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Quick Zbrush mock of the tree. Edited in Photoshop for pretties.   |
This was a fun and very worthwhile mini project for myself. Not only did I challenge the very root of gargoyles (pun intended) but I learned a few nifty tricks in Zbrush too.
The idea behind my endeavours was to really pick apart what constitutes as a gargoyle so that I'm left with something that challenges any preconceptions but also fits the criteria. Straight away a tree with a carved face isn't going to scream gargoyle to anyone, but with a bit of imagination you could see how it would work. The idea stemmed from (the puns are strong with this one) a memory of watching a survival documentary as a child, where a man put a funnel into a tree to extract sugary water. Whilst the only differences between a gargoyle and a grotesque are the practical uses of gargoyles, I thought that this could lead to something. When I looked into tree water extraction the first things that came up is extraction (tapping) of syrup from maple trees. The way the syrup is extracted is similar to spouts inside gargoyles. As trees collect and live off water (rainwater) I thought that my tree gargoyle fit the description in all ways but one, it has to direct water from a building. I looked at moon wells from World of Warcraft for reference and thought of Hobbit holes underneath the ground. I decided that if you were to build the tree into a shrine of sorts, it would constitute as a building and therefore be a gargoyle. Like I said you have to have imagination, and if you don't then we can pretend Minpins live in the tree and they've dug out man (or Minpin) made channels to allow rainwater to collect and flow down directed paths of the tree, ultimately coming out of a funnel which would create a giant (for the Minpins at least) waterfall. The end. Goodbye. I looked at the Green Man and the Great Deku Tree from Zelda as references.
Technically this ended up being a far greater challenge than I originally anticipated. I thought trees wouldn't be hard to make, I wasn't completely wrong as the initial sculpt took around half an hour, however the base which I thought would be the simplest - took HOURS. I made the tree from a ball in dynamesh. I tried out Zspheres however I found it so much faster and simpler to just use the move tool and re-mesh repeatedly. I used the build clay brush a lot to create the cracked bark and the sculpted face, occasionally inverting the brush to get deeper crevasses. When I was happy with my model ( I didn't want it overly detailed as it wasn't my final piece ) I decided I wanted to put it on a stand with some grass. What came next was all completely new and challenging. Who would have thought that when you can sculpt a convincing tree with a face on it, that creating a simple cylinder would be so difficult? Yes there is a cylinder tool and yes I used that, but resizing it to fit my tree is no easy feat when you're a Zbrush noob like me. Eventually after a step by step guide by an awesome fellow student I was able to use the transpose tools to create the base shape of what I wanted. After a recommendation to use 'radial symmetry' by a tutor, I googled it and learned how to then do radial symmetry and make nice patterns on my base. I remember having difficulty with it at first because of how my base was positioned so after playing around with the different axis I scribbled on an unpaid water bill 'M Y R' which are the axis I had ticked when radial symmetry decided to be my friend and worked.
Adding the grass was another massive learning curve and was 50% online tutorial and 50% trial and error. Using fibres is definitely something I will look into further when it is necessary but with my final idea in mind I think I should be looking more into hard surface modelling unless I change my mind last minute.
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