3D-a-day blog

yaakov-weinstein 2018-09-17 23:09:33 UTC #1

Hi CB community,

After seeing all the amazing work coming from Cubebrush, ZBrush Central, Artstation, and the like, I have been really yearning to get myself together and start doing more 3D modeling. I recalled seeing a contest on Polycount where people would be challenged to do a 3D model a day, usually small props or weapons, and they would rapidly gain experience by exposing themselves daily to practicing modeling.

Lately I've been struggling with designing because my visual library is greatly lacking, so I'm challenging myself to create something new in ZBrush every day until October (because then I'll be doing Inktober!) and that way I can both get more familiar with sculpting in ZBrush and have a better repertoire of things to use in my designs.

My focus will be on details, like patterns, materials, rivets, etc. I'll be choosing stuff from photos and concepts to model. Hopefully by the end of the month I'll have a bunch of new models that I can both take into further detail and/or use in other projects. I'm creating this blog post so I can force myself to do this and won't have to cry myself to sleep every night looking at these mind-blowing galleries lol

P.S. if anyone knows any good resources for things to model please share
Also recommendations for tunes while working are welcome

cedricgo 2018-09-17 23:19:17 UTC #2

Hi! Sounds like an interesting quest that you are on. I'm looking forward to see some of the work you'll produce

yaakov-weinstein 2018-09-18 04:42:11 UTC #3

Day 1

A bottle lamp--starting off with something simple.
No Dynamesh used in this one.
Combination of primitives, Zmodeler, and sculpting.
Total time: ~4 hours

Used curve tubes brush to get the patterns on the sides and top. It was good practice for playing with falloff to get the pointed ends of the lines.

yaakov-weinstein 2018-09-19 04:19:12 UTC #4

Day 2

Started modeling this circlet today but had to cut it short because it was getting pretty late and ZBrush was being buggy and wasn't snapping the curve to the surface of the mesh =.=
But I did get a nice twisty new curve brush out of it.

yaakov-weinstein 2018-09-20 00:45:48 UTC #5

Day 3

Had the day off so was able to spend a little more time on this one.

Found this cool elven armor. I think it's from Lord of the Rings. I have to say that laying down those scales was REALLY tedious. If anyone knows how to speed up that process, please share! I didn't do the sleeves since the point was made already and wasn't worth doing for a practice model.
I did get more of a sense of how and where to add detail as a result of doing this model.
If I went back and did this again, I would do the layering of the shoulder armor differently. I would start from bottom to top instead of the other way around so I can extract the armor pieces from each other.

cedricgo 2018-09-20 23:07:48 UTC #6

I don't really do 3D myself, but those all look pretty good to me. Great job!

yaakov-weinstein 2018-09-25 14:28:51 UTC #7

Thanks, @cedricgo!
I've been pretty busy the past few days but plan on continuing today on.

yaakov-weinstein 2018-09-26 04:02:52 UTC #8

Day 4

Modeled the upper part of this cool bow concept. I started by tracing the spotlighted image with the shadow box feature of ZBrush, then the rest was pretty much ZModeler, Zremesher, and hPolish.
I got Keyshot for rendering and used it for this model. I gotta say, the difference is night and day.

yaakov-weinstein 2018-09-27 07:24:10 UTC #9

Day 5

Hello again, here is a helmet designed by an artist named Woo Kim.

Tried to get the shapes as clean as possible using the Topology brush and ZModeler. Was a pain-staking process getting used to ZModeler but I kept at it and do feel more comfortable with it now.
You'll notice that the trim and details havent't been modeled. I decided to at least do the basic shapes today and maybe come back to this another day. For now, I'll leave it as is because I've been working on it for 3 1/2 hours and it's 3:30am and I'm tired lol

yaakov-weinstein 2018-10-17 18:00:04 UTC #10

Day 6

Had a long break to do other stuff, but now I'm back with a quick flail model that I got from this character concept. Got a chance to familiarize myself with NanoMesh.