This is how I meet ZBrush for the first time.

It's quite a long while since i first stumble upon 'Zbrush'. I remember first time playing the demo of ZB1.5 back in the days like... Maybe 7 Years ago. The software itself was somewhat come out ahead of its time. I was fascinated by its features as well as have a lot headache with ZB's workflow and its GUI.




7 years ago, I really doesn't done any study or train myself to use it much. Since I was study in Architecture School and really nothing much to do with sculpting or making a character (And how ironic that, until now, I haven't yet to work on any architectural project in my career). So, Zbrush is fall into my hobby which is still confusing to use and very hard to control.

A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda

As A.R.E.S. has released, I'm always train myself and learn how to push the IP up to the industry standard and not just indie, in the part of Art Direction and style. Making next-gen asset is more like a skill that the team has to acquire these days. And surprisingly that how we made game model these day is so much different then Half-Life's age quite a lot! It's not Modeling ---> Unwrap ---> Painting texture anymore. Instead, we're more likely to Basemesh stuffs from standard 3d package and then sculpt the hires, paint it and Bake everything. Or sometime good old 3dmax or Maya only needed for making a clean topology for the low polygon version, animating and so on.

In A.R.E.S. I use Blender to model stuffs.

Also Texture was done in "Pixel Art" style to keep the art direction in tune with 'Retro'

It's happen to me that Sculpting package like Zbrush or Mudbox is now more and more playing the part in asset making for games and other entertainment media everyday. For maybe only me, I'm the one that happy for this evolution of workflow. Because I'm quite bad at deliver an idea from concept art or model sheet into polygon modelling, something always lost in translation. Concepting on the fly with 3d sketching is quite the way to go for me. And last evening with 2 hours playing with Zbrush, making this FPS/Scifi looking container prove me well. That if A.R.E.S.2 is going to happen, we need this workflow in our team aswell.

My very first showable Zbrush work Yay! XD

7 has passed, since I've first touch ZB1.5, still this time it's still confusing on GUI it took me like ... a few days to use to the controlling scheme, where stuffs is, and when to do what along the process of modelling. For the starter, I'm not going to make a fancy character for my first model for sure. Because, I knew it's going to look funny as my level in ZB is still low as noob and my anatomy knowledge wasn't that accurate to make a character model yet.

So, I decided to make a simple scifi container. This thing start off from cube primitive. I made the shells by using masking+inflate deformation. detailing using my own bolt/nut stamp I've made earlier and small detail by projection master.

Well, yeah, it's might too long for a single work post. But, memories does seeping in while I'm using Zbrush again this time, really. I hope you enjoy both of my works and my rants. See you later ;)