This project has been incredibly insightful for me. I started this project with no knowledge of Zbrush apart from that it is a digital sculpting program that would allow for an easier and more natural workflow when it comes to making an organic object and adding details to models that could be made in Maya, especially when Maya can be quite difficult to add some smaller details as you always have to be wary of topology.
I've never been particularly great at concepting characters and creatures so I found it very difficult to come up with ideas that I will be able to work with for Zbrush however I pushed forward with creating some ideas that could incorporates some form of challenge for me for example scales or feathers. I feel as if I could have defintiely wokred on my concepting process in order to create some much more unique ideas that I could work with later down the pipeline. For some unknown reason, I decided that I wanted to create a human character however looking back at that choice, I find that incredibly bizarre. Human characters are incredibly difficult to model due as there are a lot of details and any discrepancies in the position of the details or the shape of the character would make the character look disfigured and there is little to no room for these discrepancies. If I had chosen to make a creature instead, I could have made anything I wanted as long as I made sure the creature was bipedal for this module. A creature would've let me create strangely disproportionate features as creatures can be any shape or form and this would've been a better starting place for me as a sculptor however I made the decision to make a character, I like to push myself and this is no exception. With all that being said, I decided to combine my character with some creatures as this would allow me to create something that is not only human and give me a chance to experiment with creating some creature appendages.
I found working with Z-spheres as a way of creating a base mesh for a human character incredibly difficult as there was very little way of knowing the proportions of my character and the spheres just felt completely unintuitive for me. A lot of professionals when they create humans use primitive shapes to establish a base mesh as opposed to Zspheres but I was still unfamiliar with how to use anything in the software. For me to create an effective model, I decided to default back to a software I was much more familiar with. Maya allowed me to create a very effective base mesh where I could make sure the proportions were more accurate and since I am more familiar with how to operate Maya, I was able to save myself some time creating the base mesh here.
When it came to adding shape to my characters body, I made sure to look into anatomy and muscle form of humans as I wanted my character to have a realistic form. I found it somewhat difficult to create an effective form for my character since I was using a stylised base and wasn't too sure on how the dynamesh and buildup tools worked when I started. I fell somewhat far behind everyone else when creating my character since I was so new to the software so I had to take almost twice as long building my characters form up that most others however that is just part of the process when it comes to learning new software. I had to take my time learning the basics which made my entire process much longer than expected but without the basics, I wouldn't get close to achieving the end goal I want to achieve of a high quality character. Without reference I wouldn't have achieved the end result I really wanted to achieve. Reference was essential for this kind of work as I wanted to achieve a realistic result even if I did end up creating a stylised character.
I feel as though the best approach for me in future would've been to have not used the extract feature to create the clothing. Instead, what I should've done is take the character model and demolished the mesh so that the mesh was very low poly. By reducing the poly count of my model, I could've exported it out of Zbrush and taken it into Maya. I could then create models for clothing over the top of the base model once I'd built the anatomy of the model up and refined the form more. By doing this I would be able to achieve better form and topology on the objects before I worked on them within Zbrush and thus I would have achieved better results for my finished model. It was very good to have the experience creating a character from scratch and sculpting in the details, there have got to be better ways of doing so than the methods I used and with more research and practice, I'm sure I could've improved my workflow and made my model even better. The hair is an area I would have liked to have done differently. Whilst the hair I have on my model is effective and suits a stylised character, there are other ways I could've done this if I were given the opportunity for example using fibre mesh to create a realistic hairstyle that will flow and use flyaway strands and other components to make a layered and realistic hairstyle would be great to learn for any future career, especially if I were to pursue character modelling. There are other ways to make clothing using marvellous designer and that is becoming more industry standard but having the chance to create clothes in Zbrush has still been eye opening.
When we first started this process, I thought we would have to colour and texture the model after having retopologised and UVed the model as if we would have to do in Maya however as this module only required concept art, it doesn't matter how high poly my model is. As it turns out, poly painting is incredibly easy in comparison as I can directly apply and paint materials on to my model within Zbrush and with the addition of alphas and other tools such as noise maker, I can create highly polished effects without too much work. I would however like to get my model in substance painter as I feel there's a lot more scope to creating materials and textures within there. I actually found this very enjoyable and having spent countless hours in Zbrush at this point, I didn't find it too difficult at all. I definitely could've experimented more with the materials and poly paint however for a first attempt, I am very happy with the overall result with this section.
When it came to posing my character, there was a lot of problems with my software and hardware which made all the work I did preparing poses and creating some unique stances was wasted some what. I major issue I had was that my computer would crash often and struggled to work with the transpose master tool to pose my character. If I had better hardware, I could possibly have made my characters pose much more dynamic and interesting. I actually found the transpose master quite difficult to work with however if I were sculpting a character for a game, I would have modelled them in Tpose and then retopologised them so I could take the model into Maya and then use a Human IK skeleton so I could set a control rig for her. I wasn't too happy with the final backgrounds I had for my characters, I feel as if the renders could've worked better with the renders and my character could've definitely been posed better to work with said backgrounds however I've got some knowledge of this now so I can take this into consideration next time. I should've considered the background for my character first so I could pose my character with the background in consideration as well as a story behind her.
By undergoing this project, I have had the chance to explore character design, development, sculpting, creating clothing, texturing, posing and compositing a finsihed character in Photoshop. Considering when I started this module where I had no idea where to start or what to do with my character, I never thought I would have achieved such a good result for my final piece. I may even consider pursuing character sculpting as a possible career due to how fun I found this process to be. I can apply the skills I have learnt here to many other types of projects and I know that with more practice I will get even better when it comes to everything listed above. I should plan my projects better as this project wasn't as well planned as I'd want and I even changed my design part way through the process so I really shouldn't do that in the future. I know my time management was particularly bad with this module, I let myself fall behind in favour of other work and with everything going on with COVID-19 and lack of studio access and Zbrush access for home use, I had to wait to get back into my work. If I had planned more effectively, I could've managed my time much better.