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.
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