Concept 3d Art using Zbrush and Photoshop to Convey Character Concept Ideas

 3D in Webdesign to Game Design and Tech

I have not posted much lately but I have been busy building and creating my Freelance IT Lansing website that includes both Freelance and Concept Art and Design as well as coding scripting and website design and development. Seeing I use many programs in tech, design and development that ranges from Photoshop, Illustrator, Aftereffects and Zbrush for graphics design to apps and programs like Dreamweaver, Fireworks and as well scripting apps like Sublime, Textpad and development aids like Xampp when it comes to coding the website I am building refers to all of these and the uses.

3D Modeling and Character Concepts and Design

But this is a blog about 3d digital art, concept art and graphic design so here I rarely go into programs like Adobes Dreamweaver or Flash Professional yet they do have a place in both 3d and website design and development as well some have a use in game development.  But today lets look at more 3D Modeling and Character Concepts and Design. So below I are just a few example s of this months works and ideas. As you can see these are just rough concept art sculpts / sketches of the models as I decide where I am going in zbrush. Then masked off with a greenscreen background to make it easy to pull them from the background.

Zbrush Models for use in Photoshop

From this point I then take the models from zbrush into Photoshop in order to make some character concept cards for the ideas I have. These are very rough and Work in progress sketches at this point all done in Zbrush and still not posed nor finished  works....

These here are then taken in to Photoshop to make some concept sketch cards of teddy bears sculpting models ...

 Eventually after all are masked out of backgrounds they end up on cards like these shown below for Concept Character Cards.

You can see how just adding some neatly placed textures and images can look much better and done in little time as well so any of the advertising or game reps can see your ideas and you can springboard off that sort of like a storyboard concept artists ideas come to life.

 Continuing with Concept Art Ideas

At this point we can continue on with adding more ideas and concepts for the artists work as well. In a real life situation these concept character cards above might include notes on the cards and a character concept sheet full of the specs and artists and clients concept ideas as well. Here are some more examples of concept character image cards from another project directly above and then below is what these characters would look like when starting on the concept environment art below. Again these are 3D modelings and illustration design ideas and not a finished project or product.

Pterodactyls with a concept environment art idea added,  its not time for landscape rendering, still concept ideas.

 As you can see the more added the more like a product design shape the project starts to resemble. But lets get back to the Jerry Bear style of 3D modeling character concept design ...

Adding Details to Concept Character Artists Design

So what is a teddy bear without any hair the clients and art team asks ?  Well what will the teddy bear look like with hair added and how will that be done ?  This is quite simple thanks to the functions of  Fibermesh in Zbrush. The hair and fur fibers are now easily added in Zbrush with the help of the Fibermesh and hair features.  They are editable in many ways and have many features, seen above the model has the hair only on his head, then below the 3D model has had more fur groups added and you can make some the same and others like the belly and ear fur shorter and more dense.

When you enlarge these images you can see the details that you can achieve in Zbrush using the fiber mesh functions. These furs can also be exported as splines into programs like Maya and 3DS Max Studio.

Last of this part of the Concept Character Artwork.

So at this point you could try and cut the fiber mesh teddy bear concept character renders out of there back grounds as shown below but you can see that this would be a real mess !

Seeing that with fur the background green screen will actually make this more of a chore. So they would be best done in 3DS Max Studio on a backdrop ... Adobe Photoshop Postwork cannot help here.

Take a closer look and you will see that a green screen with fur is really difficult to get the green screen removed. The image at 1:00 O'clock above is just the fur without the character concept model and the green shines right through it. As well the image above on the left shows how its hard to remove the green that shines through the fur when cutting the image out.   This is not a tutorial but I wanted to show more processes that are needed in 3d modeling and concept character design. Until next time be creative and Feel free to post comments and questions below.