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DreamShapers sketch book

Anonymous
Not applicable
Medium is a fantastic experience, before I keep adding sculpts, decided it's time to start a sketchbook.  Will start with a bit of a retrospective, and more or less start at the beginning and with any luck, keep at it for years.  Here's a carousel I made a few months ago, to see the creations up to that point.

Two Year Anniversary Update (mostly sequential with annual highlights)

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Earlier part of this post, carousel built inside medium with snapshots, from way back when we just met
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UahalLb04TU&feature=youtu.be
403 REPLIES 403

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
Damn, you're using that heinous topological smoothing effect that I'm constantly trying to avoid with hires inflate/deflate! Thought I recognised it in there. Awesome use of a glitch in the matrix!

Anonymous
Not applicable

P3nT4gR4m said:

Damn, you're using that heinous topological smoothing effect that I'm constantly trying to avoid with hires inflate/deflate! Thought I recognised it in there. Awesome use of a glitch in the matrix!

Yep.  Not so good for hard surface or anatomy, but good for organics.  See that in nature quite a bit.   Did something similar with the hair a few posts up.  Didn't do a fantastic job styling it, painting, or cleaning up the loose bits for that matter, but with a bit of practice and refinement, particularly in grouping the clusters, I think I could get a suitably realistic look.  Really time and memory consumption heavy though, even working with cloned batches, pushes it on 32gb, another level of resolution and I think it would be quite doable.   Thinking about shortcuts,  an under layer using striation has potentials.  A few other texture things I'm looking at, then I'll probably move back from the study and experimentation phase and back to the application phase.  I'd like to get better at emulating fire, for instance, gained a bit of ground there and have a few stamps that work reasonably well together, but still not satisfied with the results.  Not sure if its something I'll be able to do convincingly in medium, but I'm going to keep at it for a bit.

Anonymous
Not applicable
Alright.  Couple of evenings in. Different stages.  Initially just wanted to set up a t-pose, for Tvori but then the stamp started doing interesting things.  Started with this figure, which spawned several clones along the way, as I worked out how exactly to do the musculature and still have the color do what I wanted it to.   Got the form roughed out, and most of the chest detailed. 
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Added a background and began shaping another figure.  Managed to do it without breaking any ribs
inbvjpvk5o0k.png

I'm starting to think that listening to the album "Psychic Warfare" by Clutch on repeat was having an influence on my work.   The ditty, "Decapitation Blues", seemed particularly relevant, and heads were definitely rolling by now. 

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Had to uprez the face to get it closer to where I wanted it.  I found that the color moving properties varied significantly at different resolutions (as seen in the difference between the face and body).  Had to select both objects together, and de-rez the face a bit, before using the center function in order to avoid accidental loss of limbs, such as can be seen in the right on this particular merger attempt.  The DeRez on the head didn't hugely affect the overall look, but adding detail is likely going to be a challenge.   Clearly a ways to go on both figures.  Background is hidden, might test removing it, and see if that effects how much overall sculpt area is available in terms of resolution, and if that's a factor.  Seems to be moving from sketch to composition, so I'll likely chase it a bit further and get some anatomy practice in.  At this point, I'm not sure if its going to be a study piece, a fully detailed image, or if I'll just polish the figures a bit, clean  up the breakage,  and lift whichever one(s) I try and animate.

Anonymous
Not applicable
A bit more work on the figures.  Mostly worked on the female, although I did fix the jagged areas on the male figures legs.  The project is using stretched/smoothed clay, aside from the female's face, have generally resisted the urge to add more paint directly,  as it tends to change the line flow.  Did concede a couple touch ups when that process caused a dark grey square to emerge from the under-surface.    Makes it a bit tricky for doing details, although the main goal here is to understand the process of  using naturally emerging lines and working with them, rather than obliterating them to change directions.   Do to the coloration and materials, it makes it a bit harder to see the actual clay form.

Next session will clone and paint one a neutral gray, should help understand what I need to do in terms of shape/volume from here.  Limbs need more work.  Might not do a lot more with the faces, for resolution reasons, see where it goes. Female is at higher resolution than the male.  Surfacing is noticeably different.  The male will probably be left rough,  the female needs a lot more work in general.  Pose is simplistic, as I intend to decimate and export the figures to tvori at some stage, as a parallel project.

Front
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Back
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P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
That oilslick finish blows me away every time I see it! 

Anonymous
Not applicable

P3nT4gR4m said:

That oilslick finish blows me away every time I see it! 


