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I just finished this piece for an upcoming article in 3dWorld magazine. The tutorial, in issue 105, talks about sculpting the female figure in ZBrush and broadly covers the anatomy and techniques that are important to achieving a decent result. Rendered with Hypershot.

This is the final image of the Winged Lion. After quite a few requests I have decided to make some of my images available as prints. The Winged Lion is the first. You can find the prints, rendered at a massive 7000×4600 pixels, at the Cafe Press store here.

Here are a few images of my latest sculpture, shown in clay above, which I unveiled during my lecture at the Tate Modern on “Bit and Atoms - The Process and Evolution of Digital Sculpture“. During the lecture I talked about the process of making the piece - first creating a digital maquette in Zbrush to establish the balance, weight, and proportions of the figure, and then using that digital data (shown below) as a guide for construction of the full-sized figure sculpture in clay. Here are a few views of the digital maquette.

The lecture was very well received so thanks to the Tate for hosting the event and Supernatural Studios for organizing the lectures. Watch this space for images of the process and a timelapses of both the digital and analog construction.

The first of three of my lessons in Figurative Sculpture is now live on Pixologic’s site.  This lesson covers the fundamentals of sculpting and studying from reference, and walks through the process of creating the ‘Study of Milon de Crotone‘. If you are interested in figure sculpture check it out. Stay tuned for part II, which will cover sculpting from life, and is closely related to some of the work I am showing at the Tate Modern lecture on the 25th of March.

A special thanks to the Pixologic team who did a fantastic job formating and putting the lesson together.

I will be giving a lecture at the Tate Modern on the 25th of March entitled:

Bits and Atoms - the Process and Evolution of Digital Sculpture

The talk will broadly cover the techniques of digital sculpture and methods of prototyping digital models. I will also be showing a new piece that I have been working on for the last couple months with a little behind the scenes “making of”.

The announcement and booking information can be found on the Tate website. The talks, part of the Supernatural Series on Digital Art, promise to be interesting and will to cover a wide scope of digital art and visual effects. Hope to see you there.

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Additional view of my digital scupture of Milon de Crotone. Click on the images for a larger view.

Phil is finally out of kiln and photographed in the studio with some decent lighting.

click on images to view movies

Here are two short movies captured from Zbrush showing the construction and refinement of the human figure. The movie on the left shows the progression a female figure from very low resolution to a passable human form. The movie on the right shows the development of a heroic male torso and gives some insight into how anatomy is placed and constructed on a torso. The movie starts with a smooth, undeveloped model and first refines the large planes of the body. Once these are in place landmarks are sketched onto the model which act as guides for placing the muscle groups. The rest of the movie shows the build-up and refinement of the anatomy. The movie of the female figure is roughly ten minutes long and captures a three hour modeling session, the torso movie is seven minutes long and captures a slightly shorter modeling session.

A digital sketch of a centaur. It is a rough treatment addressing the masses, planes and anatomy of a human/horse.

I am currently at Siggraph 2007 in SanDiego giving presentation on behalf of Pixar for the RenderMan Certified Courseware that I have been developing at Escape Studios with co-author Andy Cadey. I am also giving presentations for Pixologic, the company behind Zbrush, announcing a series of anatomy lectures that I will be developing for them in the Autumn. The lectures will be released once a month over the next year covering critical aspects of artist anatomy and figurative scultpure. They will be freely available to the public on ZbrushCentral.

A work in progress. The model is done completely in Zbrush3 beginning with Zspheres and adjusting the topology as necessary, and yes there were a lot of adjustments to be made (see the humble beginnings below). The lighting and rendering will be done using RenderMan Studio and will be included in the advanced lighting and rendering section of Pixar’s RenderMan courseware. Final images will be posted here shortly.

Here is an image from my article on Animal Anatomy in the most recent 3dWorld (issue 89). The base model, the winged lion, is still a work in progress and I will post a few updates as it progresses.

update: You can now download the complete article from the Tutorials section.

Here are a couple of images from Diesel’s Global Warming campaign. I was asked to build the New York skyline, or a reasonable facimile of it (apprarently you have to get permission from the City of New York to use likenesses of the major buildings). I built, textured, lit, and rendered day and night versions of the buildings you see here. Final resolution was huge as it was intended for billboards. Check out Diesel’s website for some other interesting images from the advertising campaign.

A couple images of my version of Prometheus. I have given a few talks about “the making of”, including one on Digital Sculpture at the Tate Modern in London last September. I tried to sync my slides to the Tate’s podcast of my lecture, you can check it out here (a few of the animations and demonstrations are omitted but you should get the idea). It talks about concept development, modeling, rendering, and compositing. Sotware: Maya, Zbrush, RenderMan, and Shake. Also check out a detailed “Rendering of’ Prometheus” tutorial using RenderMan for Maya.

Here is a still from a Powerade campaign that I worked on last year at the Mill, London. The campaign was for the Austrailian National Soccer team for the 2006 World Cup. The brief was crazy, they wanted the players to tranform into anatomy men to show the inner working of Powerade. We hammered away on this for a couple of months. I supervised 3d, designed and modeled the anatomy man (Maya and Zbrush), and build tools (MEL) to help our master animator Rob Kuczera efficiently animate 30 or so shots. The end result was interesting, if a little gory.

Information on the Artistic Anatomy course that I teach in London can be found here.

Here is an image of ‘the Archer,’ which I created in Maya and Zbrush as an anatomy study. The process was documented in a tutorial for 3dWorld magazine (issue ??). The tutorial covers the critical anatomical knowledge required to construct realistic human figures. The tutorial is here , and in the same issue I wrote an accompanying article on human anatomy for digital artists.