It`s been a while since the last update as I was fighting with maya and zbrush. After watching hours of tutorial videos and failed literally 3000+ times in Zbrush. I actually produced something quite nice.
But first, I am thinking maybe I should tell you the whole story from the very start. That means you are about to see a huge pile of chit-chat and boring, pale descriptive writings with numerous grammar mistakes up ahead. If you don`t want to see that, please scroll down to the very end and see my final result. Thanks.
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I planned to separate my design into two parts. the head part and the leg part. I planned to do this firts in Maya as I modeld my leg part quite easily:
As you can see for the sake of polycount limits most of the model is made of simple geometry shapes with really low faces. That means I changed my design from cylinders to pentagonal prisms, spheres to squares .etc. This move helps me to hold a control on polycounts and things were going so well. I checked my calendar and found out ‘ohh I still got time’ and then I started to do other stuff till the next session on Friday.
That`s where it all messed up. I finally realized why I did this with such short amount of time. I did it all wrong. I must weld the surfaces of each shapes to make sure they are really becoming a sole object. What I did up there was just put things over each other like toy blocks. Move one of them and the whole thing breaks down.
It is not that hard to fix it but it takes a long time. So, I decided to redo the whole thing on Zbrush.
That decision doesn`t make any sense. But I really want to try out Zbrush.
And here it comes to torture I add to myself. Zbrush is different from all the softwares I used before. It is hard to tell how much stress and frustration I felt during the learning process. I felt completely hopeless when I found out the only thing I know to do when I encounter a problem is to restart zbrush and start again.
But I did something eventually. It is a prototype of my head part 100% made of shame and tears.
So that`s when I started to go online and search for tutorials. And I cannot understand most of them. But I did found a word called ‘hard surface sculpting‘. That means instead of the rough, organic, chuncky meat-like surfaces up there, I make my model with smooth, flat surfaces. It is a common style mainly used when modeling weapons and robots that has artificial surfaces. And that suits my need as I am designing a robot. I did a few tryouts and one of them lookslike this down below:
So that`s what I am going to do. Instead of using brush and keep adding details on the model, I am going to slice it bit by bit and carve my details on the model. It`s becoming easy once you set up a goal and clean up your mind to focus on things you want to achieve. After that my workflow becomes like this:
Modeling>>Find problems>>Describe problems>>Ask Google>>Watch videos>>Solve problems>>Modeling.
And after about 40 hours without sleeping and eating, I finally had something that is not completely awful.
So I continued on from there and keep learning new tricks like arraymeshes, nanomeshes, boolean meshes radical symmetry .etc. I made a lot of mistakes and I found ways to hide them instead of fixing them. I know they are going to backfire on me in the future but I don`t care.
And after that is repetition of refining and adding new parts to my model. The software keeps crashing and at a certain point I cannot do anything to it anymore. I tried to refine it by lowing the polycounts, failed. I tried to cut off some part of it, failed. Clearly some of mv moves are not appropiate and messed up Zbrush`s working algorithm. My mistakes did backfired on me and I beileve they will keep doing so in the future.
But it did not stop me from adding new things on it. I finalized the design of my head and add three legs on my model.
I changed the material to a darker one to match up the robot feeling and that is what I got now:
That does looks neat right? However my trouble is not over yet. Modeling on Zbrush is not good for controlling the polycounts. Even half of my head part contains 253636 polycounts now which is more than 100 times more than the requirements. That is the next thing I am going to deal with and I wish myself good luck.
Well that`s a way shorter report than I imagined. The idea of this whole thing is to push my limits afar. I am glad that I didn`t give up and change my design to something really easy to model.
Well I did thought of that but I didn`t do it.
Thank you Luca and all those youtube videos, without you guys I cannot come this far by my own. This thing is still far from finished. I still got much work to do. Still, at this night I am satisfied of my work and I can finally go to sleep without my brain keep asking me how am I going to model this and that. That`s it for my report of week2 and 3. I`m out.