GNOMON - HEAD SCULPTING AND TEXTURING A review by Mark Gmehling
DVD REVIEW
In this Gnomon workshop, the founder himself, Alex Alvarez gives an indepth look at the creation of a detailed character head using the hypetool of these days - the groundbreaking software ZBrush: Alex Alvarez shows the workflow of creating a detailed characters head within ZBrush as we know from forums like pixolator.com (http://www.pixolator.com) or pixologics website (http://www.pixologic.com). Beginning with primitive shapes derived from Zspheres (which are a fantastic tool to block out even more complicated forms very fast), the primary forms of the head are quickly blocked out to determine general proportion and design. After that the resulting low/res mesh is refined more and more by subdividing and intuitive pushing/pulling and scratching the mesh, which counts about 2 million polys at the end. Alex then refines the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and horn regions before moving into Projection Master to create surface details, like skinfolds for example. He demonstrates different techniques and tools to detail the skin surface with wrinkles/folds/pores etc. He shows the workflow to insert edgeloops to refine polycount in areas where more detail is needed or in this case to simply to block out additional geometry to extrude horns. All these processes cover the use of masking areas to protect them of affection or to hide areas to fasten performance.This entire process from beginning to end covers a highly detailed, wrinkled head. This is shown without time lapsing. The DVD's contain over 8 hours of lecture!!! Once the highres geometry is
complete he takes time to demonstrate the creation of custom tileable Alpha libraries with ZBrush or Photoshop, and even talks about using and "gettying" reference material for modeling and texturing tasks. Before painting the different texture maps, the UV Setup is done which is a lovely simple thing in ZBrush. He starts with painting a bump map, which is a nice process in Zbrush because of the realtime redraw on your mesh using a bumpviewer material. This texture map is followed by a specular and a colorchannel where some of ZBrush’s different powerful painting tools and their attributes are demonstrated. While painting the color and specular map the movie is time lapsing while Alex is giving comments to his workflow, but don't worry, all he's doing is covered in the lectures before and you'll miss no information on that. These are the only lectures that are timel apsed, because you have to know the workflow
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beforehand and are able to follow even if it’s running fast. Before he renders all the created maps and the exported .obj file back in Maya, he demonstrates ways of combining the different maps by using photo-
