Sketchbook: thelittleone

thelittleone

I started learning Zbrush a couple months ago. I'm really bad about sharing my work so I thought starting a digital sketchbook would be a good place for me to start!

I am most interested in 3D Printing, so you won't see a lot in the way of texturing, rigging, or animation in my sketchbook. Critique is welcome, especially in regards to anatomy, principles of design, or improving my Zbrush workflow. Thanks!

thelittleone

To better show progression, I have a backlog of work I'd like to share. I'll start in chronological order!

Male Torso Study

One of my first sculpts in Zbrush was a study of muscles in the torso. The back is a bit rough, however, I will most likely not go back and touch it up since this is an older piece.

Orc Lesson

This is from a Zbrush course by ScribbleMesh on Artstation. IIRC, the original concept art used for the tutorial is from Tooth Wu. The concept art is highly stylized, and the model leans towards more realistic proportions as that was the progression in the tutorial. This is something I'd like to fix the next time I work on it.

I haven't completed the tutorial, as I am easily distracted by new projects! As you can see, I've blocked out the base mesh and I have started working on higher resolution details for the hair and hairbands.

thelittleone

Head Studies

Here are a couple of head studies that I did in Zbrush, and then quickly hit with polypaint to add a bit of life.

thelittleone

Cthulhu Coffin Dice Box

This sculpt is for a Cthulhu themed dice box I wanted to 3D Print. I quickly sculpted the bust of Cthulhu then used the Alpha>GrabDoc feature in Zbrush to create an Alpha from the 3D mesh. Then, I applied the Alpha to the lid of the Coffin and used Clay Polish + Hpolish to create a stone like finish.

I've already printed the lid on an Elegoo Mars Saturn, which I'll share once I have time to clean up the print and take pictures.

thelittleone

Critical Role: Beauregard

I needed a bit of a palette cleanser, so I decided to start working on a figurine of Beau from Critical Role: The Mighty Nein!

I started by sculpting the base mesh of a slightly stylized, muscular woman for Beauregard. Then, I used Mask + Extract off of the body mesh to create the basic forms for her clothes.

These meshes had messy geometry and rough edges, so I use ZRemesher with Adapt turned off, and Keep Creases turned on, to reduce the polycount to around 2-4k polys. I used Deformation>Polish by Groups and Deformation>Polish Crisp Edges to smooth out the geometry and keep relatively crisp edges. This took me a couple of tries, as creating clothes and hard surfaces in Zbrush is still really new to me.

From there I used the Transpose Zplugin (can't recall the name right now!) to pose the mesh as one piece. This required quite a bit of clean up, especially on the arms/elbows.

There's still quite a bit to do on this one!

Eric Chadwick

These are looking great, keep em coming!

thelittleone

Critical Role: Beauregard

Its been a couple weeks, but I've made a lot of progress on the Beauregard sculpt since the last update!

I redid the face, I wasn't a fan of the style and I wanted to convey a smug confident smile. Pretty happy with the change.

I learned how to use Marvelous Designer so that I could speed up my workflow for creating clothes. While I enjoy sculpting clothes and studying how fabric drapes, it takes a ... really long time. It took me only a day or two to learn Marvelous Designer and create the entire outfit, when it took me a week or two to try and sculpt them in Zbrush (admittedly I was still learning the Zbrush workflow). There are still some things I don't know how to do in MD but its really helpful as a starting point! I still plan on touching things up in Zbrush for a more stylized effect.

Next, I want to learn how to rig my base mesh in Blender so that I can speed up my workflow when it comes to posing my sculpts. Also, I like the idea of being able to create multiple versions of one character. For example, Beauregard has three different outfits throughout the show, and I'd love to create three different models with those outfits but posing each one and sculpting the clothes manually in Zbrush would take forever with my current workflow.

thelittleone

Critical Role: Beauregard

More work on the Beauregard sculpt! Its been dragging on a bit, because I'm constantly second guessing my decisions and reworking stuff. I want to take a breather so I can take a look at it with fresh eyes. I took some WIP photos for how I did certain things, like making the laces with zspheres so I'll try to post those soon.