I’m finding out that the Zbrush to Maya workflow is a very tedious one. I haven’t run into any roadblocks as of yet, but the process of using a program where the “art” comes first and the logical part of modeling comes alittle later is new to me. In a good way.

As of now, the sculpting part of Tim is done. Once I figured out that I wanted his hair to be a part of the main geometry (in the interest of not completely crashing Maya), finishing it only took about 3 hours. The experimental hair was only worked with for 30 minutes.

new hair

old hair

The model’s mittens were finished (about 45minutes) as well.

mittens

I’ve begun working on the topology- this is the process of taking the organic shape that I’ve fleshed out and pretty much recreating the geometry face-by-face. It works by starting with a primitive ZBrush calls ZSpheres (think balls of clay) and using that as a base, the new geometry webs out from that point as I place each new vertex. This way I can use a low resolution model and apply the detail (the result of millions of polys) as a normal/displacement map. So far the retopo’s had about 3 hours put into it. Here’s the guide that got me started for anyone who’s interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeTg5xuzgCs

Tim’s about 45% done (texturing, finishing the retopo and the rigging are still looming)

retopologizing

new mesh

I also dropped the time machine model into the Team folder so that it can be used in one of the device cards. I had a couple of my models saved in my hard drive that I keep for populating environments also. I thought that I could contribute them to the creation of the library’s environment- included was a column,a grand staircase, a potted and three different kinds of light fixtures. I spent about an hour just cleaning up the mess that was their histories -time machine included- and gathering up the specific texture files so that they would be easy to access.