[ Help/Feedback needed] My first sculpt and what to do now

shacolate999

Hey everybody!

I'm soon having my 20th birthday and one of my big goals for this year was to get into 3D-sculpting. I have been drawing for most of my life but frankly, I have always adored 3D art a bit more - And that is why I gave it a try now.

As you can see here, I made my first ever portrait sculpt in Zbrush. I projected my high poly mesh onto a low poly one and then rendered all the maps ( normal, ao, cavity, displacement) and I also challenged myself a bit and hand-painted some cheap-lookin' texture map. Additionally, I had some fun in Xgen but I only really scratched the surface of all of these things.

My questions are now:

-1) How do I proceed? I would like to continue working on this sculpt to see what else I need to learn and how I can avoid mistakes in my early work stages, so... now that I have all these maps rendered, do I go straight into Marmoset or Maya and try to render the full model or what is next?

-2) Why does my model look so different in Maya than it does in ZBrush? I think it looks acceptable when looking at it through ZBrush but when opening Maya it is horrible, despite me changing the focal length in both programs to the same value. What am I doing wrong? Even in a quick render with Arnold it just looked bad.

-3) I'm really having trouble sculpting mouths that are "open", so... with teeth and all. No idea how to approach this, does anyone know of good tutorials?
-4) How do I make translucency maps?

JamesBrisnehan

#2
Well, nothing ever looks good in Maya preview or working view modes, but if it looks bad in a render that is a problem. You don't have any of your screenshots labeled but I'm guessing from top down it's Zbrush, Arnold, Maya? The facial structure and proportions in each all look about the same. If you could go into more detail about what you are seeing as different between software it would help. I do see some inconsistency as far as fine detail. In the first image all of the details are washed out by the white material. 50% grey with 50% roughness is usually a good working material so you can see the shapes. In the second image, there is a noticeable drop in resolution from the face center to the chin, brows, and forehead which just means the paining needs more refinement. And the third image has very noisy normals which might be from hardened edges.
In the 3rd image are you showing your low res model with a normal map applied, or did you import your high res into Maya? if its the high res, try softening the edge normals. If its a low res with a normal map, make sure in your map bake settings that hard edges or creases is turned off, or soften edges is turned on. ( I haven't baked maps in Zbrush in a long time so I forgot what settings it has)

#4
Translucency is a pretty simple set up in most software. You just need a thickness map to mask the effect. and a subsurface color. Some software will let you bake a thickness map alongside your Normal Ambient Occlusion and Curvature maps. You can also paint a thickness map by hand for more artistic control. White represents the thinnest areas like ears and nose, and black represents the thickest areas like forehead and chin. Then pick a subsurface color like red orange or peach and put a strong back light in your scene to test the effect. If you end up using Marmoset Toolbag for rendering here is a helpful breakdown of maps you can use. https://marmoset.co/posts/creating-realistic-skin-toolbag-saurabh-jethani/ 

I will let the character artists answer #1 and #3 since I don't really know how to help with those. But they usually say that getting the high res sculpt perfect with the anatomy down pat is the first priority.

kanga

-1) How do I proceed? I would like to continue working on this sculpt to see what else I need to learn and how I can avoid mistakes in my early work stages, so... now that I have all these maps rendered, do I go straight into Marmoset or Maya and try to render the full model or what is next?

For everyone its different, so you will probably get a range of advice. I rekon since you have just started I would practice doing a lot of sculpts to get down things like proportions, face planes and just general anatomy. I would just do loads of studies and not spend more than a few hours on each one. Post them here for direction. Also alternate between male and female studies and also full body and head sculpts.

-3) I'm really having trouble sculpting mouths that are "open", so... with teeth and all. No idea how to approach this, does anyone know of good tutorials?

If you want to detail the inside of the mouth its usually a good idea to sculpt the character with the mouth slightly open. That way you are working with a cavity. The teeth and tongue can be done by separating them into subtools and sculpting them in place. A good way of working is to sculpt the mouth closed to begin with, then open it using the move tool in combination with masking.

shacolate999

JamesBrisnehan
2) Oh, I'm sorry. The first two screenshots are both ZBrush and the last one is from the normal Maya preview, which shows the high poly .obj of my model right after I exported it from ZBrush. I'm not sure if my workflow was completely wrong there, so I'd really appreciate some advice: After exporting my .obj from Zbrush and importing it to Maya, do I need to apply the rendered maps onto it, even before I do any shader-texture stuff to make it look good, or did I get that wrong?
I'm including a picture here that shows again how I sculpted the model and how it ended up looking in Maya. I did soften the edges now, and I guess it made it a little better but there is still a big difference. Despite relocating the light sources, and trying my best to get it to look right, I feel like the Maya version looks distored, somewhat "squished". The eyes seem much smaller and the nose not how I wanted it to look at all. Overall, somewhat concave, if that makes sense.

4) Thank you so much! I will definetly do my best to follow that!

shacolate999

kanga

1) Thank you for your advice, I am defintly planning on doing many more sculpts! I thought it to be useful for myself to do one sculpt from start to finish, disregarding how bad the endresult of an unexperienced person like me might be, just so I get a feel of what I need to keep in mind and what will be useful in my workflow. I don't want to get into some bad habits that will come back to me in later steps.

After I have a model and a texture map, what would your next step be?

3) If you recommend sculpting the mouth closed and opening it later, how do you go about caving in the whole inside of the mouth? When looking at my model, I feel like I wouldnt be able to get the lips back in place after I push them far enough apart to cave a big enough hole to fill teeth inside. To be fair, I feel really inexperienced, so maybe I am missing something essential here.

JamesBrisnehan

Ok yah, I see what you mean now. Even though you said the focal lengths have been matched up, it still actually looks like a focal length issue to me. You might have to eyeball it a bit, and play with the focal length until it looks right. I would say increasing the Arnold camera by a few mm to flatten out the proportions a bit should do it. Also I noticed the ears are missing. If the ears are in the Arnold scene but somehow hidden behind the cheekbones, you are going to have to change your focal length a lot. If you simply forgot to import them, add them back in and see if that helps it look right. Something like missing ears can mess with your perception of the proportions quite a bit. Also try increasing the gloss in Arnold (or decreasing the roughness depending on what they call it) to match the zbrush a bit more. They are definitely the same model, it's only the presentation that has changed.

Using an .obj explains why the edge normals ended up getting hardened. Maya often messes with the normals of obj import. Try .fbx it can't always handle as high of a polycount, but it's usually more stable. Also, once you have your low poly done and normal map baked, you don't really need you move your high poly around between software, since getting all of the texture maps working together in harmony on the low poly is the ultimate goal.

Hope that helps, let us know how it goes.