In this Industry Spotlight, David Bentley walks you through his automotive design process. Watch, as David details the features and functions used to create this pavement pounding exotic. You'll see features like Panel Loops, the Noise Maker plugin, Insert Meshes, Clipping brushes and a host of others used to bring this project to life.
I put this series of videos together on design sketching in ZBrush because I've had a number of requests from friends and professionals who ask me where they can go for a design tutorial in ZBrush. They see sculpting in ZBrush as a huge conceptual design opportunity. I hope viewers will find these videos useful and learn from my own experiments.
I currently am an Assistant Professor in the Entertainment Arts Department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit where I work with game and animation students focusing on character, environment and concept design. Prior to teaching, I worked for Autodesk as a Maya AE or Product Specialist and later as a Solutions Engineer in Global Automotive accounts working with designers at all the major automotive companies. I began my professional career in the Automotive industry at General Motors as a Creative Designer. I am a freelance illustrator, designer, and trainer at Bentley Design, living in Michigan with my wife and four children.
Migrating from the automotive industry (where I felt limited in my ability to create forms in 3D) into the entertainment industry, helped me see that the workflows I was learning for games and conceptual design are a perfect fit for concept creation in design.
ZBrush offers me the ability to explore form and shape in real-time. I think of my initial sculpts as quick 3D gesture sketches. I will try to capture a basic shape or emotion and once captured I then am free to refine those 3D sketches and create full 3D concepts ready to be shown to clients whether it is a creature or a car design. ZBrush also has introduced the history slider making it very easy to make iterations by duplicating or cloning the tool (model) and scrubbing back into the history to look at new alternatives. There are so many ways to create designs in ZBrush and I've just touched on a few in producing these videos. I am constantly amazed at what I see in the galleries at ZBrushCentral and how artists adapt the tools to create innovative designs with life and energy. I fully expect the design industry to explode with innovation and creativity as they begin to adopt tools like ZBrush into their creation pipeline. ZBrush is a tool, just like a pen or a marker, that should be part of any creative designers tool-bag.
