A Study In Villainy: May 2011

I found out how to animate in zbrush, at least very basically. However, I found that since all of my characters are very heavily clothed, It's very impracticle and nearly impossible to animate them slightly with the method I discovered.

Engine however is mostly bare, and as such it was fairly painless to do with him. Reavers model is slightly too complex to animate using the method I found ( which is to merely blend between different poses, like a big blend shape).

However, It would be possible to do with gale and tesla. Sadly, for some reason I get VERY strange graphical artifacting in zbrush on certain pieces of their clothing when I do. The culprits are pieces of cloth that have had an alpha map or texture applied (eg: Gale's top which has a sort of ribbed alpha map on it). Because the mesh is so dense, whenever you try to move it with the rest of the mesh to animate with, for some reason the faces collapse in on themselves. This also happens with Tesla's cloak and tabard. I've tried to troubleshoot the problem and look for ways around it, but sadly nothing has come up at all.

In any case, this is the breathing animation for Engine. It's not meant to show off my animation skills, because its not a great animation; its merely to try and bring another dimension of believability to the character. I would have loved to have spent more time and effort into the animation, but sadly zbrush just isn't built for animating, and I had to make do with what it could offer.

Reaver is also finished, and I'm pretty happy with the results. He's a lot scarier than my other villains, which is what I was aiming for. I managed to model the whole body also, so im very hapy with that.

Reaver - Full body - Flat shader