HMC #22 : Classic Self Portrait - Single Model : Adam Jones

#1

Hey I am a first time poster , long time lurker.

I just want to say how amazingly talented/ well informed everyone is here,there are alot of great tricks and workarounds hiding in these pages. I have been dying to do a challenge here for a long time but just never felt like I was good enough to even post here let alone join a challenge , but I am throwing caution to the wind. So now that the meet and greet is out of the way I’ll get down to it.

I chose a sculpture of Moses holding the ten Commandments , an amazing work by Michelangelo (if that link doesn’t work you can just google “Michelangelo Moses” I’m not sure if it is cool to post other peoples photos here, I think you can, but better safe than sorry. )

Anyway this will be more of a personal challenge for me than anything, I don’t expect to win, but I do want to push myself as far as I can…

so modeling . I started in ZBrush . Zsphere base mesh for the body and limbs, I wanted more control for the hands and feet so I boxed them out in 3DS Max.
I pushed out the volume of the body and defined some underlying muscle groups, I retoped the mesh and continued to sculpt the muscles(I made good use of 3D layers at this stage). I posed the mesh , imported my hands and posed them and tweaked the volumes to fix the transpose smushing, Also blended the wrists together. When I was happy with the hands I cloned the body and the hands, Both at the lowest subdivision and at the highest subdivision (Body-LP ; Hands-LP; Body-HP ; Hands-HP) I then inserted the hands into the corresponding bodies. Then I retoped Body-HP -USING- Body-LP as the topology, added the missing geometry between the wrists and then projected.

Then Tweak Tweak Tweak.

More very soon.

edit adding render of the feet.

c&c please . ty

#2

Cloth base sculpted for the legs.

Beard placeholder, body was pushed around a bit to get better form.

And the hands were given finger nails.

#3

Here is a quick polysphere sculpt of Moses , just trying to get a feel for the basic characteristic of him. 15-20 minutes maybe… I will have to add the horns in the morning lol

Top row is Perspective and the bottom row is orthographic .

#4

WOW~

quick job man!:applause:

#5

Looking good so far. I like the way you handled the beard, cool idea.

#6

It’s rather expressive to say the least.
Almost like the style you are getting here.
But i think i still would suggest a little more work into getting a more accurate shape. You can still keep the style that really remind me at rodin. Maybe a good idea too google about it.

#7

Hey guys, thanks for the input , I really appreciate it :wink:
This render is from yesterday , I haven’t had much time to work on the model since my last post, I aligned the body and head , added some more cloth.
right now I’m working on the cloth draped over the knees.


Still a whole lot of work to go, I’m still looking for more reference for the back side, the best reference I can find for the back is small scale replicas, which certainly helps understand the general flow of the fabric , but is still less than ideal reference… I have been thinking about sending an email to one of the companies that sells the replicas and asking if they would be willing to send me some photos of the back side… perhaps using the guise of a potential buyer lol.
c&c welcome :smiley:

#8

Hey , Quick update.

I retoped all the cloth , which lightened the model 7 or 8 million polys lol.
starting to smooth it all out.

refined the hands a bit as well.

Right Hand…

Left Hand…

I’ll try to get some more up soon.

#9

Cloth Renders

Right Leg…

Left Leg…

Leg Wrap…

#10

good progress.

#11

Interesting style, especially with the hands. What matcap are you using in your most recent pics?

#12

Thanks guys :smiley:
the matcap used is called al_dusted_bone, I got it from the matcap library on pixologic’s site… it’s under skin… because as we all know bones are skin…lol

It is a beautiful matcap either way.

