Learning Diary - Zbrush Sculpting for Characters and Creatures.
polycounter lvl 4
Hello everyone, i know this is a brand new acc, but it's been a while since i keep looking at progress and learning diaries about 3D art in general over here, however i never got into it, mostly because i'm bad at art in general, i know it's moslty practice but i never felt motivated to really start.
A little bit about me, i have no prior experience in 3D modeling, i'm really bad at drawing, started to learn pixel art for a while last year, wanted to start learning 3d that time but was too affraid to do t. Also i'm on my the last year studying civil engineering in Brazil, yeah..
But this changed last month because i always loved the possibility to create something of my own using my creativity, that's why i've decided to learn 3D sculpting. But i know that there's a long and complex road ahead full of challenges to overcome!
And i wanted to make my very own journey here so i can get some advices on how to improve, i plan to make an update every week at least.
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After watching some of the zbrush official tutorials and a flippednormals video about basics of sculpting this is the result of my first sculpt trying to model the troll from LOTR, took a few hours and a lot of tries to get this:
After that i tried to make a skull, but after trying a few times i gave up and came up with this creature:
After this failure i did some research to see if i could find some tools to help me develop my sculpting skills, so i found the Anatomy for sculptor book online, got a copy and decided that i want to learn anatomy. After reading for a while and some sculpting i ended up with this monster.
I did spent a few hours on this and got really frustrated, but i realized that my probleam was that i was not using any references and was using only the book to guide me. So after watching some videos on youtube and get my hands on a reference i've came up with this:
Still really bad, but at least i didn't got mad and frustrated while sculpting like the first one.
After that i sculpted a creature using a reference to train my eyes for getting little details, i don't know if i can post the original art so instead i will give the name: "Frog Guard" By Billie Hall, i found it on artstation, heres the sculpt:
I did spend 4-5 hours sculpting this but it was nice to learn a little bit of custom brushes.
And this finishes my first week into sculpting and 3d modeling, now my biggest goal is to learn anatomy because i know how important it is to know it so i can my future creatures and characters better.
Thank you so much for reading this, any cc and advice is really appreciated. If possible i have a question about how to approach anatomy, should i sculpt individual things like a hand, leg, torso, or should i make a whole upper body?
A little bit about me, i have no prior experience in 3D modeling, i'm really bad at drawing, started to learn pixel art for a while last year, wanted to start learning 3d that time but was too affraid to do t. Also i'm on my the last year studying civil engineering in Brazil, yeah..
But this changed last month because i always loved the possibility to create something of my own using my creativity, that's why i've decided to learn 3D sculpting. But i know that there's a long and complex road ahead full of challenges to overcome!
And i wanted to make my very own journey here so i can get some advices on how to improve, i plan to make an update every week at least.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After watching some of the zbrush official tutorials and a flippednormals video about basics of sculpting this is the result of my first sculpt trying to model the troll from LOTR, took a few hours and a lot of tries to get this:
After that i tried to make a skull, but after trying a few times i gave up and came up with this creature:
After this failure i did some research to see if i could find some tools to help me develop my sculpting skills, so i found the Anatomy for sculptor book online, got a copy and decided that i want to learn anatomy. After reading for a while and some sculpting i ended up with this monster.
I did spent a few hours on this and got really frustrated, but i realized that my probleam was that i was not using any references and was using only the book to guide me. So after watching some videos on youtube and get my hands on a reference i've came up with this:Still really bad, but at least i didn't got mad and frustrated while sculpting like the first one.
After that i sculpted a creature using a reference to train my eyes for getting little details, i don't know if i can post the original art so instead i will give the name: "Frog Guard" By Billie Hall, i found it on artstation, heres the sculpt:
I did spend 4-5 hours sculpting this but it was nice to learn a little bit of custom brushes.And this finishes my first week into sculpting and 3d modeling, now my biggest goal is to learn anatomy because i know how important it is to know it so i can my future creatures and characters better.
Thank you so much for reading this, any cc and advice is really appreciated. If possible i have a question about how to approach anatomy, should i sculpt individual things like a hand, leg, torso, or should i make a whole upper body?
Replies
EDIT: Forgot to mention that i had a really hard time with the eyes, by far the hardest thing to sculpt on this head.
