Hi folks!
I thought I would create a thread here and start posting my wip’s created in Blender, since I find it hard to find the time to finish stuff at the level that I would like to, specially since I am not that experienced in Blender per se. With every little project I do in Blender, I learn a bit more about the software but still i don’t have a lot of spare time and it takes some time to polish things, so I will start just posting wips, I hope someone finds this interesting or something!
Here’s an Elephant, fully modeled and sculpted in Blender, texturing also done in Blender, still need time to finsh all the details, this was more of a test for the sculpting performance etc, see how it felt compared to Zbrush…All details hand sculpted
Hi Alex, I’ve followed your work for almost 20 years. You have been a big inspiration to many artists that started back in that era. This piece in particular was just one of those sculpts that stuck with me over the years.
I’m just curious as to your thinking behind making the move from Zbrush to Blender? I’ve been using Zbrush probably as long as you have and I have considered, from time to time, about getting more into the sculpting tool in Blender, but I ended up going the other way and embracing VR sculpting instead. I still use Zbrush for work, but it would be great at some stage to be able to leave Zbrush behind as I don’t think it has much of a future regarding further evolution. It’s pretty much reached the end of its dev life, whereas Blender sculpting has so much potential, especially because we have access to all the other tools, unwrapping, rendering, hair tools, etc.
Anyway, hope you don’t mind me posting this here, but I was very interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.
thanks for the comments guys, appreciated. @Musashi haha that is indeed so old, holy shit!
As for your question. Blender has a lot of potential, I love the fact that I can sculpt, lookdev, light, test renders, go back to sculpt, add proceduralism via either shaders or GN etc etc, so is a great tool, and I love the viewport so much better than Zbrush. With that said, I do wish Blender was more production ready when it comes to heave assets and heavy scene editing and sculpting. It lacks some nice sculpt layers along with other things here and there that in production are priceless when it comes to versions, iterations etc etc. ( i know there are addons for some things, but those are not great to have as addons ) I wish they stopped adding new features and improve the current ones instead, ( can’t polypaint when using multires for example, Blender crashes often when dealing with high res sculpts, gets a bit sluggish , and I WISH it would stop evaluating objects even when they are hidden in the viewport… ) So overall is great, but I think it needs an extra push to make it prevalent when it comes to big hero assets…I can only hope that it will keep improving.
Were you using remesh workflow or dynatopo? What was the final polycount on this? I’ve been testing some performance/ triangle counts on my system. Looks nicely done. Finish those blank white eyeball.
Awesome sculpt.
Congratulations on the initiative, it inspired me. Leave this project as finished or post it as a study and move on to the next one. otherwise, the next project will take time. I know my comment goes against the rule we created ourselves to always finish our art. But it’s a way to practice and evolve. That’s an opinion about myself.
@adam450 just remesh workflow, and then retopologized by hand the whole thing using blender too. It was the first time i was sculpting / retopologizing everything in blender so it was a nice little experiment. polycount on the elephant is arond 35millions if I remember correctly. @lumrp thanks man. I won’t be working on that for now as I have a lot of other things started, here’s another of my first models I made in blender, learning the tools. I wanted to rig it too so i could learn rig in blender, but I haven’t had the chance to do so yet, the idea was to track it in live footage and also learn the tracking tools:
Hi there,
That’s a pretty interesting feedback you gave here ! I don’t do sculpt but I use blender a lot at work and it’s interesting to learn what you like and don’t !
Did you try the screen icon ? you can access it in the filter tab …
The eye indeed keep the hidden meshes evaluated , but with the screen you should be good unless you have some special dependencies that triggers an evaluation…
Cool ! yeah that’s a bit confusing, the eye icons is some kind of temporary hide, that you can use with H / Alt-H and it’s local to your .blend.
The screen icon is a more permanent hide that will also work when you link assets into say a shot file.
In the end they kept only one in the default interface but especially when working with heavy scenes this is an easy trap for people learning blender !
Such a sleek profile ! I love how unfamiliar and challenging the micro details on these creatures can be. We’re more or less able to mentally picture the crevices and folds on an elephant, but the details on a spider’s fangs ? it’s something new
Yes, this is the main reason why I ultimately decided that Blender sculpting just wasn’t ready yet, as the performance too bad for the projects I do in Zbrush.
I was going to tell you abouy the eyeball Vs monitor icon but it seems that someone alreay did.
Yes, it definitely needs that push. Plus it needs more integration with tools like Wrap3/Scan store or the Reallision ecosystem for higher end character workflows.
