I’ve been keen to try the new hair/fiber sytem in Zbrush 4 R2b but have been put off by the limitations of exporting the fibers as geometry. After discovering that people were working on a method of converting the geometry to splines I thought I’d install the update & have a crack at it myself.

http://www.moonjam.com/CG/FiberMAX/AJ_FiberMesh.zip

(Click to download)

To install it, either place the Macrosript in your 3ds Max scripts folder, or drag it onto your open 3ds Max window. Right click on a toolbar & choose ‘Customise’ from there you should find a new category titled ‘Zbrush4 R2b’ and in that an Action called ‘FiberMesh to Splines’, which you can then drag to a toolbar.

Once you’ve exported the fibers from Zbrush to 3ds Max via GoZ (or exporting), press the button on the toolbar & it should (hopefully) convert the polys to splines. I’m afraid I’ve only tested this in 3ds Max 2011 so far, so can’t gaurantee it will work in other versions.

I’m by no means a coder, so it’s certainly not the most elegant script/solution but hopefully it will be helpful to some people.

This is a torso study that I worked on over three 2 hour sessions. It was a really challenging pose, especially for my third attempt at working with clay – but I had a lot of fun trying to solve the anatomical puzzle!

I still have to hollow it out & get her fired, will post some photos of the process in the next couple of weeks.

I can’t believe it took me so long but I finally picked up & read The Goon earlier in the year and it is a BRILLIANT comic – if you can read you owe it to yourself to seek it out & fall in love with it. So, this halloween I decided to pay tribute to Eric Powell’s excellent anti-hero the only way I know how, by whittling a vegetable & putting a candle in it.

In other news, I’ve signed up to evening life drawing & life sculpting classes and also Scott Eaton’s fantastic Anatomy for Artists course. So expect some sculptures & studies of the human figure to pop up here in the coming weeks.

Happy Halloween!

Had a very thin scraping of free time & did some more work on my female character bust. Retopologised the face & rebuilt the hair. There’s still a lot I could do with her but I’ll probably call it a day on this one…

Some more images here

Last year, in an effort to learn more traditional skills, I started to play around with polymer clay. It’s great because it’s not only very easy to work but it can be cured in a conventional oven.

I made a couple of smallish versions of my Apple Boy character – about 5 or 6cm high, but in the process of learning about the stuff I stumbled across some great books for making jewellery with it. So, I made a selection of super tiny versions of Apple Boy and a couple of other characters as earrings for my Fiancé, who is also (very kindly) modelling them in these pictures.

I don’t think I’m going to give up CG just yet, but it’s always fun to learn new things!

Been playing around with V-ray SSS2 & thought I’d try rendering my female character. I haven’t done any more modelling so her hair is still very sketchy at this stage, definitely needs more styling!

Nothing too exciting (or new for that matter) but a female bust I started for one of the challenges on the excellent CGFeedback forum.

I had posted this just before I accidentally deleted my previous blog & thought I’d pop it up again, partly for posterity but mostly to kick myself into actually finishing her!

3D Artist Magazine were extraordinarily kind to include my clay head in a feature about CG artists/modellers who also produce traditional sculpture. I feel especially humbled & to be honest, pretty embarassed to have my work along side genuine uber talent such as Rafael Grassetti, Sze Jones, Alena Wooten & Glauco Longhi to name just a few.

Fortunately, my contribution is relatively brief & there is some really great advice from people who actually know what they’re talking about!

I should point there seems to have been a bit of a mix up as the last few captions don’t quite match the images & the last shot is of the raw claw model, not the fired bust.

While I’m hoping to upload some new things I’ve been working on shortly I thought I’d share something interesting I’ve been playing with in the last few weeks.

There’s a fantastic thread started by Lee Perry-Smith over at CGFeedback about 3D Scanning, which has had some great discussion about the different methods, techniques & technologies. From a variety of people I was pointed toward a remarkable piece of software called Agisoft Photoscan which can create full 3D geometry from nothing more than a series of photographs.

The ability to translate real world objects into a 3d data has always been something that fascinates me & at work we’ve been experimenting with building a crude scanning system utilising a CNC controlled laser. As exciting as this sounds (lasers!), it’s quite a laborious process with a number of hoops to jump through. Photoscan does away with a great deal of the setup process – in fact all you needs is a camera!

This skull was created from a series of 40 photographs, I then crudely cleaned up the geometry with Topogun and smoothed out some of the projected noise in Zbrush.

Still some sorting out to do, most of the descriptions are still missing but hopefully this enforced spring clean will prompt me to actually update more often.

Please feel free to visit the Gallery