What’s up everyone! It has been a while since that last blog. I hit a few road bumps along the way, but I’ve made a good amount of progress.
Working on the Knife was a little exciting because it allowed me to try out some new techniques from this Military Radio tutorial by Simon Fuchs https://gumroad.com/l/spEkf. I still have not finished the tutorial, but it seriously has been such a helpful and awesome tutorial. I have learned so many little new tips/techniques about Maya and Zbrush that have been extremely helpful.
One cool neat trick that I learned is in the Deformation tab of Zbrush. The Polish, Polish By Features, and Polish Crisp Edges are nice if you are trying to get a nice smooth/rounded effect on your edges depending on the prop you are working on.
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Take this screw on the knife for example below. With whatever look you are going for you can use the sliders to adjust how smooth you want the edges to be. Even ticking the little circle can give you a different look.
Another cool tip is using the Mask By Feature which will mask out the edges. With using the Mask, you can control which edges you want to be smoothed in case you do not want them to all be smoothed out. You can Grow the Masks, Sharpen them, Blur them, and Shrink them. Ultimately it all comes down to the desired you look you want, but it was super cool to me to see all these different ways you can go about creating the desired look you want. There is no one specific way you must do something which is awesome. Just have some fun and mess up from time to time and figure out what works for you. I really wanted to get back to bringing some fun to the art.
Old Foliage
Update Foliage
Since the last blog I’ve done a little update on the foliage, but I’m going to spend some time improving all of that as I’m working on texturing the props in my scene.
This is just a small update on how the texturing is coming along. Nothing final, but I am so excited to do some more work.
These were some super helpful tutorials about foliage. I would have been so hesitant to try a lot of this stuff in the past, but I am starting to see the fun of just diving into the unknown.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z4v5N by Peyton Varney
https://gumroad.com/l/levelup_blueberry?recommended_by=library by Patrick Gladys
https://gumroad.com/l/vuUUX?recommended_by=library by Karen Stanley
I get so locked into projects sometimes and in the future, I would like to try and be more consistent with showing my process. I think the next blog will be more of a post-mortem of the project and how the texturing process progressed. I usually take a few days after finishing a project to assess what worked well and what did not. This kind of carried over from school and I would highly recommend doing it. It helps just to see what you learned and what you can carry over to the next project and what needs to be improved for the next. I'm going to spend a little more time on the presentation stage than I normally do because I think sometimes I get in a rush to finish, but if you spent all this time working on it you owe it to yourself to make sure you hit the finish line going strong and your project is the best it can be.
Until next time!!