To sculpt a mouth open or closed?
polycounter lvl 4
Hey, I've got a question I'm pondering about. I'm sculpting a character and the final pose has an expression with its mouth open showing teeth similar to pic 1.
I plan to rig the body to pose it and use a blend shape for the face. My question is about what to do with the mouth during the zbrush stage... do I sculpt the mouth wide open then retopo it in an open pose and extended the mouth bag further? Or do I sculpt it with the lips open slightly and extend it into an inner mouth when retopoing, then open it once I've reprojected details back in zbrush to sculpt the mouth (before closing it back up again)? I just see a lot of characters with a neutral expression but the mouth opens in another render.. unless its of course rigged to open
Any advice would be much appreciated
Pic 1
This has a neutral expression as a start but in the final render the mouth is open.. unless its rigged but can't see any controls for the face so wondered if it might have been a blend shape from zbrush
I plan to rig the body to pose it and use a blend shape for the face. My question is about what to do with the mouth during the zbrush stage... do I sculpt the mouth wide open then retopo it in an open pose and extended the mouth bag further? Or do I sculpt it with the lips open slightly and extend it into an inner mouth when retopoing, then open it once I've reprojected details back in zbrush to sculpt the mouth (before closing it back up again)? I just see a lot of characters with a neutral expression but the mouth opens in another render.. unless its of course rigged to open
Any advice would be much appreciated
Pic 1
This has a neutral expression as a start but in the final render the mouth is open.. unless its rigged but can't see any controls for the face so wondered if it might have been a blend shape from zbrush
Replies
If anything that's part of your problem right there. While Zbrush/sculpting is of course a very important tool when creating such assets (because they are, well, sculpt-like), you have to remain proactive about not letting that influence the way you think of your asset.
By that I mean : you could very well consider the zbrush sculpt as a throwaway step to not get attached to, because the more time you spend on it, the less time and energy you will have left to work on the *actual* final look with expressions.
I would say :
• Develop the look of the face with a closed sculpt, to not have the technicalities of the mouth cavity get in the way of artistic sculpting. Also make a few lookdev variants of some expressions (gentle smile / sad look / and of course the final one you know you'll need). All these using destructive sculpting techniques (dynamesh, and so on). Think of it like a lineup of little rough visdev clay sculpts with no regard to any technicalities.
• Then, develop the actual mouth cavity topology in your regular 3D app (based on the rough "vis dev sculpts" from earlier but without being 100% tied to them - compromises will have to be made. Check if it all behaves well for blendshapes, and so on. Find a good neutral slightly open mouth position and a topology that works well with all the blendshapes.
• Then you could bring everything back together to do a V2 resculpt ... but at that point you might realize that it may not even be needed if you go for a Pixar animated look anyways (subdiv only).
In short : the issue/friction you are running into comes from the assumption that things have to be done linearly (sculpt > retopo > pose), which is true for static assets but absolutely not true when developing expressive characters from scratch like the one you have here.
I hope this makes sense !
pior, just seems to be a thing that I can't seem to find much info on or if I do its open the mouth half way for retopo and close after.