Sketchbook: RobZero

RobZero

Let’s start from the begining, if you check my Artstation profile I’ve worked several years creating an illustration portfolio with some 3D pieces, on October 2019, before pandemic, my wife and me attended to IluxCon 2019 at Reading, Pensylvania.

  

I had the honor to meet an amazing couple of sculptors, Colin and Kristine Poole, they were exhibiting some pieces of their collection. One night I had a small chat with Colin and he adviced me to try sculpture, he said: “Listen to the muse’s calling”; it took me 3 or 4 years to listen.

My first digital character sculpt was the “Crimson Ronin”, a videogame character which has it’s own blog entries if you want to check it out.

My favorite part was sculpting so I have the crazy idea of creating a portfolio to break into the collectible and miniatures industry.

This piece started as an anatomy study, it wasn’t meant to be a finished character so my main goal was to follow a tutorial by Marc Brunet titled “Nude figure Scultping Guide”.

I wanted to challenge myself by sculpting a complete female figure for the first time, not stylized or cartoony but semirealistic.

My mindest shifted direction as my wife suggested me to change from a generic female  figure to a finished character. I thought it was a good idea because not only I could identify which were my strongest and weaker points, but at the end of the process I would have my first finished fanart ready to be 3d printed.


Photographic reference from Marc’s tutorial.

ZSpheres figurine

As I mentioned before, this was meant to be only an anatomy study of a posed figure,  so I started (like Marc in the tutorial) using zspheres and basic rotations to find the pose and proportions.

After that I applied the unified skin to get a very basic base mesh as a starting point.



DISCLAIMER: there will be gaps in the process, unfortunately I don’t have some files anymore, I’m used to save lots of incremental stages and to free some disk space I had to erase some of them.

Anatomy and body tone

I mentioned before I worked on  my illustration portfolio and for this I have studied a lot of anatomy and figure drawing, as a matter of fact I have worked as figure drawing teacher and fantasy illustrator, therefore the foundation I have is very strong, not perfect, but good enough to translate from 2D to a 3D human figure piece.

Lots of hours later I got to this point. I was satisfied with some anatomical forms but I felt the legs were bigger than the upper body. 

At this stage I decided  to create a comic character using the pose from the reference.

I considered to sculpt Poison Ivy or Catwoman but I wanted to explore a female character not from the mainstream, so I remembered one of the most sexy and strongest anti-heroines in the comic industry:  Brian Pulido’s Lady Death, ¡Damn she’s hot!

With Lady Death in my mind I started to visualize a strong woman, with a body tone belonging to a female warrior, I didn’t want to give her a bodybuilding structure so I tried to show some muscle groups but not super exaggerated.

I resized the upper body to have better proportions, added big breasts   and modeled a very basic scythe to give her more personality. My main goal was to start stablishing the general look of the character. 

Head

This was the most challenging part of figure regarding to anatomy, I had never sculpted a female face before so I struggled a bit.

As a figure drawing teacher I know the proportions and main forms of the human head, the difficult thing with female faces, in my opinion, is that everything needs to be subtle but defined enough to have a solid structure. If you define a lot some forms you start to have a masculine face so it’s a game of adding and refining clay.

My first intention was to give this character a similar facial look to the actress Bryce Dallas Howard, so I gathered references.

By the way, I never intended to do a portrait of her, so I wasn’t very conecerned of getting the exact likeness of her face.

I knew that the head needed lots of polishing but I wasn’t very sure about the direction it was taking, so I forgot about beautiful Bryce and decided to mix facial features from different actresses and models.

This process wil continue in my next entry.

Thank you very much for getting this far, I will be posting how this piece has evolved. Please send me your comments, critiques and questions. 

May zbrush be with you.

RobZero

Lady Death Fanart Collectible:
Part 2 Hair and body adjustments

Hi there! It’s me, Rob Zepeda.
In this second post I’ll be sharing more steps in the process of creating a Fanart collectible statue with Lady Death as protagonist. 

Hair

With the head merged to the body I started to sculpt some general shapes to see the flow of the hair. Before doing that, I took a screen capture from the front view of the character and threw some lines to explore the composition. I  know it would be better to have other views of the figure but at that point I mostly wanted to explore the hair and other elements like cape and schyte.

I’m totally new at sculpting a whole figure, therefore I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to sculpt hair. To learn a bit of this subject I had to watch two or three YouTube tutorials for hair sculpting. Sorry for not remembering the names of the videos; both of them show the sculpting process for stylized hair, the first author is Dan Eder and the other is Danny Mac, even though my character is not stylized (cartoony) this videos gave me a very solid starting point.

