The Gnomon Workshop

by Travis Bourbeau

GW: How would you describe yourself and what you do?

RK: My principle joy in life has two sides: sculpting and teaching sculpting. Sculpting has become such a large part of who I am and how I see the world that I could not define myself without mentioning it.

I remember when I first saw the sculpture titled Butterfly, by Richard MacDonald, in a San Francisco gallery. In that one moment, everything came together. That sculpture represented everything that I wanted to do with my art and my life. Sculpture put everything into perspective for me and became the conduit for all my other interests.

So, to get back to your question, I’m a resident artist at the Gnomon Workshop where I play the role of artist/explorer. My job consists of finding new ways to apply traditional rules of sculpting in the medium of ZBrush, specifically, and in the world of Digital Sculpting, at large. I then share these through free tutorials at Gnomon, in DVD training and in my Advanced ZBrush classes.

GW: You have worked with companies such as ILM, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Ubisoft and EA to integrate digital sculpting into their production pipelines. What do you think is the next step for studios to improve production value and efficiency?

RK: I have worked with nearly every major game studio and consulted on every book out there about ZBrush. There are several ways to integrate ZBrush into your pipeline or your own workflow. Some artists use it for the entire sculpting pipeline and others use it just to add a little damage here and there to make it more realistic.

Every studio is different and has different demands. However, the one constant issue I have noticed across all the training and all the pipelines out there is an under-use of ZBrush’s brush system. Most artists will brute force their way to creating clothing details like seams, but with a structured approach and a deeper understanding of ZBrush, many of the sculpting tasks we have can be made easier and take 50% less time.

GW: How did you become passionate about sculpting versus other art forms like drawing and painting?

RK: Sculpting speaks to the way my brain works. I understand sculpting on a level that I do not experience with anything else. No offense to painters, but painting seems to be a pretty little lie someone tells. I imagine all artists feel this way about their own art form. I just happen to be a sculptor. Sculpting feels natural to me. When I learn something new about human anatomy and how to sculpt some part of the body I feel like I have learned how to see the world all over again. It’s a wonderful feeling and very addictive. It drives me to be a better sculptor; to see the world with better eyes.

GW: You recently took Richard MacDonald’s traditional workshop. What impact did this have on you? What effect has it had on your digital work/workflow?

RK: Richard’s workshop brought clay back into my life. I had been so focused on digital sculpting and learning everything I could there, that I missed out on the simplicity of clay. When you watch a master sculptor, like Richard MacDonald, breathe life into a figure in two hours that you couldn’t do in two days in the computer or in clay, you have to re-evaluate a few things. His intensity and focus was amazing to see first-hand. So, now, I sculpt from life once a week and there is no better master than the nude figure.

GW: It seems that the tug of war between traditional and digital has always been at the forefront of the work you do. Deeper into your pursuit of figurative sculpture you seem to be placing a heavier focus back on the traditional. Would you agree?

RK: When I was 21, I was sitting on the porch, and it occurred to me that if Michelangelo was alive today he would not be content with clay and marble. The computer as a tool is, to me, incredibly valuable to the process of creating art. I think the art world is still on the fence; the general public is still on the fence; but for an artist the computer is another hand, another brush, another part of our brain. It is a tool that makes more things possible.

This became very clear to me during my tenure at Pixologic where I was part of the development team. At Pixologic, the overriding goal was to find a way for the computer to free artists up to imagine and create much more than ever before. Every feature that was under consideration would go through a rigorous testing process where the team would stress test it in every way imaginable.

I studied traditional art at PAFA, the oldest art school in the nation, where they have casts that Napoleon sent us as a gift to a new country. While there I studied drawing casts and sculpting from life. However, I also went through the Certificate program at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects where I learned everything imaginable about Maya, so my role at Pixologic was to bridge the artist’s perspective with the software aspect of ZBrush, and it was here that things were very interesting to me.

A lot of people think that software programming is about getting someone from point A to point B faster and easier. That might work when programming something like Word but not when making artist software. When you make software for artists, you build a world that they enter and interact with. You can’t make things too easy for them, but you can’t make things too hard either. You have to find this magical balance where the artist, at some point, will start to intuitively understand the software and guess where new features are.

I think ZBrush handles that magical blend of code and logic magnificently. So much so that even today, I have yet to find the balance between traditional and digital. I am still in artist/explorer mode trying to find my way back home and not really knowing where that home really is anymore.

GW: ZBrush 3.5 has just been released. What are your plans for future training?

RK: ZBrush 3.5 is an extension of the sculpting tools that we built in ZBrush 3 and by extension I mean they built another building right next to the first one. It is a huge extension. The Planar brush brings in a whole new level of sculpting ability and ZSphere 2 is just amazing. There are lots of plans for developing new DVDs, a book, many short-format classes as well as an update to the Introduction to ZBrush 3 DVD from the Gnomon Workshop.

GW: What can students do to reduce their learning curve of ZBrush?

RK: First, excuse the shameless plug but buy my Introduction to ZBrush DVD. Its based on the same curriculum I developed at Pixologic. The same curriculum I teach at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects and the same curriculum I use for corporate training. Also, grab the Human Anatomy figure from Anatomy Tools. Grab the book: Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome: Drawing Course. Try to keep your focus on form concepts and avoid getting caught up in surface anatomy. Squint your eyes a lot. Print your work out and look at it. Compare it with photographs.

To succeed in ZBrush you also have to succeed in sculpting. That is quite a tall order to fill and it can be very daunting to beginners so I have two bits of wisdom I would like to share. The first is to learn to live with the Suck. Everyone’s work sucked for years and years before we ever heard of them. If this is your time to suck, well, all I can say is create more models that suck faster and faster and eventually, with patience, you’ll suck much less.

The last comes from my teacher, Al Gury. It has serverd me well over the years and I hope it serves you well. “When you are sculpting, remember that it’s not important to not make mistakes. What is important is to know the mistakes you make so that you can catch them early and fix them.”

To see more of Ryan Kingslien’s work, go to: www.ryankingslien.com

To learn more about Ryan’s available classes at Gnomon, go to: www.gnomonschool.com