I'm having a toad-tastically great time with ZBrush...

I've been busy making a toad.
Here's a few pics of early stages.
Right now it's nearly finished (see next post), and I've combined it with my turtle to create my favorite (and perhaps most bizarre) piece to date, so stay tuned for pics of that in my next post!

Anatomically fairly accurate zsphere toad armature 

Armature plus a tiny bit of sculpting converted to a polygon skin

More sculpting to create what looks like a dessicated dead toad!

Further sculpting, followed by re-meshing (smooths everything out) 

Building a new ZSphere rig inside the skin which can be posed, taking the skin along for the ride! It has some small issues and the resulting posed skin (next post) needs a bunch of work, but it sure is fun! I have too many zspheres in the thighs here, which led to some nasty post posing results! (so I removed some and tried again)

I'm probably making all kinds of grievous workflow mistakes, but it seems to be working (although I'll probably not find out for real until I take the finished model somewhere to be milled or printed, at which point I may learn of all kinds of horrendous digital doo-daddery I need to re-think or brush up on).
What I like is that I can work in a similar way to my wire and clay approach, and get convincing results.
Plus I can also do things I can't do with wire and clay that make things more efficient.
There's lots of back and forth between my sculpting program and video tutorials on YouTube or Pixologic's website to remind myself how do do things.

But it seems to be working, so I'm happy.

Next post: See the bizarre result of a turtle and toad as seen through the mind of your's truly...

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