Sculpting with Light

VanLogan

I've been putting this together for some time now. Please let me know what you think. I haven't seen much out there about this technique for digital sculpture so I thought I would share. If you find this helpful, or have any questions please let me know.

MeintevdS

Thanks! Useful write up,I never really liked the materials with the harsh shadows and highlights, but I now understand the use of them, never thought about using light this way. I shall give this a go next time.

mandisawesome

Huh! For some reason adjusting my light to match my reference never occurred to me, but of course it makes perfect sense. Time to give the matcaps a break, I think. Thanks a lot for the write up!

VanLogan

I'm glad that you find this useful. I also just updated the image to explain why I like using Basic materialB over a few others and how I modify it to my liking.

LRoy

I've never thought of looking at it that way. Thank you for taking the time to write this up.

cleankid

great examples, thanks for doing this!

crazyfool

Great write up I use this a lot with likeness sculpts recently. It's actually called Chiaroscuro and is traditionally used by painters and sculptors. If you want to delve deeper, this book is really good for looking at it in application

[ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0823003590/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?qid=1396977915&sr=8-2&pi=AC_SX110_SY165"]The Artist's Complete Guide to Drawing the Head:Amazon.co.uk:Books[/ame]

Makes it a lot easier to read forms from reference and makes your sculpting rely on form over cut ins (hisssss)

BradMyers82

I have done similar stuff in my likeness work as well, however, I never really used a material and moved the light around much real time, and I really should be taking advantage of that too. So thanks a lot for the write up dude.

The way I usually work is swapping around different materials to get different looks at it, then eventually setting up similar lights to my reference taking a screen shot and in photoshop seeing how well they match up. If I see errors in my work, I'll paintover the image of my sculpt in photoshop which really helps me understand what I need to correct and why. This is pretty time consuming though if you have to go back and fourth many times with this, so Using a material where I can move the light around and match it up there will def. help a lot.

Torch

Hey thanks a bunch for this write up, really interesting read.

VanLogan

Crazyfool thank you for the book recommendation. After reading into it more I'm finding that Mudbox is much better at this technique than Zbrush.The thing I found interesting in the book was that he says there are only two types of shadows. Form shadows and cast shadows. I found that in Zbrush I was only looking at the form shadows because the real time cast shadows were very fake.

The light is much more realistic in Mudbox, with more accurate cast shadows.

The closest thing I could get in Zbrush was by doing a render to get the shadows, however this isn't best because it is not in real time.

If anyone has any way of improving upon any of this I would love to know. Thank you for all the feedback so far.

imurme

I really found this post helpful but have a question about creating the materials you mentioned. I am a bit a newbie to Zbrush so this may be a dumb question but how did you adjust the Basic MaterialB so that there was ambient light in the shadow of your material?

VanLogan

I hope this helps.