Blogs, Facebook and a broken hand

Hi, its been quite a while since I last posted on this blog.  Part of this reason is that I broke my right hand about 11 weeks ago.  Not a good thing to do when you sculpt, draw and paint on a regular basis.  I spent the first few weeks getting down in the dumps and then I just started to sculpt again...Just much slower and mostly with my left hand.  I have noticed that my creativity that I once had through "zenning out" (as ill put it for now)was not accessible with this broken hand.  I guess cos I have to concentrate more to create whatever it is Im making.  Its still ok, Ive just used to time to get a bit of anatomy and left hand practice.
Ive tried to use a wacom pen with pretty bad results.  So, no Zbrush or Photoshop for now.
Come over and like my Holonick page on Facebook too heres a link -->  holonick
Heres a few examples of whats been sculpted with a broken hand.

Sculpted in Super Sculpey, painted in acrylic 

Sculpted in Chavant NSP medium

This is a stereoscopic image, cross eyes to see in 3D

Sculpted in Chavant NSP medium

Sculpted in Chavant NSP medium

This is a stereoscopic image, cross eyes to see in 3D 

Sculpted in Chavant NSP medium

This is a stereoscopic image, cross eyes to see in 3D

Sculpted in Chavant NSP medium

This is a stereoscopic image, cross eyes to see in 3D

Sculpted in Chavant NSP medium

This is a stereoscopic image, cross eyes to see in 3D

Sculpted in Super Sculpey

Sculpted in Chavant NSP medium

Hand sculpture "How To" and a little animation

A short animation made with particles and fields in Maya 2011.



Here is an instructional video in how to make a hand with oil based clay ( Chavant )

Making clean edges in Zbrush

This video shows my technique for creating clean edges. There are two techniques I use, both similar. One is to simply mask, in low subdiv, and pull the geometry over other geometry and then pinch to make the edges close so that after subdiv up they remain close.
The other is to turn off "subdiv smooth modifier" so when subdiv up levels the corners remain.
You will see both techniques in this video.




Making clean edges in Zbrush from Nick McGavern on Vimeo.

Edit existing topology in Zbrush

This is a short demo showing how to take existing geometry and to edit the geometry/topology to better suit your mesh needs.
Load a Zsphere.
Scroll to the "Topology" dropdown.
Click "Select Topo" and choose your geometry to be edited.
Go to the "Rigging" dropdown above and choose "Select Mesh" and choose the mesh your editing (to be used as a surface that you can lay your verts onto).
Click the "Edit Topology" button and begin editing the topo.

Tips.
Hovering over the verts will turn your brush green, you can then click on that vert to use as a starting point.
To reset the beginning point of your vert placement, double click in space, otherwise it will start at the center of your zsphere.
Make your draw size about 1-3 so you are only effecting one vert at a time.
This method can also be used to merge two tools, once they have been merged down to one.
Also great way to add geometry to a sculpture without having to venture out to another program.

Edit topology in Zbrush from Nick McGavern on Vimeo.

Zbrush layers tutorial

I have a tutorial for you all to have a gawk at.
Basically I had created a sculpture in zbrush and posed it before saving it in a neutral pose.  I would usually pose a sculpture on a layer but this time forgot.  So, this is a work around to get the creation back to the neutral pose.   Using layers and importing an early saved version of an exported .obj into a layer at the lowest subdiv on the latest posed sculpture...the video will explain it better.