For my organic object, I struggled to use the ZBrush workflow. Due to the time it was taking to complete, and the added difficulty of finding access to the software outside of campus, I decided to pursue another method to create an organic object that I found while pursuing my practice intention.

Rather than sculpting in ZBrush, I used the NURBS Modeling tools available in Maya. These allowed me to draw organic shapes with bezier curves, and use various functions to turn them into 3D shapes. Then, I was able to touch up these shapes to get exactly what I was going for.

I was attempting to make a mouse, so I started by drawing the rough profile of a mouse. Then I used the Revolve tool to generate a 3D surface by revolving the curve around an axis. I started with the wrong axis, resulting in the silly disc/hat-like shape. After reorienting it, I got the vaguely mouse-looking blimp.

After messing around with trying to delete some of the faces to get only half of this blimp shape, I realized the surface’s direction had been inverted. I had already converted the surface to a polygon mesh, so I couldn’t figure out to invert the direction to what it should have been. So, I started over from scratch (now with a greater understanding of my workflow) and created a properly oriented 3D shape. I attempted to use the sculpt tools to bring the shape closer to what I was going for, but I ended up just making the shape extra fat or skinny on a seemingly random axis.

I finally decided to try a different method of removing half the shape’s geometry and settled on the boolean difference tool. I created a cube primitive and adjusted its size and position so that it overlapped with the undesired geometry, then cut away the excess. The final result is a simple, organic mouse shape.