[Zbrush] Sculpting 'sculpture-like' fur?

tester1225

Hi guys, I've posted this question on another forum but haven't gotten any answers yet, so I'm expanding my horizons I'll just copy and paste what I posted there: 

There's not [I]that[/I] many tutorials out there on fur in general it seems. I saw maybe two tutorials on youtube that sort of go for what I want, but not completely. I need to sculpt some thick fur, and this is sort of the look I'm going for:

So basically thick, defined 'curls' that lay down in layers. The closest thing I found was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsYrWu-clbM&ab_channel=AngelinaDiez but I don't think this is close enough for what I need.

Does anyone have any tips for this? I don't really even know where to start TBH.

I'll be really grateful to anyone who could tutorial me up on this

musashidan

This isn't a case of 'step by step tutorial'.  Sculpting hair/fur/cloth is something you have to spend a lot of time on - both practicing and studying forms.

There are some hair imm brushes to get started but, it's pretty much the same as sculpting human anatomy: start with the primary forms to establish the overall look/silhouette, and then keep on refining and refining with the secondary forms. Eventually you will get there if you stick at it but, there are no shortcuts and it takes a lot of patience.

Look up some traditional sculpting videos as there are some great ones to learn from. Brushes aren't as important as observation of refs. The Clay brushes, dam standard, and standard are all great brushes for this work.

The main thing is not to get frustrated and really put the work into the primary forms. Classical sculpture refs are your best friend here.

thomasp

i've done this kind of look (project not published yet) and since time was a factor i did use splines in an external modeller to achieve it in part.

1. fibermesh haircut as a base -> export as splines
2. import splines into blender (or 3ds max - same technique) and render as geometry. adjust shape, thickness, rotation of the strands. when finished, convert to geometry (it'll be an intersecting lump)
3. import geometry into zbrush -> dynamesh. remesh if needed
4. that should give you a crisp looking base with clean intersection of these hair-clumps to sculpt further strand detail onto

tester1225

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm not really looking for a step-by-step guide, simply a workflow direction of sorts. I've heard of the insert brushes, but I haven't really used them or even looked into them really. I'm not much of a sculptor (I only resort to sculpting when I really need it), but when I do sculpt I tend to stick to a few of the standard brushes so I don't overcomplicate things. I don't think getting the primary form would be that difficult, I just don't know which way to approach it from - do I layer each strand group individually, do I carve the groups out of big blob? That's why I'm looking for examples but they are pretty scarce. Although looking up actual real life sculpting is an idea I didn't have, I'll have to see if I can find something!

thomasp, yes I did forget you can simply make a base mesh outside of zbrush and then work from there, but I set myself a challenge of making this prop completely in zbrush. Don't want anything external. Of course if all else fails I'll do it, but I'd prefer not to   

Travis C

this might help a bit: https://youtu.be/oT6t0cx7VQ4

sadly the cameraman sucks 

tester1225

I've seen that one before, but I don't think that would work as nicely for bulky fur Well it might, but what's a newb to know haha
I may be scratching the idea of not using the suggested insert brushes. I just watched this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLZpwVCYxOE&ab_channel=ZFever and I think if I can make just the right custom brush, it might actually produce a result very close to what I'm looking for. And hopefully I'd only have minor sculpting adjustments to make instead of sculpting every single bit.

The tutorial was straightforward enough, but I don't get why he did the whole polysplitting/remerging thing? At 5:10 he splits the mesh into 3 separate polygroups, and then at 6:30 he splits those into subtools and remerges them again. What was that all about? He does the same thing at 15:50, I understand why you'd want the edgeloops but again, why the whole separation/merging thing, why is that needed, couldn't you do this in just one polygroup?