Sculpting a Mermaid Character with Dynamesh - ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games - page 388

manoid elements and by playing on the audience's expectations of what is a stereotypically feminine, you
can communicate that this completely nonhuman creature is female, graceful, and potentially dangerous due
to her spiny fins.
By understanding how the viewer will react to various combinations of shape language and proportion,
you can influence the audience's perceptions of your character on a deeper level. When you are thinking
about your characters in this level, it becomes less a question of “how do I put neat shapes together?” and
more of a case of “how do I combine shapes that tell the story I want to communicate about this creature?”
Introduction to Dynamesh
Dynamesh is a new tool developed for ZBrush 4 R2. Essentially, Dynamesh tries to replicate the feel of
sculpting in practical clay by allowing you to continually pull new forms from the base shape, interactively
combine new meshes into the existing volume, and even carve away negative spaces, all the while maintain-
ing an easily workable even quad mesh layout. This frees you from really having to think about the under-
lying topology as you work. It also allows you to create any kind of volume for sculpting without having to
be tied to the limits of a base mesh. This is highly beneficial in cases where you might want to carve out a
large negative space in a model. In previous workflows this was not easily accomplished. With Dynamesh,
the mesh will update to accommodate any new shapes you create or remove from the model.
Getting a Feel for Dynamesh
In this section, we will look at a basic demonstration of Dynamesh using basic primitives. We will create
an abstract organic shape as an opportunity to experiment with the Dynamesh workflow before we dive into
creating a figure sculpture.
1. Open ZBrush or create a new project. Open the Lightbox and from the Tool section load the Polysphere
ZTool. Step down to the lowest Subdivision level and under Tool ⇒ Geometry, click the Del Higher button
to remove the higher subdivision levels.
2. From the Brush menu, select the Move brush. Turn on X symmetry and start to pull the sphere out into
a larger shape. Don't be afraid to stretch the mesh beyond its normal limits. You will see the mesh starts
to distort as the underlying polygons are stretched ( Figure 7-6 ).
Figure 7-6: The underlying mesh will distort when the Polysphere is stretched beyond the limits of its un-
derlying topology.