Baby steps in Zbrush

Ive always wanted to give Zbrush a go ever since seeing some of those crazy high poly characters and creatures posted on art forums. It looked like the perfect outlet for me to practice my passion traditional sculpture, minus the mess and plus the bonus of its application uses.

So I've managed to get a copy and give it a swing... Let me just say, It only took 5 agonizing minutes of confusion and ineptness for me to realize this wasn't so simple as pick up and play. Be it that everything in the interface was alien to me, even the shortcuts; I decided to ask for some help. The next time I took a swing at Zbrush I was mildly prepared. I could at least load a Dyna-mesh sphere into the scene and start manipulating it with the brushes, but that know-how was pretty much sitting on the edge of the shelf when it comes to my Zbrush knowledge.

This is what I managed to produce before and after I made it crash... It took roughly 1 hour to shape from a Sphere. Done from imagination.

The Founder! my first Zbrush creation.WIP 1 hour

So as you may imagine, I have been slightly buzzing after managing to get that far, and I'm not  too displeased with my monkey alien man thing either...

My second attempt wasn't so lucky. It just crashed and was lost to the forgotten Zbrush pages of history. Unfortunately I didn't manage to recover a back up save like my first attempt. But I did grab a screenshot of it before the window closed though. This was done in roughly 35 minutes and just head doodles.

Weird Alien head lost at WIP stage.

 
Here is another I'm currently debating working on farther or not. Its a simple Shape that took about 5 minutes to make so either way; no biggie.

5 minute WIP- Base for sculpt

What have I learned about Zbrush then? Well... It is a lot of fun. Once you push past the initial road block of " omg ok.. what do i do?" its easy peasy to allow my thinking brain to switch off and my sculpting creative mind take over. I imagine once I become more confident with the program, sculpting something that puts these to shame will become almost thoughtless. I cant wait!

Why do I want to do I want to learn Zbrush?  Because I want it as another tool under my belt to use as an artistic outlet, or for creating and retopologizing in game models or high poly renders. All the cool stuff that's done these days.