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As many of you already know, the second session of my online Digital Figure Sculpture course is underway. A group of artists are hard at work learning new techniques in ZBrush and studying hard to make great progress as figure sculptors. To give everybody a taste of the types of projects they are working on week-to-week, I have started a blog where I will post updates as the course progresses. If you have an interest in ZBrush and figure sculpture, check it out.

Digital Figure Sculpture Course: Weekly Blog

upcoming course: January 20, 2012

Weekly Fragments:

During the first half of the course, students complete weekly studies that focus on areas of the body in isolation. These are a few of the ZBrush exercises that students are shown how to complete.

The Autumn Digital Figure Sculpture online course is currently underway. The next course begins on January 20th. This course covers the critical foundation necessary to build naturalistic figures in ZBrush, including all the tools and techniques that I use day-to-day in my own figure sculpting – both on my art projects and on feature film characters.

Over ten weeks artists get a chance to hone their skills by completing numerous weekly figure studies and one complete figure. The course reinforces the importance of anatomy as the critical foundation for building realistic figures and shows practical construction techniques for applying this knowledge to figure sculpture. The goal is for every artist on the course to increase the realism and naturalism of their figurative work in Zbrush.

For more information and registration see the Digital Figure Sculpture course page here.

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Here are a couple images of a digital sculpture that I did for a ‘recently released pirate movie’. At the time the film was in early preproduction and this piece was more speculative design than anything concrete for the film, though it is loosely tied to an event in the script. The piece also has thinly veiled references to Damien Hirst’s infamous pickled shark sculpture. For more details on how I created the sculpture keep reading below.

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The first digital prototype of Scott’s iPad docking station has been seen in the wild. The docking station is a private commission but will be available to the public in a small limited edition (contact here). For anyone new to the project, find concept sketches here.

“A stylish docking station for syncing, charging and display. An evocative blend of ancient fertility symbolism and modern technology worship. I want one!”

The April 2011 issue of German film/VFX magazine Digital Production features a full-page Hephaestus image to introduce their writeup on Zbrush 4. The image is backwards but otherwise looks good. Their article gives a great overview of Zbrush, my digital sculpting tool of choice.

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…alternate view

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Here is an early preview of a new digital sculpture that I am slowly working on. The sculpture is of Hephaestus, the smith god. Time permitting I will try to post some early sketches and other works in progress. Check back soon….

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Here are a few images of the sculpture, shown in clay above, which I unveiled during my lecture at the Tate Modern on “Bit to 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 constructing the full-sized figure sculpture in clay. Here are a few views of the digital maquette and a timelapse of the clay construction.

click below to view the timelapse construction of the life-sized clay sculpture.

Movie – Timelapse Construction

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Copyright © 2008 Scott Eaton

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Here is a little digital maquette that I knocked together a few months back to test some new functionality in Zbrush 3.5R3. Timelapse videos of the construction/sculpt will be available as resources in the Online Anatomy Course.

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Here is an image of my latest digital sculpture, The Death of the Centaur. The sculpture depicts the moment when the king of the centaurs, Chiron, is struck down by an errant volley of Hercules’ poisoned arrows.

Chiron originally appears in Greek mythology as an exemplar of wisdom and learning, tutoring many of the legendary Greek heroes including Achilles, Jason, Theseus, and Hercules. He meets his end at the hands of Hercules who, during a skirmish with unruly centaurs, accidentally wounds Chiron with an arrow poisoned with Hydra blood. Being immortal Chiron can’t die, but lives in agony until he selflessly barters his immortality for Prometheus‘ freedom (note: I have take small liberties with the original story in my depiction of events). Chiron subsequently makes appearances in other stories including Dante’s Inferno, where he guards the seventh level of hell, and in Goethe’s Faust.

Click on the thumbnail above for a high resolution image of the sculpture (2048×1760 pixels). Use the green arrow at the bottom of the lightbox to enlarge the image. I have provided it at high resolution so that you can (hopefully) appreciate some of the fine details. For more images from the construction process, see the Death of the Centaur development page.

Image rendered with Hypershot

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Here is an image from a current project, “Death of the Centaur”. The piece is still in progress, so I am starting a work-in-progress thread that will document the sculpture at various stages of execution, along with a couple time-lapse videos of the creation and preliminary sketches for the piece. You can find the WIP page here.

Here are a couple images of a digital sculpture that I created for a tutorial in Issue 105 of 3dWorld magazine. The tutorial covers the fundamentals of sculpting the female figure in Zbrush. Both images were 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 crisp 7000×4600 pixels, at the Cafe Press store here.

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

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.

Here are a couple images of my digital sculpture of Prometheus. The piece is my own interpretation of the Prometheus myth, and is not based on any existing sculptures. I have given a few talks about “the making of”, including one on Digital Sculpture at the Tate Modern in London in September 2006. I sync’ed my slides to the Tate’s podcast of the lecture, you can check it out here (a few of the animations and demonstrations are missing but you should get the idea). It talks about both the artistic and technical progression of the sculpture from concept development to modeling, rendering, and compositing. If you are especially interested in the rendering process you can also check a detailed “Rendering of Prometheus” tutorial using RenderMan for Maya.

NOTE: This talk is a few years old now and the state-of-the-art in computer graphics has moved on since, but many of the ideas are still valid.

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.

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 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.