A Little Bit of Modelling

Ok, maybe more than "A Little."

Over the past two and a half years, I've been teaching myself and exploring 3D modeling in a program called Zbrush, with the help of a professor at my (now former) university, Tom Austin. It started as an On/Off process, just playing around with it as something new to learn as a skill-set. But then I realized just how practical a skill it was. At first it was simple shapes (cylinders with flared sections) and then I started to delve into it with more complex sculpting and box modeling.

One of the first things I modeled with Tom was a small gas cylinder inspired by the costume of the Sith Acolyte from the online video-game Star Wars: The Old Republic.

After I modeled this the first time, I set away Zbrush for a little while as I went back into my "physical art" only mindset. This wasn't an attempt to rebuke modeling, but instead a need to get the physical skillset I needed to develop locked away.

After coming back to modeling post BFA exhibition, I decided that I should model the remaining parts of my Acolyte in Zbrush and get it 3D printed. The first aspect I decided to model was the finger armor. It had been a while since I'd worked in Zbrush, so I decided something small would be the right way to get my brain wrapped around it again.

Having warmed up again, I tackled two of the more complicated areas. The first was the belt pouches that line belt of the character. This started off as a simple box, where I went a little overboard for my needs, and modeled the full pouch as a hollow form object, where a future paper pattern could be extracted.

At the same time as the pouch was wrapping up, I got fully into work-mode and started to model the armoring for the boots. As I had already determined the shoes that would serve as the base of the costume, I found some good marketing photos of them, and using them as reference, modeled the basic shoe form to ensure that the final plates would actually fit. This took about a week of trouble shooting as finagled my way through modeling the shoe and finding new tools in the latest Zbrush update. Finally, I got the plates modeled and detailed, and loaded into my 3D printer to get them underway.