My first character sculpt - Chloé
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Hi, I've been playing around with Zbrush for a few months now in my off hours, and Chloé is my first serious attempt at making a humanoid character.
However i have been working in the video game industry for a few years now mainly as an animator and mechanical environment modeler. and while i am proud of my current character. I cant help but notice that there is something off about it, especially the face I'm going for stylised proportions however i just cant seem to get it to look right, it suposed to be a young charcter but i keep ending up with something that looks old imo
I would greatly appreciate it if anyone would be kind enough to give me a few tips as to what i am doing wrong.
Before I started using zbrush my main 3d modeling software was (and still is) autodesk maya. so i have quite a bit of experience in this area. but character modeling has never been my strong suit.
Thank you,
Replies
Part of it comes from experience and anatomy knowledge (and the simplification of it for a good stylised result), but another and non negligible part of the issues you are facing comes from the fact that Zbrush does not have an accurate viewport for perspective. (Now everytime this topic is raised there is always going to be a number of people arguing that the viewport is fine, but trust me : it isn't, period).
This is especially apparent when comparing your two screenshots - even though they are of the same model, they look like different faces. This happens because Zbrush tends to flatten/smooth forms a lot (and distort them too) - meaning that parts of the face that seem "frontal" when looking at the model head-on are actually slanted to the sides. Zbrush hides this, and therefore one won't pay attention to it. Whereas in a real 3d program you would instantly notice it.
This may sound like something that one can fix with elbow grease (and in some cases it is indeed possible to fix by doing a lot of very careful adjustments - a lot of zbrush artists do that) but at this time the best thing you can do is to get your model out of Zbrush in order to review it (and work on it) in a real 3d environment. If I remember correctly Maya now has sculpting brushes, so you should be able to keep working on the face there, even if it is at a lower resolution.
Now regarding anatomy stylisation : if you want to make her look cute you want to ease out/erase the bridge of nose as much as possible, to basically end up with just a button nose (think Glitch from Wreck It Ralph).
Last but not least : when it comes to cute/stylized character faces, make sure to always work from solid references from Pixar, Disney, and so on. There is no point improvising that sort of stuff. I can tell that you've been skipping on that because ... you gave the character a nose philtrum, assuming that a stylised female would have one. But check Glitch or Elsa from Frozen : no philtrum in sight. Same can be said of the way you modeled the lips, the chin, and so on. If you merely oversize realistic facial features, you risk ending up with something akin to a carnival mask. Instead, some things needs to be emphasized (the fullness of cheeks, the size of the eyes compared to the skull) while others need to be phased out - and of course that all depends on the kind of character you want to depict.
Also one more technical quirk you want to be aware of : never shift-snap to front or side view when working on an organic character in Zbrush. I don't think it is possible to disable this feature so try your best to never, ever rely on it when working on the face of your character. If you do, you will end up either flattening or slanting the facial features.
Good luck !
Thoughts anyone?