I divided the hair in 5 areas in order to have better control, as I learnt with the tutorials, it’s super important to first have the main masses of hair and check if the flow and general forms are visualy pleasing.

After purchasing some hair curve brushes and lots of hours applying hair strands I got a hair style I found good enough and reflected the dynamism and flow I was looking for. More hours and hours of polishing waited me but I will talk about that later.

Anatomy rework

At this stage I wanted to rework some areas of the body that needed more polishing or adjustments.

The first thing I changed was the neck angle, in my first figure the neck and head were pushed forward, therefore it looked like she was humping. For this reason I tilted upwards the head, giving her a prouder and more imposing appearance. Also the chest looked very wide in comparison to the head.

Hands

Time to give some love to the hands. I wanted to detail and polish the anatomy of both hands and fingers but I faced a problem with the left hand (our left), as this element is in direct  contact to the hip area I wasnt’ able to carve the roundness of the fingers and the palm.

I decided that the better approach would be to separate (cut) the hands and arms in order to have more control and freedom to work on them.

Another reason for making the separation was that; at the end of the day both arms are going to be printed separately, this character uses very long gloves that reach the middle of the biceps, so I took advantage and made both cuts.

After cutting the arms I started to refine both hands, again this was a bit challenging for this is my first time sculpting a female, fortunately I took my old notes on hand anatomy and did my best effort.

I think that one of the most difficult things of sculpting femenine hands is, as I mentioned before, to find the middle ground between enough information to give them a semirealistic look but not too much information that it starts looking masculine or rough.

I didn’t want to use wrinkles or skin alphas to detail them for two reasons: 1- I wanted to face the challenge of doing this by hand with a couple of brushes, and 2-I’m not shure it will be trully benefitial to have the most tiny little wrinkles and pores, my plan is to print this character in a 1/6 th scale, therefore it’s very likely that such subtle details aren’t going to be noticeable on the printed surface.

My 3d printer is a brand new Phrozen Mini 8ks, maybe I’ll print a test of this hands with more skin details and look how does it look.

Sculpting, painting and other artistic adventures aren’t lineal paths, it’s necessary to go back and forth in order to refine and adjust parts of the piece.

The first thing I wanted to modify were the breasts, I know that Lady Death has big ones but it’s not my intention to give her an exagerated look with titanic boob implants, my goal is to give her a  sexy but natural appearance. By the way, I had a hell of a struggle defining the separation of both breasts, the contact area looked welded and carving the middle line with the damStandard brush gave a fake appearance. 

Important Disclaimer: The position of both breast doesn’t have a natural fall acording to the weight, the reason for this is that I’m considering a bra that is pushing them a bit up and to the center.

Another modification was done on the face, I compressed a bit the side planes of the face, the result is a sharper (triangular) jaw line. To be honest, at this point I’m not super happy with this new look, writing this blog entries and revisiting my process allowed me to value more the previous version of the face. I think I’ll return to this head, it looks stronger and more imposing.

Some tweaks were made to the butts, I gave more definition and extended a bit the butt crack. 

I don’t know why but it was a bit complicated for me to get the right look to this area, I explained before how also I struggled a bit with the breasts; I felt that I was only carving a straight line in the middle of the butt instead of having two semispherical shapes having contact right in the center.  

I definitely need to sculpt more  boobs and butts, a sacrifice my wife will have to understand 

Finally I smoothed a bit all muscles and reshaped the torso. Looking at the full body I felt the body tone belonged more to a female bodybuilder, it was too strong and muscular.

Hair Polish

At this point I was ready to polish the hair so basicaly I did three types of operations:  Move and reshape hair strands, subdividing to have a smoother look and detailing some lines in minor areas. 

Tip: A great brush for hair detailing is Orb Crack from the package Orb stylized effects, sorry for not remembering the author’s name. These are meant for enviromental detailing but they can be super useful for organic forms also, best thing is they are free to download.

To be honest I’m not sure that my methodology was the right for this figure, I mean, maybe it would be faster to give more resolution and detail the main shapes I started with, instead of adding brush strokes with a curve brush for each of the hair strands. 

I’m not sure how difficult this piece will be to print (the hair), maybe I’ll cry tears of blood, but the only way to learn  is to challenge ourselves. 

Thanks again if you got this far reading this post.