Thanks.  It's basically a stamp (somewhat rectangular?) painted with prism colors and softened up a bit.  Think I hit it with the swirl and then smoothed it, but not entirely sure.  Could be a stamp cut from something like that after it was stretched, would have to check.  If I was going to do it over, I'd probably sandwich a bunch of colors together to start with, (starters for this were pretty pale, almost pastel, not really pretty) and merge them into a block.  That would keep the below surface color more consistent.  Working with it's tricky, because a lot of grey square artifacts under the surface, and the color tends towards bronze mud if you cut it too deep.  I agree it does give a really interesting look, worked well enough that it sidetracked my t-pose project because I wanted to study it.

Entire piece is one layer (although I separated the head at one point, it's remerged).   Detail cost, but makes moving the surfaces a lot easier.  Piece, as it is currently, only has one lighting source. 

Metals, top slider somewhere in the 5-20 range, inflate/deflate/smooth.  Don't think I changed the default (the materials  settings on all three layers affect the surface, I've noticed).  Bands were created by stretching it a bit when first applied.   Lower resolutions tend to make blending easier and keep colors stronger (male figure), higher rez and you get more of an oil slick effect. 

Anonymous
Not applicable
Learned something today.   First thing I did was clone the sculpture, mirror it and paint the first one gray.   So much easier to see what needs to be worked on.   The coloring really distorts the surface, was a bit shocked at how lumpy and inaccurate the underlying model was, since I worked with the colors from the beginning of the sculpt.  Definitely see why people like working in gray. although it was instructive in the way it demonstrated how powerful color and line are on the perception of form.
m2nkexpbdu5d.png
back view at start of session, using grey clay clone for comparison
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... For most of the rest of the section, I worked on the pair using mirror mode.   Switched back and forth between models, due to the inconsistency of tool results across the mirror plane.   In the final image, it's particularly noticeable in the grey form, which doesn't get fingers.  Over the course of a long sculpt, using this approach, I'd probably redo the cloning process a few times to minimize distortion.

She did eventually get boots, or at least the start of some.  They came out very differently than I expected them to, enough so that I'm curious how it would look on a full sculpt.  Along the way the clones started cracking, which was interesting, but generally not something I would do deliberately very often, assuming it sticks during the relaod. Ended up stopping to delete some layers, and called it a night.

Will try and post a couple of the more interesting progress shots (where unexpected effects happened), and a "where it's at now" image sometime tomorrow.  Time for some rest.


P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
I tend to go back and forward a bit when I'm doing portraits. Sometimes I need to blast some paint on there just to quickly check how it looks but if I don't have a look at it in grey before the end, I find I can be miles off. The good thing about Medium is a rough paintjob only takes 5-10 minutes

Anonymous
Not applicable

P3nT4gR4m said:

I tend to go back and forward a bit when I'm doing portraits. Sometimes I need to blast some paint on there just to quickly check how it looks but if I don't have a look at it in grey before the end, I find I can be miles off. The good thing about Medium is a rough paintjob only takes 5-10 minutes


Before the 2.0 update and/or Win10 (switched at the same time), I couldn't even consider doing it this way.  Massive optimizations when they changed the layer storage approach, I think.  Generally, I'd know it was time to stop working on a figure when the memory got shaky, even with 32gb.  Duplicating it, would cut the working memory in half, so was out of the question.  Early on in this figure, I found that I could duplicate it at different stages, rather than relying on multiple save files to backtrack, if needed.   I've almost always worked in color (by itself not too bad), and like the metals look, using both
makes it pretty hard to read, adding lines in the clay, even more so.   As a result, the clone and paint gray, work on both at the same time, thing was something I didn't even consider until a couple sessions ago, when Inky's comments about preferring to work in neutral colors popped into my head. 

Upside of learning the hard way here: depending on the purpose, there are clearly avenues to
change the way metal reflections work by deliberately distorting the
surface .  I might go back and look at some old sculpts now, I'm curious what the sculpt with the manta ray and red-metal lady, look like in that form.

This technique wouldn't really lend itself to an end stage paint-over, although, might be
able to do a block subtraction thing to apply the base color, like that
dinosaur stamp thing I did a long time back, to speed things up. 

Anyhow, happy about finally wrapping my head around that, should speed up figure sculpting times considerably.





Anonymous
Not applicable
A couple of interesting things along the way, one of the gray clones fractured, which is another artifact that may have a place and time to build an image around.   Perhaps in a rock monster or an impact area.  How exactly the lines form is a bit unpredictable, and would probably require a long process to figure out.  The effect is reliably produced when the GPU gets overwhelmed and cloning is used, so it can be forced at any point by just recloning until that happens.  When the other objects are deleted the crackling remains, although I'm not sure if it would survive a save and reload.  Also due to the non-precise nature of the mirroring effect, none of the silver/grey clones have fingers, which is a feature that could be improved, or set as a precision option, if memory is consumptive.  Anyhow, mildly interesting effects that are worth noting.
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