Hi everyone, my name is Max Calò. The moment I read the theme of the contest I decided I had to enter, here's my entry, the Pickmebat.

The Pickmebat is a special kind of bat, can't fly and is much uglier than any other bat. On top of this the Pickmebat craves the love of children, so she stands by the pet shops and tries to get their attention. "Don't get a kitten, pick me" she says, but she's just so ugly. Poor Pickmebat.
She's been doing this for a long time, she knows that her chances of being picked are not great, yet she keeps on trying, it's just her nature. And when all the pet shops close she hangs around with the rats and the down and out that meet by the cemetery. They don't mind, they don't chase her away, they're so drunk they don't even notice her.

----

I read the instruction about the distinction between Pros and Amateurs 100 times and decided to enter amateur, I hope I did this right but I'm happy to change category if asked. I am a freelance artist and this has been my profession for many years, I work with pencils and brushes. I started modeling with Zbrush about two years ago and so far I have only done one model as a job (freelance job). I've never been employed by a studio though. The rules specify that pros are those that have been working in a studio so I entered as amateur.

______

Edit 26th May: this thread now changed from Amateur to Pro, we've now clarified that if you were ever paid for modeling jobs, even as a freelancer that makes you a Pro.

Hey Max! Real funny character you got going on =) Im sure this is going to turn out to be a strong sculpt man! You got a lot of practice from the Action Hero Contest

Good Luck!

Hi Max, welcome to the comp! He's a really cool looking character that you've sketched up, I like it.

Good luck for the rest of the comp.

Cheers
a`

Hey, welcome to the contest Max. Good to see you here. You've come up with a nice concept. I already know it's gonna be a great sculpt

Thanks for the welcome Alwyn.

Hi GregS and Captain, good to see you here. I'm starting with Zspheres right now.

maxinkuk! Cool to see you on board! Your sketch is looking awesome!
Good luck with the competition.
Can´t wait to see the first Zsphere update.

Hi Moni, good to see you, here it is, the result of a few hours' work.

I did a lot of fiddling with the Zsphere tweaks plug in and settled for marking some joints with a few extra polygons straight out of Zspheres instead of a more uniform flow, I think I will need extra geometry there, and if I just add a few loops where it's a bit too sparse I may get away without retopologizing, which would be a huge relief.
I also decided that the membranes between the fingers and limbs will be independent subtools. I think that if they had been part of the same mesh posing would have been a bit of a nightmare.



I also placed it on a pedestal and smoothed it down, just to see clearly my starting point for the sculpt. And at intermediate levels of subdivision it's also very clear where it would benefit from some extra loops. This smoothed version is level 5 and just under 700k, I hope that the final main body after the loops will be level 6 and stay well under 4m polys, that would allow me a good contingency for the other subtools.



PS: can anybody explain how do I upload images here, I can't find the way, these are uploaded onto a blog and then linked here.

You need to do a 'Reply to Topic', that way you get the full editor and get the attach file options at the bottom.

If you still have problems let us know.

Also resize the pics youve hosted somewhere else so you can see all the buttons on the thread (like edit post) and whos replying.Ii had the same issue till I sized things down to about 500px.

Really great zsphere action!!

Looks like this will be a very good sculpt... 2 years zbrushing eh!?? 2 z-years old....

Also resize the pics you've hosted somewhere else so you can see all the buttons on the thread (like edit post) and whos replying.Ii had the same issue till I sized things down to about 500px.
You do not need to resize images down to 500px. The forum can accept images upto 2000px x 2000px. Images these large are automatically scaled down to fit 100% width of the forum text area. I believe the problems you had are because you are hosting images at imageshack which doesn't deal well with forum posts very well. Tinypic.com is a better solution, but at the end of the day, simply attaching images to your message is the best way to go!


maxinkuk - Kick arse start to the comp. Great work.

As a tip, once you browse to your image using "select image file to attach" area, you can use the [img] button to place the image tag where ever you want in the message.

Hope that helps.

cheers
Andrew

Thanks for all this help, looks like it's working, only that it doesn't appear in preview before posting.

And Kingroaw and Andrew, thanks also for the kind comments, it was the first time I did such a complex thing with Zspheres actually, infinite thanks to Zsphere Tweaks plug in.
Anyway, I exported the mesh from Zbrush and imported into Modo, there I did all sorts of editing and came out with this mesh that back into Zbrush has at level 6 about 1.7m polys which I think could actually be enough and that there may not be a need to subdivide further. And that's brilliant, I didn't think that I could get away with so few polys. I tried in critical areas with the inflate brush and I didn't see any disturbing faceting at all. So that's my mesh ready for sculpting and there should be still plenty of geometry left available for hair, membranes and base and still keep under the 10m polys recommended upper limit.