Week 3 - Musculature, Torso (Task 3) and Zbrush

Life Drawing lesson

In this weeks life drawing session we were given the opportunity to observe the musculature  of the human body, this was a very useful session because it allowed us to understand the complexities of the human body and how specific muscles connect, overlap and entwine around certain parts of the human body .

Sam also brought in a model which the entire class looked at, I found it very useful and I was amazed at how perplexing the human body actually is, it is made up of so many different muscle groups, obviously only the major and fundamental muscles are necessary to learn, but the whole lot of it captivated me. I decided to buy a book on artistic anatomy by Dr. Paul Richer, this was requested by Tian.

The model above is very expensive, they are made and painted using fine resin and these are the works of Andrew Cawrse, a very talented artist who has taken his work into the sculpting area of the industry. Successful artists such as Feng Zhu have models like this on their desks and in their offices as inspiration, and as a reminder as to how the human anatomy works. They serve as good reference for character design.

Below are some photos of the drawings that I did during this week, to try and achieve musculature of the human body.

As you can see in the above images, I have tried to draw the musculature of the human form using each model (Gordon and Hollie) as a basis, when drawing, I try to pinpoint the major landmarks and extremities of the pose. So if Hollie had her legs folder, the farthest most extreme point would be the knees because they protrude further than any other part of the body. Once i have the basic proportions, i start to shade the characters in lightly and get a feel of depth. This is always difficult when you have three minutes to do a pose but i think they turned out rather well in the end.

Task 3

For this week, our main task was to create three more human anatomy studies of the Torso, showing a front, side and back perspective including the shoulder girdle. In some torso drawings people cut off the neck and the shoulders, but we are to include this in ours hence the shoulder girdle.
I decided to draw my art using a mechanical 5mm B lead pencil, I think these pencils are brilliant as they allow for fine lighting and tiny cross hatchet shading which i enjoy using.

Below are three pictures that I drew, I tried to draw them as accurately as possible from a book that I was recommended to get, it is called Artistic Anatomy by Dr. Paul Richer. His anatomical drawings are fun and easy to understand, so i really enjoy working out of his book, it also has a encyclopaedic knowledge about the anatomy and the human form and is very interesting to read.

When I was drawing these, I tried to draw them in ever so slightly different styles, the drawing of the front torso, I drew how I use to draw, it was quick and sketchy and I let my hand roam all over the page, I discovered that I had an excessive amount of lines everywhere and I was forever using my eraser to get rid of them ad refine parts of my image. The other two, I decided to draw with a steady and more calculated hand, using more confident lines, and I think the results have proven better, they have more definition and the lighting is much better and makes more sense, particularly on the back of the torso picture. 

Below are a few photos of some pages of the "Artistic Anatomy" book by Dr. Paul Richer, these prooved themselves very useful when i had to complete the above task, they enlightened me on muscle patterns, and taught me a lot on how they work and where they are positioned on the human body. 

Zbrush Column

So today we started using Zbrush properly, we were given a zip file which had tons of reference materials and all sorts of guidance with using Zbrush. This was useful but it was mainly to do with creating the torso which is a stage we aren't currently at.
In the lesson we imported a very basic OBJ column, and started using different types of damage methods. We fiddled around with the brushes just to see what we were able to achieve, and most of the damage seemed pretty unrealistic and I was a but curious as to what Tian was going to teach us next about the software.

A little bit into the damage build up, tian introduced us to the 'Projection Master'. This takes your 3D object and takes the current view into a two and a half D piece of geometry. The glorious thing about projection master, is that you have full control over all modifications you make.
The thing i like most about projection master is its use of alpha maps. I will show you my finished column and then explain the method I used to create it.

So on the left you can see my finished column, the first thing i did was 'Drop' the column into projection master, when I dropped the geometry, I added the extruded squares onto the mesh. I did this by selecting the grid alpha, and choosing the square brush (Alpha 51 brush), when i had selected them both, i right clicked the brush and set the repetition on the vertical axis to 23, this meant that the squares would repeat all the way down the column, as opposed to tiling them continuously.

When I had achieved a nice look, I decided to create a extruded top and base, this was simple, I changed the stroke to 'Line' and clicked to the left of the column held shift and dragged to the right, this allowed me to create a straight line across the top and the bottom of the object.

Now the damage! When i was happy with everything so far, I 'Picked up' my object from projection master and returned to 3D view. The result looked really nice all the way around the column, but now i had to add some wear and tear. To do this, i clicked 'Lightbox' and i hit Brushes', I navigated to the right (moving the scroll bar) and clicked on 'Mallet', this then opened up a folder which took me to three different mallet brushes  the one i used was called 'MalletFast', I double clicked it and imported it into Zbrush.

Now that I had the mallet brush selected, i increased its size, turned up the intensity and started bashing away at the pillar. I used this brush in conjunction with 'Clay Tubes' both I found very useful and effective when designing the column.

Next we will be moving onto the torso, but I found this exercise very helpful when getting to grips with the software itself.