Week 1 Cont - Understanding Human form (Task 1)

This week we have been working on our life drawing skills, this consisted of quick sketching, of about 30 seconds to a minute, and then we progressed up to drawings that lasted 15 minutes or more.
Having this experience has been brilliant because it has allowed me to hone my skills more and really understand and appreciate the way the human body works.

TASK 1

Today we had Gordon and Hollie as life drawing models so I was able to capture the male and female anatomy. Pictures of the drawings that I did will be posted toward the end. For this week our main task was to produce Three Studies of the human anatomy so I created four. I really found this task interesting because it enabled us to think about how the human body is constructed. I used websites for anatomy reference such as pixel lovely and pose maniacs.

Below are my 4 studies of the human body. I drew these traditionally with pencil so i could adapt myself more with my traditional art skills. In these pictures i was trying to portray the musculature of the human form

                                 

We also delved into the human skeleton and started to look and understand more about the human anatomy and the way the human body's bones are structured. When we were drawing today, we were using special methods such as the Da Vinci method where you measure the human body at arms length form a distance; with seven and a half heads for models standing up straight, and generally six and a half heads when they enter a pose. This is a rough estimation because all people are different shapes and sizes. 

As we looked into the human anatomy, we noticed that males and females are significantly different. 

For example, When a male stands straight, their wrist stops just in line with their crotch, with a female, their wrist line stops beneath their crotch so they have longer arms, their shoulders are also 2 to 2 and a half heads long, where a males shoulders are 3 to 4 and a half. 

Also I found out that the entire span of both arms held to the side in a T pose, is the same length as your body standing up from head to toe. 

Its little snippets of information like this that really help with the construction of drawing the human body and getting proportions as correct as possible when it comes to measuring. 

Below you will see some photographs of some sketches that I did during my life drawing classes, one of them is a drawing that I in the style of Michelin Man, our task was to try and draw out different poses whilst not looking at the paper we were drawing on.
For those who don't know about Michelin Man, he is a character that consists of concentric circles that forms his body shape. This is what we used but translated it to drawing, so when we wasn't looking at our page, we tried to draw the models pose using circles, focusing all out attention on the model not letting out pencil off the page. As our life drawing lecturer says..."the drawing is telling you nothing, focus on the model get the fundamentals and add detail later"

On the second image you can see multiple drawings in the Michelin Man style, they aren't very good...but it was an interesting experiment.

Michelin Man

Getting into Zbrush!

So now that I am starting to understand the layout of Zbrush, I'm starting to delve into the creative side a little more. 

You can see on the left that I have selected a tool preset (head model) from the light box menu. this is a simple double click operation and the head model appears right away. At first I had to get use to the panning, zooming and tumbling but its actually pretty easy, sometimes transposing form one software package to another can perplex you. Eventually I found my way around and I started using the standard brush to alter the face and get use to the creative work flow. 

On the top image you can see the original face of the model imported from Zbrush, and below the modified one, I did this using just the standard brush tool with a linear dotted pattern. I used this to bring out the characters flesh and make it look a little more interesting to look at.

As you can see its nothing too difficult to achieve, but with a few small changes you can really see how powerful this software is. i have completely changed the facial structure and made the model look older. I really enjoy using this software and i suspect my skills will develop as i move on to creating a torso later on in the module.

Week 1 - Introduction to the Module

This week I started my new second year modules, One being 3D Digital Sculpting (3DDS).
I am very exited about this module because it encompasses everything that I wish to learn about character design.
 I came to university wanting to turn my 2D drawings into life like 3D animations and characters, to be able to enchant and exhilarate others and this is going to help me towards that goal.

So Week 1, This has been a very interesting week as all students have had a taste of this module which so happens to be split into two separate units. Life drawing, which is the study of real life objects and particularly for us, the human figure which heavily revolves around anatomy, and lastly 3D Sculpting using Zbrush, this is a more contemporary method of development which allows us to incorporate our traditional skills into a 3D software package.

From the looks of things so far, we will be studying life drawing, then transposing our skills over to our 3D lessons to bring them to life and try to create what we drew.

From what i have gathered form this session, and our future tasks, over the course of this module, we will be expected to create 3 highly detailed character designs which are anatomically and proportionally correct. I am very exited for this andi  have already started creating some designs. 

When we entered our drawing session Sam lectured us on the human body, just giving us a brief understanding of what we will be getting ourselves into with the course, and looking into different body types. This was very interesting because body types vary according to gender, size and shape, i learnt that there are actually three types of human anatomy.

Thin (Ectomorph) - This is a thin person that finds it difficult to gain weight due to a high matabalism and is naturally skinny, bones are very defined and quite small in size, the individual would have a flat chest and it would be lightly muscled and most of these body types are quite short.

Round (Endomorph) These people are typically larger than the average person, they have a slow matabalism so gaining weight isnt much of a problem for them, Endomorphs generally have wide hips and under developed muscles too. Fortunatley for them, its quite easy for them to build muscle and burn off the fat. So these body types dont necessarily mean the person will be fat.


Hard mucsular body (Mesomorph) These individuals are very strong and generally have above average to large sized bones, they have large chests, long torso, quite a high matabalism but this can stoop and be quite low sometimes, and they can gain or loose weight fast, these particular body types are most effective with body training because they are very versatile in body form.

This week in life Drawing we met a male model called Gordon who was achieving incredible poses for us to draw. I started out with quick 30 second sketches and slowly time elevated to about 10 minute poses allowing us to get more detail into out illustrations.


I thoroughly enjoyed the 30 second poses because it allowed me to understand human proportions quickly and efficiently, where as the 10 minute ones allowed me to think more and i was able to plot down a grid and measure my drawings more accurately.

Below are some images of my sketches from this week showing the terrible drawings that i produced!, fortunately they grew in detail and started to improve.

As you can see its all very primitive and basic, my skills in 30 second sketching aren't that brilliant, but the way I see it is, if I'm doing this solidly for a year, I think I will really be able to hone my skills and become a talented drawer in time, but it will take time and effort. 

My First 3D Sculpture Lecture!

So what is 3D sculpture? It is the process of creating environments and models either created from scratch or imported from other software packages. It is used a lot in the industry and is predominantly used for adding hyper realistic and extremely minute detail to existing 3D characters and objects. 

An example of Zbrush being used with character modelling, would be for adding veins, paws in the skin and wrinkles. This tool is perfect for small detail and quick manipulation of the models. With the ability to increase the poly count to 6 Million, the capability of this software seem almost limitless. 

When you have created the model that you are happy with, you can decrease the poly count in seconds and export it to Maya and UV map it.

This week in our 3D Sculpting lecture, we also learnt the basics about the user interface of Z brush  to familiarise ourselves, and we played around with some of the already imported models referred to as tools. Tian showed us how to use brushes and how they can be used differently and manipulated in thousands of different ways, but for what we will be doing, we will be using very few brush types and most likely sticking to three or five at the most for consistency and efficiency.


To the left are some is a screen shot of the basic user interface.
I have annotated the main parts of Zbrush that we have learned and the basic fundamentals.

Learning the software package is key, it may seem obvious, but learning Zbrush only during lessons is not going to get you experience using the software, spending time at home studying the different tools and trying to understand how the sculpting works is very important and will help when progressing onto projects, having to research how to do things can be time consuming; learning it before hand saves time and if far ore efficient.