I made a time lapse video of the portrait painting I did the other night.
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Timelapse of Forbes Portrait
Tag: portrait
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Forbes Latimer
I was fortunate to road trip with the great Forbes Latimer for a few days down the west coast of America. He was en route for Texas and then off to navigate the waters of the Sea of Cortez. Forbes is a true wild rover and could easily be mistaken for the wayward protagonist of a London or Steinbeck novel. He is fearless, wild and free. I was able to match his speed and trajectory just long enough paint a portrait. Then the wind shifted, and he was away once more in search of new adventures.
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Wiley Sketch
Quick painting of the boy while he is coding on the computer. 15min or so.
My first attempt at a portrait with oils. Thank you Zeldie for being patient and brave enough to model for me. Since I wasn’t painting outside I thought I would try something new and went with a Zorn pallet. This was a lot of fun. 1.5hr ala prima
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My goofy Mug
Here is the final render of my ZBrush Self Portrait sculpt. I created the sculpt entirely in ZBrush primarily using Dynamesh and Fibermesh techniques.
While making the model I stumbled upon the ZBrush retopology tools and spent a few nights learning how to implement them on my goofy mug. The retopolgy tools are a little clumsy but I found with time and effort that they were able to get the job done. Fibermesh can be a real memory drain so this new resource is a godsend for my little laptop. Now that I have a retopology option I am able to subdivide my models in a much more efficient way and increase the resolution I am able to work at significantly. I feel like a fool for not figuring out this function earlier.
I love dynamesh, don’t get me wrong, but it can be difficult to work with on the back-end, especially after you have found your character. The high polycounts cause lots of memory crashes which up your chances of lost work and make computational heavy actions like transposes nearly impossible. But the real killer and the reason I began researching retopology options is the lack of UV’s . You create these beautiful characters but can’t do anything with them outside of ZBrush. The lack of UVs was a big problem for me on some of my previous sculpts especially when I was trying to render glass. At the time I wanted to render in MentalRay but couldn’t get any of my color information over to maya. Now I can do this easily so I couldn’t be happier.
My other big experiment this time around was using a morph target to sculpt the hair. My previous Fibermesh hair attempts all involved raw extrusions which I would sculpt using the move elastic brush to the desired styling. This time though I sculpted a guide model, ie morph target, and grew the hair to fill in the difference. This worked rather brilliantly and i’m pleased with the results. The one small catch is that my final hair has some unknown error which has block all attempts at exporting and transposing. I will have to rebuild it at some future date if I ever want to animate this fellow.
Topology
For those who are interested into this sort of thing. Here is the topology and a few hi-res renders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkXioL_Gk5k&hd=1
Detail Renders
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New Profile Icon
I realize I have a lot of inconsistent profile information floating around the web these day. Sorry about that but its easy for to be pulled in a million directions online. Its difficult enough keeping this site up to date let alone all the social junk i’ve signed up for over the years. For instance, I forgot I have a flickr account, completely lapsed on that one.
Well I was trying to do a little spring cleaning today and in the spirit of updating things created an new profile icon. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual suspects, hat, glasses, stripes and scruff. Hope you like it.
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The man behind the curtain
I built a redirect page for the website today and to style it out a little bit drew this little cartoon. You can never fail with a good wizard of OZ reference!”
We bough the blueray remastered version of the movie a few weeks ago and ever since the songs have been playing in my head on repeat. What an awesome story. I’m happy to have flying monkeys running around my brain.