#13

that’s a really hard sculpture to do = props for having a go at it. One thing that I notice in the meshes you’ve showed already is that you seem to be subdividing too son, which makes the sculpts feel a bit too ‘lumpy’ and irregular. Try brining the subdivisions down and getting as much detail as possible from level 2 first before proceeding onto l3 and so forth. Keep going, not much time left :wink:

#14

Thanks Magda :smiley: , This model is WAY harder than I had originally thought, this is the first time I ever really sculpted cloth and there is sooooo much of it , it is overwhelming. Whoever thought wearing 30 or 40 feet of lose cloth was a smart idea :curious:. the hair… as well another thing I am no good at, still trying to get a handle on that. I should have chose a sculpture of a naked bald man lol.
I do agree with you 100% on the lumpiness of the meshes, Especially the cloth, which was a polysphere on each leg that was pulled down around the legs. I still need to do a great deal of work on them, but now that they are retoped it should be alot easier… but time is closing in… this month is flying by. I am pretty unhappy with this model so far, something just seems really off to me, but I just can’t put my finger on it, the proportions of the feet seem off to me as well… here is where I am at right now…
so much work to do and so little time. I have been putting off the face as well, that head is a polysphere place holder lol . c&c welcome :wink:

#15

Coming along really nicely. One thing that keeps sticking out is the extremities. I feel like the base part of the hand (between wrist and fingers), as well as the feet, are a bit stretched. The cloth on his lap is coming along fantastically though, certainly shows that you’ve really put the time in.

#16

Thanks Tim, The second I read that I went and fixed the feet, well the right foot mostly the left still needs quite a bit of work , it looks like it’s broken lol.

Quite a bit more cloth work , still need to totally rework the left side… so much to do :eek:

Here is an update.

#17

I’m writing an essay on this very figure at the moment - the Michelangelo take, i mean! Ironic that you’ve chosen it for a self-portrait contest, since a lot of scholars make a lot of hints that Michelangelo hid elements of self-portraiture in the figure.

Also, given that i’m studying it, i do have quite a few images of it stored away if you wanted them. You mentioned wanting to get at the back of the figure, and i’m sorry to say i don’t have any photographs of it from the back, but i’ve got some nice front and 3/4 pics of the statue, and a very close-up detail of the face. I’ll subscribe to this thread, so just post in reply if you want them or not.

As far as C&C is concerned, my immediate reaction is that i have a problem with his forearm - his left specifically. I feel like it’s too short. The right arm, however, is brilliant - you’ve done a great job replicating that comfortable way his arm rests on the tablet. I also love the way you’ve done the beard, so much like the original. One last critique, though: i think the head is turned to far the side to match the original, Michelangelo’s Moses’ head was turned a little bit more towards the front I think.

Great work so far - the model looks great, and you’ve chosen one hell of an ‘artistic father’ to model it after!

#18

AgentPrometheus - Thanks for kind words,I never noticed the arm, it is too short, I’ll have to fix it. In regards to the reference, I appreciate the offer but I have tons of photos, a few videos as well :wink: .

For an update i sadly don’t have much to offer, my most recent save was crashing ZBrush when I would try to load it… so I had to revert to an older save (which isn’t too big of a deal for me as I save awhole lot lol). Hard to believe the month is almost over , I have so much left to do… the cloth has eaten up so much time, learned alot along the way tho so not all is lost, still have to sit down and do a few studies to get better aquainted with sculpting cloth.
K anyway here is the update
Still need to work alot of detail into the beard , I’m still knocking around the idea of merging the beard and head so I can get a smooth transition between the two… least of my worries right now however lol … 5 days to go

.

#19

well this is my final update, this month went by extremely fast, I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked to on this model, most of my time was spent trying to make sense of the cloth and hair. Anyway here are the ortho shots.

Front and Back

left and right side.

and most importantly… top and bottom. :surprised

And the wires , due to the nature of the challenge I wasn’t overly concerned with my topology, so it is pretty sketchy in spots.

Last but not least … the beauty shot :drool:

Thanks for viewing , and good luck to everyone who entered :buttrock:

#20

Great entry!
I love the expressiveness in the sculpt.
Maybe you could have used a more contrasty background to fit the dramatic contrast of the sculpture?

Cheers