In our next chapter I’ll be showing and explaining the development for the clothes.

May zbrush be with you.

RobZero

Lady Death Fanart Collectible:
Part 3 Clothes section 1

Hi there! it’s me, Rob Zepeda.
It’s been a while since my last entry, my wife and me moved to a diferent home and there were lots of things to arrange, store in boxes, and rearrange etc. 
In this third post I’ll be sharing more of the process for creating Lady Death, a fanart collectible statue 
First of all I want to mention that I have great respect for the original design created by Brian Pulido, nevertheless with this fanart I want to give a different look to the character, I think of her more as a warrior and huntress than just as a femme fatal that wears a tiny bikini with long boots and gloves. 
In my mind I imagine that she had to gather some leather, by killing animals and hellish creatures, and the metal ornaments could have been forged by Cremator, a master blacksmith that was vanished from Lucifer’s kingdom. 

Disclaimer:  To be honest I haven’t read a single Lady Death`s comic, my main approach to the lore was the 2004 animated film directed by Andy Orjuela. It may have some differences with the comic story,  but it was the easiest way for me to have a better understanding of Lady Death’s universe.

Bra

For the black leather piece I used the classic approach of masking parts of the breasts and extracting with a thin thickness. Some Zremeshing, fixing polygons and polish by features were simple enough to get this piece.

The straps that conect the chest and neck were created with a single curve brush created by myself; at this point I didn’t think it would be useful to buy a pack with strap IMM curve brushes, also I wanted to understand how curve brushes are created.

From the beginning I wanted to avoid metal flourish ornaments, I want to give a bit of aggressive look to the clothes. I took inspiration from some Goth accesories and garments, I’ve tried to give a more organic look to the pieces and using some bone elements, not only looks cool,but it reinforces the supernatural nature of this character.

The little skull and bony hands are part of a skeleton Imm brush that I bought years ago. By the way, if you feel a little envy for those skeleton hands, trust me, you’re not the first.

Bikini

Again masking and extracting allowed me to create the cloth piece for the bikini, my trusty strap Imm curve brush helped me to add a sexy touch and also will connect the bikini with the boots.

Not wanting to leave just like that the bikini, I decided to create some ornaments to add a bit of salt to this piece.

As you probably know, for my first blog entry, this figure was posed from the beginning so I don’t have the possibility to sculpt with simmetry. I thought that it would be very useful to use a DAZ 3d model in T or A pose that allowed me to work with simmetry and later I would have only to adapt those pieces to the posed figure.

I opened DAZ studio brought a Genesis 8 female model and reshape her in order to have a similar body type of that in my zbrush posed sculpture. I rendered a front and a back view that allowed me to make some paintover to stablish the design of this ornamental pieces. 

In this point I want to mention that I think is very important not to forget that as 2d or 3d artists we need to give a cohesive look to the piece, designing and experimenting is more time consuming that just directly painting or sculpting, but at the end of the day the time you invest in preliminary sketches will help you to reinforce the general message and look of the whole piece.

After completing a very simple sketch of the ornaments I returned to Zbrush to sculpt them. For the organic stuff like the skull in the center and the lateral bony fingerish pieces, the good old Move, ClayBuildup and Trim brushes were my best friends at this task.

For the hard surface pieces I decided to sculpt them only as sketches in zbrush, later I would import them as OBJ in Blender for modeling with better edges and topology. Hardsurface sculpting/modeling in Zbrush is something I don’t understand very much, to be honest I haven’t immersed myself in Zmodeler or other tools that other artists use to stay in Zbrush, which is super useful. I will definitely study more about the hard surface workflow in order to have a more efficient sculpting methodology.

I  decided to eliminate the diamond lateral pieces since I didn’t like how they looked. Instead I used again a spike Imm brush, it looks cool and it gives consistency to the shape language along the different garments.

By the way, adapting the symmetrical pieces I modeled in Blender to the posed figure, was a bit more complicated than I expected in Zbrush.

Gloves

Masking, extracting, zremeshing and tweaking geometry helped me to get the gloves pieces. 

I searched for some references at Pinterest to have a better understanding of folds and wrinkles, for the bra and bikini I didn’t worry about that but for the gloves I had to trust on the images I found and my observational skills.

Sculpting or drawing clothes is on of the most complex tasks because you have to understand the physics and how some materials behave when the body takes a specific pose.

If you are having difficulties with folds, wrinkles and how clothes behave, I really advice you to look for tutorials, Marc Brunet and Glenn Vilpu have amazing information regarding to the clothed figure.

