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Martin's sketchbook

Martinity
Heroic Explorer
Hi guys, in here I'll be posting my ramblings and sketches. Hopefully you'll enjoy watching my work, and feel free to leave comments and critique.
167 REPLIES 167

Martinity
Heroic Explorer

P3nT4gR4m said:

@Martinity Characters are difficult? That surprises me, i'm finding the total opposite. You mean in Medium compared to zbrush or blender or whatever?

Awesome sculpting BTW!



I find characters to be a bit more difficult, since fine control is hard, at least for me. Whereas with landscapes, you can be a bit more loose and gestural. I'm going to try my hand at more characters though after seeing your awesome characters ☺️ Do you work with traditional 3d Sculpting as well? 

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
@Martinity - Thanks a ton! I've actually never been able to do this before. I've tried modelling some stuff in trad 3-d packages but the interface always stopped me dead in my tracks. I've known all along I would be able to learn it if I persevered but the problem was it never quite got enjoyable. It never felt like art, like it does to me in 2-d. It always felt like engineering, like my dayjob as a database and systems guy. Motivation was low.

I've always been pretty confident that when VR hit us, it'd be a lot easier to get to grips with and this was backed up to my satisfaction when I saw an early demo of Medium on YT. At that point I started getting my hopes up. So I got my rift ordered up and then steeled myself for a massive disappointment if and when Medium or something similar launched.

The advantage of being a pessimist is that it's a lot easier for us to be pleasantly surprised and, very occasionally, blown away completely. 1st generation VR and V1.0 Medium was just so smooth and so damn usable that I pretty much just jumped in with my trunks on. What you're seeing is the results of decades of frustration, at not being able to 3-D art the way I'd been pretty much dreaming of doing the whole time.

The long-term goal has always actually been environments for me but, I'd been mucking about with blender to UE4 pipeline, and then jumping into the rift to check it out, killing time for the three or four months it took between headset and controllers arriving and suddenly made a breakthrough with blender where I could just about sculpt organics. Up til then it was always hard surface stuff, all panels and boxes and stuff)

Now organics and characters were always the holy grail for me, like I wasn't even aimed there, it was so far in the future I might well be dead before it arrived and suddenly I can kinda do it a bit and I'm starting to suss out anatomy and stuff and it's rapidly getting easier and making more sense. And it was around this time Medium launched.

TL/DR - no, no real traditional sculpting background

With regards the fine control thing, if you haven't tried already, try scaling the sculpt up till it's huge and you'd have to get up on your tiptoes to finish an eyelash then use the big travel joints of your shoulders and arms, rather than little twitchy wrists to get the strokes in.

I think you mentioned you'd noticed the scaling glitch, where you scale up to max size and the sculpt gets stuck at the centre of worldspace? Just ignore the position and scale it back a tiny bit to find maximum usuable scale. When I'm painting the eyeballs the're the size of shipping containers. More like graffiti than fine art. Any time I'm having trouble with a fiddly bit, I just scale it up a bit.

Martinity
Heroic Explorer
Interesting read.. It's great that VR has helped you bridge that gap to a place where character modeling is less frightening! My hope is also, that modeling characters in vr, might help myself to better understand the planes of a face and anatomy in another way than 2d could. 

I'm blown away by the potential of working like this, but also very aware of how early we are in the transition from 2d to VR. Would love to take a sneek peak at the future of VR to see where we are in 10 years from now. 

Martinity
Heroic Explorer
Here's another one. Not that happy about the face, but oh well :hushed:

nvnvlca5ci36.jpg

Martinity
Heroic Explorer
Hi guys, here's another one. This time it's a skull study. The teeth are a bit "blocky", but appart from that I'm quite happy with this one.

Trying to get better at painting portraits, and doing a 3d study like this helps a lot in understanding the planes of the face.

You can check it out in 3d here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WQnKN

Btw, this was exported from Medium, taken into Substance painter for textures and then rendered in Marmoset toolbag. Still struggling with getting normal maps to work right, but hopefully I'll get that to work soon.

1gtn2y6uvc3u.jpgother o

Martinity
Heroic Explorer
Substance painter 🙂

gpcsjervcai9.jpg
nln3m4q9ftof.jpg

Anonymous
Not applicable
Damn man thats awesome! Is Substance painter easy to get into? I've just noticed they offer free student versions.

Martinity
Heroic Explorer
It's not that bad I think, if you're allready into 3d. You should give it a try! 🙂

Here's a realtime version of the skull and a turntable!

m41qelwiduxo.jpg
https://youtu.be/SbZSxPjvir8

Anonymous
Not applicable
awesome! I'll have to add it to my long list of things to try out  😛