below.

What been happening this week

This week I have been doing more walk cycles geting to grips with the graph editor and sorting out the tangents. Also this week me and Dan C have been talking about differernt ways to possible use an existing rig with all the controls and tranfering this to our character that Anna and Dan R are making. The benifts of doing this would be that it will save a lot of time and over coming some problems that we might encounter. This would leave us more time to animate and prefect more to our liking.
If we cant find a way to do this then it wouldnt be much of a downfall, but just eats into time that is running out very fast.
Anna and Dan R have transferred there low ploy head models from Maya into Z brush to start sculpting detial and defining more definition. This was quite a slow process as they were quite new to the programme and from experience hard to get to grips with all the tools and navigating round the screen.

We encounterd an obvious problem when going to save what they been working on for a couple of hours. When they had gone to save what they had done they saved it as "Document" as its the first button to click as seem some obvouis to click. When coming back after lunch and going back to what they had been working on they couldnt edit any thing. This had been such a waste of time and effort. To over come this small problem we experiment and tried "save as tool" and not document. But to save it as a tool is the second option and doesnt seem logical to be first choice.
This set them back and was VERY frustraing but on the positive side Anna and Dan R had got better at Z brush and the way to aproach sculpting the head of there character.

On Wednesday we had to edit our films that we short a couple of weeks earlier. I had been looking at lots of different tutorials on the internet as there was this one site that had all the tutorials as videos so you can follow them with out getting lost too easily. These were very Helpfull in adding little effects to my short film.

Today we had some feedback fom the first term animation that were shown to class. This was usefull as we could get feedback and coments from other people in our class. Also I have been updating my blog and ready for the aformative on friday.

For the rest of the week me and Dan C should be able to have the head of the character and maybe the body so we can rig the and weight the body ready for animating.