Zbrush Tutorials on YouTube!

Hi All,
I've spent this past week making several youtube videos for Zbrush instruction. It's one thing to practice with zbrush and get really great technique nailed down. It's another issue to understand the logistics and setup necessary to get all that great zbrushy goodness out of zbrush and into a game texture and real time model. These videos are designed to answer all those complicated questions. If you're into zbrush, this stuff is for you! Feel free to post comments and/or suggestions.

http://www.youtube.com/user/kpburgess/videos

Remember Hermey? Here's his twin sister....

A good friend of mine gave me a sketch and asked me to model a character for her. She's got this short film planned...this is very preliminary. I modeled it in Max and then brought it into Zbrush for a quick surface touch up. Once my friend buys off on it, I'll go crazy in zbrush with the surface details.

Ahhhh, Xbox Avatars...quick and dirty

I got called by one of my favorite freelance companys: "hey Kevin, can you make three xbox avatars in a week including textures?".

Uh, hell yes!

Unfortunately, right in the middle of Number 1, I get an email that says the project has been cancelled. I guess the client expected Rock Band quality instead of Mii, I mean, Xbox Avatar quality. That's a big miscommunication, but, these things happen. Here's what I busted out in 11 hours.

Finished 'dem fins...

I took about a day and a half to model them, and four days to texture them. I spent a lot of time on the texture process because I wanted to learn some new stuff. I'm in LOVE with spotlight in Zbrush...and of course polypainting. About 40% of this is photosource and the remaining 60% is handpainting. I only had three useful photos to work from and the light was different between all three....so really, handpainting it was my only option in the end. Polypainting in zbrush makes it FUN, rather than drudgery.

Aquafin by ScubaPro

Here's a couple views of a model I just made. I'm currently making the UVs and will rig and animate this with an existing female scuba diving character...textures coming soon.

Three HER Interactive Characters + Rig + Lip Sync + Body Poses & Animation

I also rigged and animated these two characters for HER Interactive. I have to make a very loud shout-out to Mark Dygert (aka Vig), the Animation Lead over at HER. He taught me more about rigging, lip sync and Motion Builder in three months than I've ever been able to accumulate on my own. He's a one-man 3D orchestra. If you're ever up on Polycount.com, he's the senior dawg and he goes by Vig.

Each of these characters were modeled, zbrushed, and textured in two business weeks....80 hours. Another week to rig and create morph targets and about a week and a half to two weeks to lip sync, body pose, and animate. It was an extremely aggressive schedule but it worked out and I hear from those that matter that they're happy.

Next Gen Workflow

I'm most comfortable with a Max->Zbrush->Max workflow. I am very fluent with Maya as well, but really like modeling in Max much better. The new Graphite toolset leapfrogs Maya in a variety of significant ways. The character seen here will be released later this month by HER Interactive (www.herinteractive.com). It's called Secrets Can Kill Remastered.