The metal ring at the top of the gloves was done in Blender because I wanted to have sharp edges and I couldn’t get those inside Zbrush. 

I have understood that my lack of knowledge with hardsurface modeling with Zmodeler and other tools is interrupting my workflow, I will definitely study and practice this subject.

Again I decided to create an Imm curve brush in order to add the metal diamonds around the ring, for the little skulls I used an Imm brush with lots of skeleton pieces.

Some details were added to the gloves, like a seam at the inner part of the arms with some stitches, once again I bought an Imm curve brush with stitches to save some time.

In order to add some flavor I attached some organic spikes that protude from the gloves, the idea is that those cloth pieces are made from the skin of a creature like a small dragon or some kind of an abyssal reptile, that explains the iguanas pictures in my mood board.

Thanks for reading and joining me in the adventure of sculpting my first collectible figure.

In my next entry I will continue to show you some of the process for the boots, the cape and texturing all the garments.

May Zbrush be with you.

RobZero

Lady Death Fanart Collectible:
Part 4 More clothes

Hi there! it’s me, Rob Zepeda.

In this entry I’ll show you some of the process of creation for the boots and cape.

Here are my main references.

Boots

I tried a different approach with this pieces by not starting them from scratch. Years ago I used and had some fun with DAZ 3D so I went to the main page looking if I could buy a pair of boots that aligned to the design I want for Lady Death’s clothing.

I did find a pair of boots with a lot of potential, so I bought them.

It was very important for me to consider two things by deciding to use items I didn’t model myself from the beggining.

1.-My figure is not in a T or A pose what allows me the use of symmetry, the legs have movement and a defined pose so I had to replicate that pose as close as I could to get the boots adapt to the model. 

As a former DAZ user I loaded a Genesis 8 figure and posed her trying to emulate my Zbrush figure, then applied the boots. This is when point number 2 appears.

2.-Any DAZ user knows that those figures and assets are not perfect, they are a great starting point for saving some time but it’s mandatory to make adjustments. Unfortunately the geometry sometimes is streched or deformed in a way that doesn’t make sense. A clear example can be seen in the buckles and the holes for the laces (circled in green at the image).

Back in Zbrush I imported the boots and eliminated the straps. Obviously the dimensions and position of the posed boots weren’t the same as my figure’s legs, so a lot careful tweaking was necessary in order to match them with my character.

From the beggining my idea with the boots was that they were complemented with leather panels, as if they were part of a leather armor set. 

In general terms I want to reinforce the concept of Lady Death as a supernatural being, she is a kind of queen from hell. For that reason I decided to add hooves to the boots, I think they add a bit of a badass demonic touch.

The hooves were sketched first in Zbrush and later modeled in Blender, I wanted clean topology and more controllable forms. 

The leather panels were created by masking, extracting and zremeshing, for the borders I used a simple Imm curve brush. 

To give some extra wrinkles to the boots I sculpted with the ClayBuildup brush, an Imm curve brush was used to add straps and buckles and finaly the small metal rings were created with an Imm Primitive brush. Also lots of adjustments were necessary to get decent non distortioned (stretched) laces.

Cape

The cape had to show movement and add some grace to the composition, I used Marvelous Designer in order to have wind blowing at it. I’ve never used dynamics for clothing inside Zbrush so I’m not sure if you can get this effect.

The topology I’ve got from Marvelous Designer wasn’t very good so I Zremeshed the cape and used the Move brush to modify some areas. Smooth and Claybuild up brushes allowed me to refine some folds and wrinkles to have a more pleasent look.

I can’t forget that this figure is going to be printed in my Phrozen Sonic Mini 8ks. This printer has a maximum z print size of 17 cms so I had to cut the cape in two pieces.

As I’m an absolute rookie to 3D printing I asked in the Discord group “ArtLegion” how could I make this pieces printable and I got some help.

The thickness  at the center of the cape should be heavier in order to add a key that penetrates the other half, this not only allows to have a connection between both parts but also gives more printable material to the printer.

An important thing to consider is that I didn’t want to have a super thick cape, this would look bizarre because the cape, in my mind, would be composed of leather pieces, and leather is not super thick. To adress this, only the thickness at the center is heavier than the boarders, this method allows me to hide the heaviest thickness in a less visible area.

Finally I added some seams and stitches to give the impression that this cape is not a single piece. The idea is that the person that made the cape had to join several pieces of leather, in my mind it has a similar look of Catwoman’s suit in the film Batman Returns.

