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Description
Here's a quick study I did in zbrush a while back to become acquainted with its new features;

Dynamesh

Can you believe that this entire bust started out from a simple sphere? That's what dynamesh does. It dynamically adjusts your topology/polygon count to the shape of the model as you are sculpting. Before you would have to plan ahead and create a base geometry to sculpt onto. For example simple cylinders/tubes for the antennae would have to be in place, otherwise it would be quite messy to do in zbrush without creating separate meshes.

This is perhaps the greatest advancement in digital sculpting thus far. It further removes the tediousness of 3d modeling and allows the artist to jump straight into the concept without having to initially worry about things like geometry, edge flow, or polygon count. As such, it also drastically speeds up the process. In the time it would take to produce a simple sketch on paper, an artist adept with zbrush could conceivably sculpt a 'sketch' in full 3d.

Case and point? The time I took for this piece: Roughly 40 minutes, all straight from my head. No previous sketches or plans involved. =]

Material blending and rendering

To go along with the rapid prototyping idea, zbrush also now has material blending and rendering capabilities that are slowly becoming comparable to those of higher end packages. Before I would have to take sculpts into maya or 3ds max to get subsurface scattering for skin or image based lighting for ambient effects for example. All of that is in zbrush now and it's fairly easy to use.

The entire render for this piece was done in zbrush. No external renders or composites needed.

Tiling, noise and advanced brushes

There are also a bunch of new brushes and sculpting features too. Most notably is the surface noise feature, which lets you quickly apply bumps or patterns to a model. I used it to give a kind of bumpy/smooth pattern you see on beetle shells.

So yeah, those are some of the things I tried on this piece. Hope you enjoy! Next things to play with are fur, image composting and render passes for an even higher level of fidelity. =]

Additional Shots:

Description
Here's a quick study I did in zbrush a while back to become acquainted with its new features;

Dynamesh

Can you believe that this entire bust started out from a simple sphere? That's what dynamesh does. It dynamically adjusts your topology/polygon count to the shape of the model as you are sculpting. Before you would have to plan ahead and create a base geometry to sculpt onto. For example simple cylinders/tubes for the antennae would have to be in place, otherwise it would be quite messy to do in zbrush without creating separate meshes.

This is perhaps the greatest advancement in digital sculpting thus far. It further removes the tediousness of 3d modeling and allows the artist to jump straight into the concept without having to initially worry about things like geometry, edge flow, or polygon count. As such, it also drastically speeds up the process. In the time it would take to produce a simple sketch on paper, an artist adept with zbrush could conceivably sculpt a 'sketch' in full 3d.

Case and point? The time I took for this piece: Roughly 40 minutes, all straight from my head. No previous sketches or plans involved. =]

Material blending and rendering

To go along with the rapid prototyping idea, zbrush also now has material blending and rendering capabilities that are slowly becoming comparable to those of higher end packages. Before I would have to take sculpts into maya or 3ds max to get subsurface scattering for skin or image based lighting for ambient effects for example. All of that is in zbrush now and it's fairly easy to use.

The entire render for this piece was done in zbrush. No external renders or composites needed.

Tiling, noise and advanced brushes

There are also a bunch of new brushes and sculpting features too. Most notably is the surface noise feature, which lets you quickly apply bumps or patterns to a model. I used it to give a kind of bumpy/smooth pattern you see on beetle shells.

So yeah, those are some of the things I tried on this piece. Hope you enjoy! Next things to play with are fur, image composting and render passes for an even higher level of fidelity. =]

Additional Shots: