ZBrush 4R2 Beta Testing

Taken from my original thread here: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?161137-ZBrush-4R2-Beta-Testing-By-Matthew-Kean

I owe zbrush a lot. 

It is one of the main reasons why I have a public face in the 3D world. In the beginning I was a maya kid all the way. A friend of mine introduced me to the program he used for toy design, a small program called zbrush, and after that I knew what I was meant to do. Digital sculpture has changed so much since when it started. In an odd way its goal was never to progress, but rather revert. The closer the program came to its clay origins the more a success it was. With the release of R2, I can say with almost no doubt that not only has the origin been reached, but clay will leave envious of more than an undo button.

I came onto this project a little late, a little over two weeks before images were due. I stressed thinking what a task this would be, what I didn't know was this version of zbrush was different than the others. I found myself unchained, unleashed, and unaware of the speed at which I was producing.

Off like a rocket I flew sculpting like never before

Dynamesh became my new best friend, allowing my to take spheres and turn them into anything I want:

From nothing other than my own imagination I was able to turn any kind of geometry into any character I felt. I was truly free to create as I wanted.

Just to show you how far you can push dynamesh, I gave him a close up too :P

Dino from a sphere, had a good time doing this one

The sphere became my best friend allowing me manipulate forms unlike anything I've been able to do.

With it whole new styles began to emerge because of it

One of my old professors as he ran around the room:

And a fat kid in a panda suit

Rendering in ZBrush.

The idea of rendering in zbrush is nothing new, but with the addition of HDR and the ability to alter things with BPR filters, the game for me changed significantly.

I'm the kinda guy who doesn't like to move around a lot. The more I can stay in one program the easier it is for me to focus. Conceptual work can be done now from beginning to end within this program. And I love it.

This Mermaid was done from a sphere in one hour. The actual render used no photoshop what so ever, the end result being layered filters found within the BPR filter itself:

This devil's render was my second play with the bpr filters.

This butterfly was the first successful test I did with the wax shader as a skin shader, I was so happy with how this came out.  I also put a quick vid showing the very very beginning of the sculpting process and what I go through when making a model like this.

The shader used, was later developed further and used again on my alien piece, one of my favorites from the sessions

And finally was the head I did to document a video tutorial on how I created this shader, it uses 3 variations of the material all blended together using zbrush's new material blending system.

 More of the same

This piece was done using the new curve brushes, really interesting things. Every thing from the wrinkles to the poly paint was done using the curves as a base.

a snippet of the base material, of which three versions are applied to the final model.





The Idea of rendering continued, but I realized I had no real videos of me modeling.

I decided I would (from a sphere) design a realistic creature

I also wanted to play with the new noise plugin

one afternoon I popped out this imagea napping old man and it made me smile:







And theres more of course, but its mostly scraps here and there, once polished they'll pop up somewhere haha. Making these sculptures I used every single new feature available to me. It was like using a completely new program, without learning anything. All the features were intuitive and just worked (most of the time haha). I never felt more at ease then with using these features.

I'm so glad I got a chance to help further along such a great program, and I look forward to future betas with such a great company.

Thanks for stopping by and, of course, happy zbrushing

-Matt