To remedy that, we have spent the last few months scanning through old posts to find the best of the best, gathering everything in one place and organizing the content for easy accessibility. In fact, so much free stuff has been given out that most of it is unknown – buried deep within the forum archives.

Not only are people happy to answer questions and help out newcomers, but many of you have gone above and beyond by providing free resources. They don’t even have any detail sculpted on them.One of the great things about ZBrushCentral is the incredible sense of community that we have. The wings feature some staggeringly bad topology – spiral loops, super-squashed quads, and even a lone triangle – but I didn’t care much because these are almost entirely hidden by the feathers. * I’m not an expert in topology and edge flow…if you are, I very much welcome your critique! I’m sure I overcomplicated parts of this mesh, and there were a couple of hidden areas where I decided to just cut my losses and learn from my mistakes next time. Sending lots of love, with the hopes that we will live to see – and create – a better tomorrow together. On a more serious note, I’m sure the recent months, weeks, and days have been very difficult for a lot of you. Confession: I’d never actually done a full-on organic model like this, start to finish, from base mesh to sculpting to retopo and normal baking. In the meantime, I’m just glad I decided to spend the extra time on this. Next steps: creating the rattlesnake, posing the eagle to hold it, integrating the whole statue into the main model, and damaging the fountain to match its dilapidated state in the film. The result looks virtually identical, but the simplified model is waaaaaay less sluggish in terms of software performance, render times, and animatibility. …and then I baked all the details from the original sculpt into a normal map, an image that simulates the shading of the original detailed sculpt on the new simplified mesh. I retopologized the statue into a nice, simple, clean mesh*…

This brought the sculpt of the golden eagle to a state of completion! But at this point, this was all still real geometry – millions of tiny flat triangles connected together to form a complex, bumpy surface that slowed my computer down quite a bit. I thought the legs and feet were going to be hard, but they actually turned out to be a lot of fun: Should be good enough, considering that this will mostly be seen from further distances. This gave me a great base texture I reshaped parts of it by hand to create more convincing layers of feathers. Back in Blender, I used this brush to directionally “paint” three-dimensional feathers along the body. So I used Materialize (another piece of freeware) to help me create a textured sculpting brush from photography of real eagle feathers. …but not for the finer, more textural plumage on the body. The same shape key technique worked for the tail feathers…

It’s not lost on me that I’m putting more effort into this statue than is really necessary for the purposes of this project, but I view it as an opportunity to learn and practice organic modeling skills that I’ve tended to neglect.Īnyway, I began creating some basic materials and threw in a background HDRI for lighting. At a certain point, I have to remind myself that this statue is just a tiny part of a much larger just-for-fun model – and only certain versions thereof, at that. I’m sure there’s an ornithologist somewhere out there having a heart attack over the anatomical tomfoolery on display here, but whatevs. After playing with them for a while, I finally arrived at a result I could feel good about: I created four different feather shapes/rotations/positions (absolute shape keys, for my fellow Blenderheads) and allowed Blender to…well, blend between them. They have a lovely sweeping three-dimensional curve to them in the film and I wanted to capture that.Īfter taking a few days off to stew over this frustrating problem, the right method became apparent. This seemed more promising, but I still couldn’t get the feathers to “flow” nicely. Sculpting them was giving results that were messy and uneven, so I decided to try modeling each feather as its own mesh. Although I didn’t share this last time, I’d actually gotten the head off to a decent start, especially for an artist who doesn’t do much sculpting:īut those dang wings were confounding me. …but I’d temporarily given up when the flight feathers proved more challenging than I’d expected. When we last visited the statue of a certain golden eagle gobbling up a certain rattlesnake from a certain courtyard in the third Harry Potter film, I’d created a base mesh for the initial sculpt in a separate file…

Sculpting feathers zbrush