Zbrush Sculpting Practice
polycounter lvl 8
Hi, I'm here to try and get feedback on some of the assignments I'm doing for my master's at Staffordshire university. I feel that anatomy, cloth and simply Zbrush in general are some of my weaker spots, and so the particular module I'm doing should help greatly and force me to tackle these hindrances.
This thread will be updated according to the tasks that come along, and hopefully there will be time to improve on the older pieces as well, in which case of course they'll be posted up here too.
Without further ado part one is to find a sculpture in a museum and produce a study of it by 25th October. If there are 2 subjects in the sculpture, only one has to be done. Its a test of form, anatomy and clothing so its purely sculpting here. One of the rules (at for least this part) of the assignment is that nothing can be imported into Zbrush; the final product must be 100% produced in this software.
So I went to Birmingham museum and snapped up a lot of photos. The subject I chose was "The Sisters of Bethany" (1875) by John Warrington Wood. Anyways, its a nice deep end subject with lots of cloth. Lots of references below (beware: the image is quite huge)
With this, whilst I know I only have to sculpt one of them, I think the beleivability of the sculpt will be increased if both are sculpted, one at least roughly. This also has the benefit of being able to 'upgrade' the rough into a fully fledged sculpt as well.
So, my current plan is to get a "base" sculpt of one of them. Since the two of them are pretty much identical, it makes sense to me to get one of them done in a pose that makes proportion correcting easier. Once those are fine, it can be duplicated and posed - cloth then being sculpted on top of the subject. It seems like a sensible plan but please feel free to share advice.
Current progression is as follows. The model was sculpted from a sphere with dynamesh with the basic forms completed in about an hour. Additional details and forming the face took around another two. I believe that this might be too slow for such an output:
Things that I am currently aware of:
1) Hands and feet need more definition before leaving the dynamesh phase
2) Ear shape and size might be questionable
When errors are dealt with, I will Zremesh the model and project the dynamesh form onto it so that it stresses the rigging/posing tools less. From the the model will be duplicated and posed as in the photos. Corrective assymetrical sculpting will follow, and then clothing roughs can start being formed. Hair will probably be done around this time, or it might be better to do that in the dynamesh stage as they are almost identical in hairstyle.
Anything else, or if you have any advice/constructive crit to offer, I'd be glad to have it
This thread will be updated according to the tasks that come along, and hopefully there will be time to improve on the older pieces as well, in which case of course they'll be posted up here too.
Without further ado part one is to find a sculpture in a museum and produce a study of it by 25th October. If there are 2 subjects in the sculpture, only one has to be done. Its a test of form, anatomy and clothing so its purely sculpting here. One of the rules (at for least this part) of the assignment is that nothing can be imported into Zbrush; the final product must be 100% produced in this software.
So I went to Birmingham museum and snapped up a lot of photos. The subject I chose was "The Sisters of Bethany" (1875) by John Warrington Wood. Anyways, its a nice deep end subject with lots of cloth. Lots of references below (beware: the image is quite huge)
With this, whilst I know I only have to sculpt one of them, I think the beleivability of the sculpt will be increased if both are sculpted, one at least roughly. This also has the benefit of being able to 'upgrade' the rough into a fully fledged sculpt as well.
So, my current plan is to get a "base" sculpt of one of them. Since the two of them are pretty much identical, it makes sense to me to get one of them done in a pose that makes proportion correcting easier. Once those are fine, it can be duplicated and posed - cloth then being sculpted on top of the subject. It seems like a sensible plan but please feel free to share advice.
Current progression is as follows. The model was sculpted from a sphere with dynamesh with the basic forms completed in about an hour. Additional details and forming the face took around another two. I believe that this might be too slow for such an output:
Things that I am currently aware of:
1) Hands and feet need more definition before leaving the dynamesh phase
2) Ear shape and size might be questionable
When errors are dealt with, I will Zremesh the model and project the dynamesh form onto it so that it stresses the rigging/posing tools less. From the the model will be duplicated and posed as in the photos. Corrective assymetrical sculpting will follow, and then clothing roughs can start being formed. Hair will probably be done around this time, or it might be better to do that in the dynamesh stage as they are almost identical in hairstyle.
Anything else, or if you have any advice/constructive crit to offer, I'd be glad to have it
Replies
The sitting character only serves as a guide; used to solidify the pose of the standing character, which for the purposes of this module is the only thing being marked. Hence, expect the sitting character to be somewhat neglected.
Cloth is created by simply masking and extracting, but the newly created asset is often subject to either a round of Zremeshing or Dynamesh to be Zremeshed later. This is because the existing topology reflected the previous asset which is likely to be something entirely different; thigns like flowing cloth or hair especially require their own topological 'flow' and unique density to prevent Pixol aliasing.
After much autopiloting, checking the sculpt against the references I ended up with this. Whilst it matches up reasonably well with the original it is certainly not exact to it. Sandals are missing just due to time constraints (I really wanted to get the cloth right as its my weakness, hard surface-ish sandels can wait).
I fiddled around with the Zbrush LightCap and made a simplistic Bronze MatCap with it. Of course, it looks nothing like real bronze, but shows me that creating shaders in Zbrush can be pretty simple (if difficult to control)
I fiddled with it some more and made it a bit brighter so that it was much easier to discern details.
This module, and my choice of subject essentially forced me to tackle my weaknesses: being unable to understand flowing cloth and an absurd hatred of observational studies - copying things. There are four more observational studies to go (one a week from this point on) so hopefully I will open up to such things more. At the very least after they're over, the final part of this module is getting a functional human bust into UDK with advanced features - something I'm much more enthusiastic about!
Feedback is welcome, I need to take note of where things are going right and where they're going wrong.
I did notice with your base that you do have some anatomy issues to work on. One thing that stuck out significantly was that the arms are really thick and the body is to short and really thin.
The breasts are to squished together and don't have much shape in the frontal view. Unless the girl is wearing a corset or a bra that does such a thing, they wouldn't naturally act and appear that way. They should be spread apart with a gap between them and hold a bit more of an oval like shape.
The waist is really thin. Again, unless she was wearing a corset, which I don't think were around that time period (could be wrong on this), it should appear a bit more thicker. Along with that, the lower genitals should be lowered to about the middle of the thumb area. I would also suggest that the shoulders be narrowed. The shoulders on the base make her appear more muscular, which doesn't match with the body type.
With the side view, the arm still appears to thick and a little high up. The butt seems to high up on the body and a little small and the neck is a bit thin. The back of the leg, where the upper thigh meets the lower thigh, the curvature in that area needs to be smoothed out more. I would also straighten/angle out the leg more to balance with the center of gravity.
A lot of these issues you don't notice once the clothes have been modeled on. So maybe keep these in mind with your next project/assignment.
With as far as you are in this, I'd think about working on the upper body and the upper arm/shoulder. The upper arm does appear long with the model posed.
A torso (male or female)
Posed Hands
Cloth acting on an object (to do)
A head with facial expressions via Zbrush Layers (to do)
The torso's development is as follows. I used one of the models on 3D.SK as reference (not sure if I can distribute said reference, but the model is Iva). Initally the sculpt did not have enough a long enough abdomen, but was corrected soon afterwards.
Corrected images follow. Note that whilst the deadline for these is 22nd November, I found out that if they were improved before the final deadline (sometime in december) the improved ones would take precedence when being marked so critique is welcome:
Hands follow. I needed the torso to be there so that judging the correct space between each arm would be more believable.
After using Transpose with Zrig enabled and a ton of annoying post transpose sculpt correction here is the mesh posed. I created a simple gun mesh in 3DSMax so that the hands had something rigid to hold: