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Description
So, those of you who have been following *ElsonWong recently may have run across a panel of this on his new comic site CursedWombat.com Well, here's the rest of it.

It's actually a brief 'demo' of sorts to demonstrate what could be done with the Daz Studio custom Ashworth model I made for him. I presented it on his birthday but the idea has been in the works way before that.

Process

The comic pretty much explains itself. Elson was interested in learning about Zbrush, so one day we did a skype session and I demoed the software to him, creating a sculpt in Zbrush which led to this:

At the time, I was also experimenting in Daz Studio with the Dack and Gem model you see in the comic (more on them in a later post. Just note that clothes on the fox are really reference placeholders made from stock items), so I decided to include Ash in the experiment.

Both of them were created in the same manner. I started with a full body sculpt in Zbrush, polypainted it and then projected the sculpt onto the 'Genesis' stock model in Daz Studio 4 as a 'shape' or 'morph target'. This was made possible through the projection and morph target tools in Zbrush as well as the asset transfer plugin in Daz studio.

Usage

At first it seemed like a strange way to go about things, since the geometry in Daz is comparably less detailed in terms of resolution, but the tradeoff seemed to be worth it. Through this technique, I was able to quickly take a static model and give it a fully skinned and tested rig along with every morph, shape and pose Daz Studio was capable of. The model could wear any clothing Daz Studio offered, pose any pose, take on any shape or morph, as well as do any expression etc. It seemed like a promising rapid prototyping tool to use, especially for us modelers who know how much time and effort would go into setting up a proper body and facial rig.

Case and point? The time I took to make Ashworth from start to finish was roughly one weekend. Not bad for a fully shaded, clothed, rigged, poseable, morphable, animatable model, no? =] Granted of course, it's limited by Daz Studio's simplified geometry and rendering systems, but if it is intended just as a drawing or painting reference (which it is, and that's important to note) rather than for full blown renders, this approach is quite nice. The artist can easily load in the model, pose the character for reference and render out exactly what they need. In fact the artist doesn't even need to render. They can just navigate around the model in 3d space like one would for a real figure or model.

My hope for this particular model is for it to serve Elson as a pose and volumetric reference to be used in his comic panels. Whenever there are odd angles, complicated poses, gestures etc. He can pull up this model and work with it for better accuracy. =]

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little insight into the experiment. I will be producing more works with this technique in mind, so there is definitely more to be revealed.

Ashworth © *ElsonWong

Additional shots/Examples:

Description
So, those of you who have been following *ElsonWong recently may have run across a panel of this on his new comic site CursedWombat.com Well, here's the rest of it.

It's actually a brief 'demo' of sorts to demonstrate what could be done with the Daz Studio custom Ashworth model I made for him. I presented it on his birthday but the idea has been in the works way before that.

Process

The comic pretty much explains itself. Elson was interested in learning about Zbrush, so one day we did a skype session and I demoed the software to him, creating a sculpt in Zbrush which led to this:

At the time, I was also experimenting in Daz Studio with the Dack and Gem model you see in the comic (more on them in a later post. Just note that clothes on the fox are really reference placeholders made from stock items), so I decided to include Ash in the experiment.

Both of them were created in the same manner. I started with a full body sculpt in Zbrush, polypainted it and then projected the sculpt onto the 'Genesis' stock model in Daz Studio 4 as a 'shape' or 'morph target'. This was made possible through the projection and morph target tools in Zbrush as well as the asset transfer plugin in Daz studio.

Usage

At first it seemed like a strange way to go about things, since the geometry in Daz is comparably less detailed in terms of resolution, but the tradeoff seemed to be worth it. Through this technique, I was able to quickly take a static model and give it a fully skinned and tested rig along with every morph, shape and pose Daz Studio was capable of. The model could wear any clothing Daz Studio offered, pose any pose, take on any shape or morph, as well as do any expression etc. It seemed like a promising rapid prototyping tool to use, especially for us modelers who know how much time and effort would go into setting up a proper body and facial rig.

Case and point? The time I took to make Ashworth from start to finish was roughly one weekend. Not bad for a fully shaded, clothed, rigged, poseable, morphable, animatable model, no? =] Granted of course, it's limited by Daz Studio's simplified geometry and rendering systems, but if it is intended just as a drawing or painting reference (which it is, and that's important to note) rather than for full blown renders, this approach is quite nice. The artist can easily load in the model, pose the character for reference and render out exactly what they need. In fact the artist doesn't even need to render. They can just navigate around the model in 3d space like one would for a real figure or model.

My hope for this particular model is for it to serve Elson as a pose and volumetric reference to be used in his comic panels. Whenever there are odd angles, complicated poses, gestures etc. He can pull up this model and work with it for better accuracy. =]

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little insight into the experiment. I will be producing more works with this technique in mind, so there is definitely more to be revealed.

Ashworth © *ElsonWong

Additional shots/Examples: