WEEK 4 - The End of Pre-production

We are gradually learning to tie loose strings of our project together, even though it took us a while! It’s week 4 (a month into the project), and we have finally gotten our animatic approved. That’s a great start considering how everything in the scene will allow us to prioritize our work systematically, and focus on the level of detail accordingly.

On Monday, we learnt the basics of Zbrush and experimented with a few of the available tools. The interface was completely new to most of us so it will take us a while to get used to it. However, it was surprising to hear from our lecturer that ZBrush is currently being used by many (almost all) concept artists at this time in the industry. 2D art might actually be dying since sculpting offers a whole lot more than 2D ever could. It’s easier to view any concept work from multiple angles in a 3D based software than it is to view/or create in 2D. It is also a valuable change in the production pipeline because once the character is approved, it can be quickly taken to the next stage rather than having to model it all over from a concept model sheet. According to whether the character will be prepared for a game or a cinematic, or even a film, it will branch out from there. This saves time and increases efficiency in the pipeline; hence I see why the workflow has been shifting to more 3D based space.

The media below are research reference for ZBrush sculpting for concept art.

Image reference from ZBrush Central: artgusart (2017).

Here's another video explaining how concept art is done on ZBrush. There is a series of 6 videos available, but this is just the first one.

(Pixologic Zbrush, 2015)

This got me thinking and convinced to sculpt my character in Zbrush to be able to learn the UI and to practice for industry standard work. Also since we were running late on time, it would be faster to start off in zbrush and take the character into 3Ds max later.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Tuesday, our team sat down and worked diligently to improve our animatics in accordance to the feedback we received. Once that was approved, each of us were tasked to work on separate things to improve the speed at which we were at and jump start straight into production. I was working on the concepts. The main character designs were approved by Wednesday. I was also working on the sushi concepts which was the main idea of the film – to demonstrate a mechanical sushi. These were quickly approved and I was to take artistic control over the modelling and the finalized sushi models. It felt great to take artistic control over my concept designs for the first time.

I also refined the storyboards based on our new animatic. Usually, storyboarding is the first step in pre-visualization. However, in our case, we couldn’t follow the order as strictly, as the camera angles had to be modified before finalization. Hence, I designed the storyboards based on the animatic.

Therefore, this week we have been pushing ourselves to compensate for the lost time at the beginning of the trimester. Knowing that we are finally getting back on track has motivated me to work harder. I hope we continue to work harder to deliver tasks on time henceforth.

References:

artgusart (2017). ZBrush Block for 2D art and concept art [images]. Retrieved from http://archive.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?210060-Zbrush-blocking-for-2D-art-and-concept-art

Pixologic Zbrush (July 9, 2015) Zbrush from Concepting - Part 1