Ostrich Hairdresser

My experience with zBrush had been very little prior to this project and I learned a lot while doing this assignment. The idea was to combine an animal with an everyday occupation, so what better combonation than an ostrich hairdresser! The hairdryer prop that I modeled in my previous post was meant to be her accessory.

Before starting any building I decided to take a trip to the North Carolina Zoo with my friend and girlfriend to get a lot of good pictures of ostrichs and some of the other animals as well. I also brought my sketchbook to practice drawing the animals. This helped me a lot in seeing the basic shapes that help to form the ostrich and get familiar with some of its smaller characteristics. I approached the modeling similar to the lion I did a few years back, by starting off in Maya and building a fairly simple base mesh. I had intentions of later posing my character so I built my base mesh as if it would later be animated. Once bringing it into zBrush, however, I discovered the power of Dynamesh and all of that nice topology went out the window.

Working with this file proved to be a challenge as I began adding feathers. Each feather was over a million polygons. My original idea was to give her a dress made out of feathers but after making the big feathers I settled for doing a custom feather brush instead to act as small reliefs on the dress. It was not enough detail for me to be completely satisfied but my file was already at a very high poly count so I did not want to add more geometry to any part of the model. I am very happy with what I was able to do given the time of the assignment and am looking forward to working in zBrush more often.