If you’ve seen 3DW 95's Rick Baker’s cover image, you already know what can be achieved with ZBrush 3. Resident columnist Mental Roy has a love-hate relationship with ZBrush: he loves the software – he just hates the fact that students can use it.
I usually try to avoid mentioning fine art in this column in case… ooh, I don’t know, someone should find out that I actually know about anything other than Star Wars and graphic novels, and thereby destroy my credibility as a 3D professional. But there comes a time in every man’s life when you have to stand up and plead guilty to possession of good taste, so sod it. It is said that when the painter David Hockney first clapped eyes on the late WH Auden – a fine poet, but not a potential finalist for Mr Gay UK – he commented: “Blimey. If that’s his face, what must his scrotum look like?’ This story has been on my mind recently, since we’ve just seen the release of a piece of software that promises to unleash horrors on the world far beyond the average Nobel laureate’s nutsack. I speak, of course, of ZBrush 3.
Since the milk of human kindness has long since turned to yoghurt in my veins, it grieves me to speak well of anyone or anything, but sadly, ZBrush 3 is actually a pretty good piece of software. It does bumps, it does wrinkles. It has alpha brushes for sculpting pores. It’s even got that pretty red wax shader that makes your model look like a Christmas candle. No, my real problem with it is that it’s available to art students.
Art students, as anyone who has ever been one will attest, are the lowest form of life on this planet. Lazy, incompetent, pretentious: these are only three of the kinder things that can be said about them. So when it comes to attaining mastery of human form, most would rather eat their own entrails than attend any actual life-drawing classes – presumably in case it interferes with their hectic schedule of taking drugs and talking bollocks about transgressive sexuality in the local pub.
This would be okay if they didn’t then insist on submitting their modelling portfolios to you with the air of Michelangelo unveiling the Sistine Chapel ceiling to Pope Julius II. At which point, the limitations of an artistic training driven by amphetamines rather than anatomical study become apparent.
Orcs whose elbows flex like door hinges? You got ‘em. Naked amazons with more polygons in their nipples than their entire heads? No problem. And just what is it about big-eyed anime catladies that so warms the cockles of the average wannabe games artist?
And now they’ve got the tools to add surface detail to these monstrosities. It’s only going to be a matter of months before we start seeing characters with skin that resembles that of the late Dame Barbara Cartland before the builders arrived to sand her down and make good each morning – but no functional knees. Yes, the creatures of darkness are meant to be ugly, but they’re not supposed to drive their own femurs through their lower intestines whenever they break into anything more than a gentle jog.
But what’s the use? Obsessive ZBrush detailing will appeal to art students for the same reasons that anything appeals to art students: it’s cheap, it’s flashy, and it’s entirely superficial. Just don’t expect it to compensate for years of anatomical observation, or to get you a job at Blizzard Entertainment.
Oh, and I know that WH Auden didn’t really win the Nobel Prize for Literature. That was merely a piece of artistic licence. Artistic licence is a powerful tool in the world: it’s just a shame that it can’t be revoked from anyone who uses technical effects to cover up their underlying deformities. Trust me on this one – I know whereof I speak. After all, I’m the opinion columnist for an international magazine, I regularly use words like ‘whereof’, and both my eyes are on the same side of my head.
(Originally published October 2007)
