Digital Sculpting - Creating Virtual Models and Bringing Them to Life

Looking through the Internet for some appealing motion graphics program and techniques, I came across ZBrush. ZBrush is a digital sculpting tool that, simply, allows users to shape a digital ball of clay into anything and everything using tools. The program combines 3D and 2.5D modeling, texturing, and painting to create high-resolution models for use in movies, games, and animation.

ZBrush was developed by Pixologic in 2015.

The basic component that allows this program to operate is the 'pixol' technology. Similar to a pixel, pixol uses information on depth in addition to the X and Y position information. Pixol-created images can lose their property (Z position or depth) if converted in to JPEG or PNG file formats.

ZBrush is famous for allowing users to go into detail with creating and sculpting their models. An example of this is that ZBrush allows medium to high frequency details to be applied on the models; something that was previously done using bump maps.

This is something really fun and creative but also very complex. Digital sculpting is still very new but it has become very popular in the few years of its existence. This new technology uses geometry in various ways to enable the manipulation of clay-like digital objects.

Animating a Still Photograph

Have you ever seen a show or documentary where there is a still image that has been animated to look 3D? That is called the parallax effect, and can be done using Photoshop and After Effects. It is surprisingly simple as well. Using the skills we have already learned in class we could easily create the effect by following this tutorial I found on YouTube. By singling out individual subjects in the photo, making them each their own layer, and putting them into 3D space in After Effects, a beautiful looking 3D animation can be created.