A hair render test of the The Mountain Bandit from my Dragon Project
This is my second hair sculpting attempt using ZBrush 42Rb and the new FirberMesh feature. I’m struggling a little to find a setting that will work well for my characters. Most of the hair ends up looking too realistic or too much like straw. I believe painting will be the solution but for now I think this is an OK start.
The subject here is “The Mountain Bandit”, the main villain from my forever shelved Dragon project. I have made several attempts in the past to sculpt him but his scraggly hair was beyond my skill level. It’s nice to be able to see him finally come together.
This is by no means final, I still have a bit of work to do. Tonight I will try to make a second pass. He has a great head-dress that I want to add as well as some other costume dressings. I also need to get him out of that dead looking neutral pose. Still its a decent start and I thought merited sharing.
Last night I stayed up late to test out Zbrush 4R2b’s new FiberMesh additions. For testing purposes I made this quick DynaMesh sculpt and threw some hair on him. What you see here is my third grooming attempt. The first two hair passes were tragic failures that more or less resembled the bastard child of an ugly carpet and a putting green.
Creating the hair is effortless but controlling its flow is a bit tricky. There are a dozen grooming brushes and I have yet to master any of them. The workflow is very clear though so I don’t think it will take long to get up to speed. I don’t have experience in any other hair systems, so I am by no means an expert, but was generally very impressed with FiberMesh. It is a welcomed addition to my quiver of design tools.
Earlier in the month I spent several days working on this zbrush sculpt of a young farm girl. I was using it to test-drive a lot of zbrush 42R’s new features so the work was slow and a tad frustrating as I had to make a couple of the elements twice before moving on. Now that I have a better grasp on the app I must say I love all of the new options and am really impressed with how much MORE I am able to do because of it.
By far the most difficult hurdle I had to overcome while sculpting this model was learning how to hold and feed a baby in one arm while rocking another in its cradle with my foot. I looked like one of those one man bands! It was a delicate four A.M. balancing act that if managed correctly would allow me one free hand to sculpt and an elbow to press all of my function keys! It was a rather funny setup but it worked.
This is a very old character of mine, I created him a life-time ago. I believe I was ten.
Recently, I have resurrected old characters like Don here to see what my adult self would do with them. In this case it was a zbrush sculpt. Start to finnish this project took me one night of work. The base mesh was made in Maya and then polished up and roughly painted in zbrush.
Don, Circa 1996
I found this animated gif of him, dated 1996, and put it up here for reference. At the time of this drawing he is already a few years old. There are boxes of better Don drawings sitting up in the attic that I really should scan.
Oh 1996, when animated gifs were all the rage and every website had to have one.Don maya sculpt
A zBrush sculpt of a frightened dog I was working on for a friends project
This is a folow up post to the previous Doggy Dog post.
I spent a bit of time working in ZBrush last week posing several old models. This dog model is one of my maya sculpts that I revisited. The work went pretty fast, I spent one night on this pose.
The dog isn’t rigged so to do the work I built a quick temporary Zsphere rig to block in the main gestures, then polished out the rest with normal matte transposing and sculpting techniques. The work was rather straight forward, the most difficult part being wrinkle management and keeping the skin from folding into itself. In this regard I wish ZBrush had a function like Mayas Ncloth which would prevent topology from passing through itself. Maybe it does and I just don’t know these things.
Rendering was done in Zbrush except for the stereoscopic “anagliphic” version below which had to be done in Maya using a stereo rig and mentalray.
Herman is a hermit crab character based on a series of doodles I made in my sketchbook while in Hong Kong last month. I had been away from the 3D work for a few months when this began but was happy to discover that I had not forgotten very much. The work passed quickly and without any major setbacks. All in all Herman took only one day to sculpt and another day to pose.
Posing was a bit more complicated than I expected. All of the legs were a problem to matte and transpose in zbrush and for some reason I was having a bit of difficulty with the Zsphere rigging technique as well. He is a character that merits having his legs in a tangle all the time but that makes for slow selection work in Zbrush. Originally I had set up polygroups to simplify the selection process but for reasons I don’t understand Zbrush deleted these and I had to do everything by hand.
If I have time I would like to have a stab at rigging Herman properly in maya. I think he would animate well.
For the record, below is the sketchbook doodles and first-pass rough model.
We spell scouts S-C-O-U-U-T-S which makes us a completely different autonomous organization.
This was my masters thesis from USC Animation. It is an improvised comedy about the woes of scouting in the middle of urban Los Angeles. Scouuts came into being when I realized that my original thesis proposal was far to ambitious and needed to be scrapped. It was late in the semester and I needed something fast and so I turned to my best friend Devin Westberg, who just happened to be an improv comedian, for help. Devin gathered a talented group of friends from the Improv Olympic over in Hollywood and brought them down to the USC sound department for a two hour session in the recording booths. it was free form and fast and within an hour or so we had Cub Scouuts Pack 213 in the can. It was a bit to long so I cut the audio down a little which give it a bit more structure and punch and then spent the next two months animating.
For this project I did all the animation in Toon Boom Animation, which at the time was pretty new and was lightning fast compared to the tradition pencil and paper method. It allowed me to completely bypass a dozen steps and be one of only a hand full of students to finnish their thesis on time. The b&w vector art was then exported as an image sequence which I coloured in Photoshop and composited in final Cut Pro. This was a brave new digital world and compared to the three years it took me to make my earlier film this one only took five months start to finnish.
Improv by: Devin Westberg, Tom Warren, Jimmy Zerda, David Ury, Ben Tolpin
Directed, Animated and Produced by Sterling Sheehy
This project is dedicated to the memory of my friend Jimmy Zerda, who passed away not long after we made this film. He was the scouut with glasses, avery talented comedian and a friend. He will be missed.
Dragon is the story of a poor street sweeper in an ancient Himalayan city who sets out to clean up his city and in doing so uncovers more dirt than he was expecting. Our humble young hero is pulled into a world divided by greed. As an army of wild mountain bandits threatens to invade the isolated city its people see little hope for survival but to pray desperately to their dragon god for protection. From the grit of the gutter to the lavishness of the city’s palace our street sweeper must use all of his sweeping skills to uncover the truth about the dragon and find a way to save the city he loves before time runs out and all is lost.
The project is based upon the book “Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like” BY J. Williams. Vanguard had the rights to the books and paid me to write it with a writing partner, Sejung Kim. The project has sat on the shelf for years. It’s a beautiful story and I would love to see it get its due some day. In my free time I have donated a ton of time and artwork for the project hoping it would help grease the wheels and get it moving. Every now and then I get a phone call and then the excitement fades and its back on the shelf again.
Above is a pitch trailer I made for the project and below are the panels I used to make it. Interestingly enough I drew all of this while I was in Jerusalem.
The dragon gives a lesson
Archers at the ready
There is a hole in the defences
A stranger appears
They have found a way in.
Down into the darkness he goes
The Mountain bandits ride into action
a warrior of the mountain
Han is captured
The mountain bandits ride to battle
Han find the wounded scout
The bridge that connects the two halves of the city
Turned my camera towards the dreary landscape and was rewarded with some interesting footage. The Tola Harbour is well protected from the open ocean making it exceptionally calm, so calm that the wake trails from the passing boat are visible for miles.
