ZBrush, C#, and a slew of sadness salad.

Hello Everyone,

So the blog is getting some thumbs up from people, apparently its fun to read a little bit behind a portfolio to see what's really going on. I haven't been posting much, so I thought I would catch up.

I've had a pretty severe sadness salad drought of work lately, so in that time I've taken to Treehouse and dedicated some time during the day to practice C#. It's actually quite exciting, and although Treehouse does not have a platform entirely geared for advanced coding for games, its lovely to expand and learn more and more. Between learning some C# and venturing into the depths of hell that is Unity 5, I've had a great time. In this industry, you've always gotta' expand your brain and venture outside of your comfort zone professionally.

In addition to some C#, I've taken the liberty to expand outwards to animation of organic creatures. I'm no means an animator, I focus entirely on Hard Surface & Organic modeling inside of Maya 2016 and ZBrush 4R7, using Substance Painter 2 and Substance Designer 5 to create my work. I'm actually at a bit of a crossroads between learning Marvelous Designer for clothing, or creating the clothing in Maya and using ZBrush to add the details. It's quite a conundrum. I think ZBrush does a lovely job with clothing if the clothing itself is combined with the underlying mesh, but if the clothing is created as a SubTool, I think it looks and feels a bit goofy. Also, it seems to have a bubble gum effect to it, and it absolutely is entirely too high poly when using ZRemesher. Random thought of the day I guess...

You people wanna' see images though, am'i'right?

So this is a Neanderthal anatomy study, which I'm going to use for an upcoming self project here shortly. In ZBrush, I'm also a little conflicted between using an exported Fibermesh subtool for the hair, and just creating it the traditional way of meticulously adjusting planes inside of Maya. Fibermesh even when optimized ranges between 12-30k polygons, which is double in Triangles, so 70k (facial, head, other) hair in polygons is hugely excessive.

Between a conundrum of clothing and hair, in terms of what is the best method right now and what the popular kids are doing, I've certainly got my hands full in my spare time. Oh, and don't worry, I'll take the super sunburned and wicked stoned look off of this guys face. :-)

Toodles,

-Robert