That's it for this post, thanks to getting this far.
I'll be posting more of this amazing process 
May Zbrush be with you.

RobZero

Lady Death Fanart Collectible:
Part 6 Polypaint and base desing

Hi, it’s been a while since my last post, some projects and being sick with COVID interrupted the process of this piece but I’m back. It’s time to share with you another part of the process to create this fanart piece.

Polypaint

As this is my first collectible fanart I didn’t have previous experience with polypaint so I tried my best and played a bit with it.

I wanted to give a ghostly and eerie look to Lady Death, she is beautiful and deadly, but at the end of the day she is a woman that died and was reborn at hell as an avenging spirit, that’s why I gave her skin tone a bluish very cold tone.

As you will see I gave myself some creative freedom to deviate from the traditional color scheme that this characater has in comics and illustrations.

To add a bit of sensuality by painting some freckles on the face and the chest. 

The dark nature of this character was the perfect excuse to gave her a kind of goth make up, very dark shadows around the eyes, blue lips and fingernails. I know that the original character includes sexy red lips but I wanted this girl to have a sexy but at the same time creepy look, that’s why we can see some thin veins emanating from her eyes.

The biggest chromatic change I did for this character is at the hair. Lady Death has a characteristic white weavy hair but in my fanart I decided to gave her a very saturated blue color.

The reason behind this wasn’t only an aesthetic choice. I want that the face area strongly pulls the attention of the viewer so this area needed a stronger contrast. Another reason is that I want her to have a more modern look, as I mentioned before, I’m strongly attracted to women with goth/punk look.

I gave myself half an hour or more to analyse the work of experienced sculptors that create collectibles and I discovered that the use of darker values on the skin is often applied to create a greater sense of volume and three-dimensionality. I found that areas with heavy ambient occlusion are the perfect places to paint with darker colors in order to increase the separation between different forms.

Even though she has a bluish skin tone, I used a bit of warmer hues in areas that, in real life, tend to go towards red and pink, this is very obvious in the nose, cheeks, and knuckles. 

Thinking with a logical mind it’s completely absurd to have warmer tones on the body of a zombie like creature but I didn’t want to limit myself by using only blue tones, it looks boring and artificial. In real life these colors are created by blood vessels in areas where the skin is very thin. 

Scythe

for her weapon I applied a cool gray with some warmer variations, this color scheme is influenced by the work of H.R giger.

Base

I’d like to talk about the design for the base which, to be honest, I forgot to develop along with the character.

My main idea with the base is to show that Lady Death inhabits a very sterile and arid land, at the end of the day she is at hell.

You can see a that she walks over dirt and rocks, a sign that she’s surrounded by death and loneliness.

As part of the landscape we can see some bones and skulls to reinforce the idea of lack of living creatures, yet we can see three hands that try to reach her legs.

This hands represent that all creatures are subordinated to her power and seek an evil blessing with a simple touch of the princess of the damned.  

1- The hand with skin burns represents the souls of those who are newcomers to hell, tortured souls that suffer for the sins comitted on earth.

2- The hand with greenish rotten skin and pustules is the reminder of the decay that has infected the souls of those who have been trapped and have forgotten their humanity

3- Last but not least, the hand of a demon shows that even dark creatures and entities bow before her presence.

The cherry on the top, at least in my vision, are the simese twins that emerge from the ground, this malevolent creatures remind us that in hell there’s only perversion and any trace of innocence is lost.

Thanks for reading till this point
I’m really happy to be very close to finish this creative journey, last but not least it’s mandatory to talk about splitting the sculpture in several pieces to be printed, this will be my last entry before showing the final rendered images.

See ya
May Zbrush be with you

RobZero

Lady Death Fanart Collectible:
Part 7 Cuts and keys

Hello guys, this is the final entry of this process, it’s a long post but maybe you can find some useful information.

Cuts and keys

Before explaining my process to create the separated pieces I must say that it’s mandatory to understand how scale works in Zbrush.

For this task I watched some YouTube videos in order to really understand this basic but very important subject. If you have some doubts about this I will advice you to watch the tutorial on YouTube “How Does Zbrush Deal With Units and Scale? (and How to Fix issues You May Have)” posted by Outgang
If you are new to creating sculpts for 3D printing, like me, I can’t recommend you enough to watch the video series Demystifying Post-Production: 3D Printing by Ian Robinson. He’s a Zbrush trainer working at Maxon, this four video series has amazing information about the fundamentals and steps to create a 3D print from a zbrush model.

