It was raining, I didn’t want to go outside and there was no one else to paint.
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Self Portrait
Tag: self portrait
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Intro to oil
Rudie wanted to make a self portrait in oil so I showed him how to set up the gear and then helped him out with the paint mixing, and a bunch of observational tips. He was a great student. I think he did a great job. Not bad for his first try.
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Signature cartoon
Here is a fun little optical illusion. I found that its possible to sign my name in such a way that it is also my self-portrait.
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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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ZBrush Self-Portrait
I’m working on ZBrush self-Portrait at the moment. Nothing official just killing time while i’m up late watching the babies.
I just finished sculpting in the hair and thought I would share my render. I’m trying a different fibermesh technique this time for sculpting hair. I would like to get away from a real hair look so this time I’m using it to create large chunky sections that I dynamesh and add detail too. I’m going to build up a “hand painted” texture and see if I can get a nice 2.5d look going. Just playing around so no promises on where this will go.
Maybe I can use this thing to make some silly gif animations or something. That might be fun for the site.
Just updated the sites favicon to this swell little animated self-portrait.
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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.
I’ve been trying to get the sites load time down to under a second but it looks like it isn’t happening. On the bright side I did set up a image mirror last night. Now all of the sites embedded picture picture should go through a images.sterlingsheehy.com domain. It might speed things up a little or just give me a big headache.