Important Disclaimer-

At the moment of writting this blog entry I haven’t printed the sculpture so, it’s likely that some pieces could need adjustments in order to print correctly or fit in the place they belong (I wish this won’t happen and everything goes beautifully).

Planning the cuts

The ideal is that the clothes, accesories or props of your character allow you to hide the cuts, this way you won’t have to do much post-processing and the sculpt will have a cleaner look.

In my case the few clothes she’s wearing helped me with this, the following image shows the division of pieces with a yellow line.

In case you have the chance, it’s important to take advantage of creative freedom with the design. In my original design the choker around the neck wasn’t considered but it allowed me to divide the head from the torso, it’s an element that integrates well with the other accesories and functions to hide the cut.

It’s very helpful to use folders in order to group the meshes that will conform each piece of the sculpture. Another simple and useful strategy is to name the subtools in order to easily identify each mesh.

Filling spaces

For this subject I’ll use the right arm as an example; I knew that part of the arm and the forearm were going to be covered by the long glove, even though this geometry wouldn’t be visible it was necessary to keep it in order to fill the hollow space of the long sleeve.

The key has nothing fancy or special it’s just a tappered cube with smooth edges, 

this softened edges are important in order to facilitate the connection between the male and female piece.

At this point we need to weld using dynamesh, not only merge, the connector to the subtool that will be part of it, the boolean operation to get the female piece will be generated later in the process.

Merging subtools 

It’s substantial that your mesh doesn’t have any holes or floating polygons, this issues could throw errors with the slicing software, therefore, before merging the subtools contained in the folder as one subtool it’s important to close any gap or space between each other.

With the move brush and using the transparent button, you can push portions of the mesh in order to facilitate not only conntact between them, but a penetration.

This ensures that the polygons that penetrate the geometry will be erased and the piece will be solid, any existing holes will be eliminated.

On the left there are two gaps between the two meshes, on the right the gaps have been eliminated.
Once there are no spaces, the process was something like:

1-Apply Merge folder to join all subtools just in one. Apparently the pieces have been united but this is not true, they are only merged but not weld, for that you can use Dynamesh or Remesh by union. This workflow uses the Dynamesh approach; it was the one I learnt from Ian Robinson, in his videos he mentions that sometimes Remesh by union can generate problems.

2-Open Dynamesh/elimante blur/turn off groups and with the picker button slide the pointer along all surfaces in order to have a better number of the resolution needed for the dynamesh.

3-To the highest number given by the picker add aproximately 300

4-On the history bar CTRL+click on the latest step, this function saves the level of detail at that history point.

5-Hit Dynamesh, if the resulting subtool has lost detail and quality you must return to step 2 and increase the resolution for the dynamesh.

In my case for almost every piece it was necessary to increase the scale by 200% or 300% in order to keep details, remember Dynamesh it’s a process scale dependent. 

It’s adviceable to have a balance between the level of detail and the number of points in the subtool, you don’t want trillions of polygons on each one.

6-You can use the Project history function (inside the project menu) to tell Zbrush to recall the history step that you saved on step 4, this will help to recover some details.

Note: Always remember that Dynamesh can wipeout about 5% or 10% of the details and project history may not be able to recover that. In some cases I had to sculpt again some details that were important for me to keep, the DamStandard brush or some alphas could be helpful depending on the details.

Fixing holes

To make sure the resulting subtool has no holes:

1-Create a cube big enough that covers the subtool

2-Create a new folder with the subtool to be cheked and the cube below it

3-Turn on the arrow in the boolean menu of the subtool to be checked

4-Select subtract mode in the boolean menu of the cube

5-Position the cube over the subtool and move its pivot below it

6-Slowly move the cube in order that covers the subtool. With the subtract boolean it gives the impression that the cube is slicing the piece, just as the real slicer software. The goal is to locate holes inside the geometry and fix them.

If you find areas that need to be adjusted

7-Select Move brush/turn on Backface mask (Brush/Automasking menu) and move the inner walls of the meshes in order to create a penetration

8-Dynamesh again, this welds both meshes and closes the hole

On the left mesh with inner hole. On the right the hole has disappeared

IMPORTANT NOTE: Be careful with the move brush and adjustments you make, if you are not careful enough you can modify the outer forms (visible areas of the piece) and afect the original design.

The pink line represents a deformation

Floating Geometry Check

Sometimes booleans and dynamesh can leave some floating polygons that will cause errors with the slicing softwares, to check if this si happening and fix it:

1-Select the subtool you want to check/turn on solo/turn on Polyframe (you can hide the polygon edges by clicking on line)

2-Go to Polygroups/Auto group

3-Select the Rectangle Select brush and CTRL+Shift click on the subtool (this isolates the polygroup of the subtool from other polygroups)

4-CTRL+Shift drag on the canvas to invert the selection

If your subtool didn’t dissapear, congrats you don’t have floating polygons, if it did go to step 5

5- Invert again the selection by CTRL+Shift drag on the canvas (this turns on visibility on the main subtool you’re checking)

6-Go to Modify topology/Delete hidden, and the floating polygons have been erased.

After this I used the Check mesh Integrity/Fix mesh operations that are located in the Geometry tab, then I rescaled the subtool to its original size with the Size parameter 

Checking scale

I used the scale master plugin with a bounding box previously generated to check the real physical size of each piece.

I want to take the opportunity to complain about the scaling and measurement system inside zbrush, I understand that this is the way it was programmed but I find it super unintuitive, other software has a more understandable manner to deal with units, scale and measurements. 

Making the key cut (female parts)

Before creating the female piece by using booleans, it’s very important to add all the necessary male connectors to the male piece and be sure these won’t be modified or moved.

I’ll use the torso and the right arm as male and female pieces respectively, the process is something like this:

1-First I duplicated the male part that will provoke the key cut (torso), then create a folder

Note: It’s very important to duplicate and not to use the original male piece

2-Rename this duplicate with the sufix cutter  “Torso cutter”

3-The subtool that will have the key cut (right arm) must go over the male piece

4-Turn on subtract boolean in the male piece/Turn on the live boolean button

5- Apply the inflate function to the male piece in order to create a physical gap between the key and the female piece.

This is a crucial step in order to have a size tolerance that will ensure that the male piece will enter into the female, take into consideration that this gap will be filled with glue in the printed piece.

6- If the boolean operation created “walls” it’s important that these have a measurement of 1mm as minimum. If this walls are thinner use the Move brush (backface mask turned off) to pull out the mesh in order to increase their thickness, be careful not affect in a destructive way the original design.
 

7-In the folder containing male and female pieces, push the gear button and select Boolean folder. This will generate a merged version of both subtools with the boolean cut applied. It’s necessary to measure the gap distance between the male and the female.

8- Select the new subtool with the boolean cut, go to Display properties/Flip

9-Turn on visibility of the original piece, not the duplicate in the folder, I mean the male that will connect to it and turn on Transparent button

10-With the transpose line measure the gap. I followed the advice of Ian Robinson to have something between .2 and .3 mm of gap

If you’re happy with the gap distance select again the female piece, go to Display properties/Flip, this will return the normals back to the original orientation.

In case you are not happy with the separations on the pieces:

1-Erase the merged subtool with the boolean cut, it has the prefix Umesh if you didn’t change it

2-Select the male subtool and undo the inflate

3-Inflate again with a numeric value that can give you the desired separation

4-Adjust the walls created by the boolean operation if they measure less than 1mm

5-Repeat steps 7 to 10

In order to find the ideal inflate value I had to do several tests and repeat this steps, my inflate value was 1.75 and the resulting separation was around .27 and .28 mm, which is perfectly acceptable as physical tolerance. It’s a good practice to write and have a record of the inflate value and the gap that it provokes, this way the guessing work is less chaotic.

Refining the female piece

After getting the female piece it’s necessary to make some adjustments before calling the piece finished.

Most of the time the boolean substract operation will produce very hard edges on the cut surface, this can lead to difficulties at the moment of connecting the printed pieces.

1-To fix this just grab de TrimDynamic brush and turn on Sculptris to soften those razor sharp edges

The blue line represents a very hard edge that needs to be softened

2-Open Dynamesh/elimante blur/turn off groups and with the picker button slide the pointer along all surfaces in order to have a better number of the resolution needed for the dynamesh.

3-To the highest number given by the picker add aproximately 300

4-On the history bar CTRL+click on the latest step, this function saves the level of detail at that history point.

5-Hit Dynamesh, if the resulting subtool has lost detail and quality you must return to step 2 and increase the resolution for the dynamesh.

6-If the lost level of detail is not considerable you can use the Project history function (inside the project menu) to tell Zbrush to recall the history step that you saved on step 4, this will help to recover some details.

7-Execute the Floating geometry Check described some paragraphs above

8- Use the Check mesh Integrity/Fix mesh operations to be sure your geometry doesn’t have problems with the topology.

9-You can check if your piece is watertight, go to transform menu/Analyze mesh/and select the right scale at mm

If Zbrush says it’s NOT watertight don’t panic, leave the piece like that. Fortunately most of the slicers (Chitubox,Lychee,etc) have processes to fix simple errors.

10-Rename your female piece with a clear name to easily identify it

Decimating

In order to import the mesh into the slicer and work on it without problems it’s mandatory to reduce the polygon count. It’s adviceable to export each piece with a maximum count of 700K points.

1-Open the plugin Decimation master

To have better results with this process avoid reducing the polygon from the highest value to the lowest, it’s better to work with intermediate steps; for example if your piece has 3.5 Million points  don’t decimate to 350 K with one pass, you can reduce it by 50% resulting on 1.75 M points.

2-In the preset area write 500k and click custom

3-Finally write 350k or the value you consider correct and click custom again

This way Zbrush has a better way to organize the topology and process bit by bit.

Tip: If you worry about loosing detail on a certain area, you can mask it and then decimate, the process will avoid touching the protected area.

I repeated all this steps for every separated piece to obtain the final female pieces.

STL export

This can be easily done by using the zplugin 3D print hub

1-Select the subtool that you want to export

2-Click Update Size Ratios and select the right measurements in mm

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you need to export several subtools do not select another one different from the first you selected. Changing the selection will create scaling issues.

3-Go to Export options/Visible (it will export only visible subtools) or Selected (to only export the selected subtool).

4-Export STL and define the file location. If you selected visible in step 3, a window will prompt with the naming options for the exported pieces.

I followed these steps for all separated pieces and obviously this presented lots of challenges to me, remember it’s my first sculpt for 3D printing. Naturally I had to rework some areas because I didn’t know the rules and characteristics for a piece to be 3D printed.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the pieces haven’t been printed so I don’t know if I had success with this sculpt, only facing the demon of 3D printing I’ll know if more adjustments need to be made.

Final Thoughts

This blog entry closes the adventure I had with the creation of this fan art. Along the process I’ve learnt lots of things to consider for my next pieces.

First walk, then run.

To be honest I didn’t think this piece would be so complex to finish, maybe I forgot it was my first attempt to sculpt a semirealistic female figure and prepare it for 3D printing.

I think it’s important to learn and acquire new skills bit by bit and focus on a main aspect, for example: human anatomy, sculpting hair, hard surface or whatever. With this piece I faced lots of challenges and difficulties for the first time and in some point of the process I felt overwhelmed, sometimes my inner voice said “maybe it’s time to quit and start an easier sculpt”, fortunately I didn’t hear it.

It’s okey to put yourself in front of challenges but be careful not to overexert your capabilities and skills, this could lead to frustration and quiting the project.

Even though I haven’t printed the piece I’m very proud and happy with the final result, obviously is not perfect but it’s a great first step.

I’ll be posting the final renders as soon as possible, feel free to comment and critique.

Thanks for sharing this journey with me and see ya’ in my next quest.

May Zbrush be with you.

iam717

NICE, i feel the face could be "prettier", idk if she should also look gruesome, it is your design just my .02's.

Also i am always fascinated at how people do g-string designs, like how do you prevent the cheeks from intersecting? into each-other and getting that way up in there? the string.  Might not sound serious but am, also the chest is showing signs of intersecting when "fabricating", if you in deed did that on purpose, if not then in the zbrush looking img it looks stuck together, is that a deliberate choice?  I'd think if someone was making this for sale you would want it to look its best and sharpest? wouldn't you.

I hardly read the thread feel free to ignore if answered any of the above ^ comment..

RobZero

Thanks for your comment.
I wanted her face to look a bit hard, not masculine or something like that but I didn't want a pretty or cute girl face. Nevertheless it's my first sculpted semirealistic face and maybe is part of the learning process, I'll have to see it printed to judge it more objectively.
The Buttocks and breasts were very challenging because they need to look pressed toward the center but without penetrating each other, I tried to give the impression that they are pressing each other like fleshy masses.
I'll have to see the sculpt printed in my hands before deciding if it needs adjustments before selling a STL file, thanks for taking the time to write.
Cheers

iam717

Thanks for the response, appreciate getting some insight to how these things are made well, i respect the artistic decisions.