Another head study done, it's supposed to look like The Rock but it was really hard to get the bonemarks right, had a hard time with the eye again but tried a different approach and it wasn't as hard as the last study.
Today was a really bad day for sculpting, was really demotivated, mostly because i still struggle a lot when starting a head, i'm affraid i'm not good enough to get better at this.. but still tried to sculpt something, kevin hart to be most precise, but somehow it turned out worse than my last head study, maybe that was because of my demotivation..i don't know, maybe i will try and sculpt a creture tomorrow.
References used:
I tried really hard to get the eyes and mouth similar, but was not able to achieve it..
The head is too wide from the profile and not long enough down.
See how you sculpted the cheek so it curves into the nose shape? it shouldn´t do that. And how the orbital bones of your skull is kinda flat but on the reference it goes way further back.
There is also a tendency to overly define the jaw, while in reality the transition is more soft than that.
For a face you need at least three good references of a front view, a side view and a three quarter view, don´t just use pics from the front.
Also sculpting faces is hard and takes time, doing a bunch of quick studies is cool but I think putting more time in fewer heads and really getting in there would probably be more beneficial. Also making a lowpoly head that you can use so you don´t have to start from a sphere everytime.
Hope that helps somewhat, keep going
It's been a while since my last post and that's becaue of college and some health problems, oh well, i did a little bit o practice on sculpting these days but not in anatomy. heres a derp baby yoda.
Anyways, instead of trying another small sculpt i've decided to try and make my first big project( with polypainting uv mapping and so on), got inspired after watching a tutorial from Luis Gayoso.. Here's the result:
I'm really happy with the results and it was quite refreshing. Learned a lot about polypainting and texturing.
But i think i will stick with small projects for now, still need to get back to anatomy stuff, but that's really frustating for me.
That's it for now, see you all!
REFERENCE USED:
CATATOAD:
I'm somewhat happy with it, had a really hard time with the acessories, it was hard to make it fit with the frog.
That's it for now, this time i will not say what i'm gonna do next because that's a mistery even to me at this point, see you all.
If you want to learn anatomy, I might want to suggest The Complete Figure Drawing Course HD by Riven Phoenix.
I am still learning it, it a bit dense but I think that will help ^^
Well.. it`s been a while huh? And yeah, i did pretty much nothing during this time, that's because of college and life stuff, but mostly college, felt really bad for not doing anything in 3 months, after the war frog i joined a course and did 3 studies before stopping.
First study was an alien which i managed to finish it.
Learned a lot from, the most important thing being patience with your sculpting.
Second one was a dino, this one i didn't finished, the scales on the head were done by hand, that drove me almost insane, halfway i was not sure if should just skip the whole model or finish it, so the final result was not as good as i expected.
Doing the 3rd study i was getting really anxious about all the college stuff, so i didn't got even close to finish it before stopping everything, maybe i will get back into it in the future, the plan was to sculpt a courier pig.
Well, i've decided to came back first day this year, but man did i felt horrible after trying to sculpt something and realizing how rusty i was already, felt like i didn't learn anything, i tried to come back doing a snail monster, this is what i got before giving up.
After almost 2 weeks and much thinking about giving up on the whole thing or not i decided to persist, did a 30 min anatomy study.
I started the course again, i'm doing the alien and dino again and will probably sculpt another animal, the goal is to get back into track of sculpting and then start learning more about anatomy.
That's it for today, when i have the new alien and dino ready i will post again, see you all and good luck and don't give up on your journey!
The thing is while i was doing some pixel art(i did a bit of it in the past like i said in the original post) i was really sad about my decision, after a few drawings i've decided to make a little concept to draw in pixel art and sculpt it.
And that was it, the 3d one is far from finished but i already know that 3d sculpting is what i like more doing, way more than pixel art, not saying is better, just saying that i like more.
After the crisis i started the course again like i planned, the left one is my first time, the right one is the remake, i feel like i did got better at observation and patience a bit.
Same thing with the dino, left was the first time, right is the remake.
And that's it, before i start studying anatomy i'm going to try and sculpt an animal by myself, maybe an elephant, goodbye everyone and stay safe!
But i kept going and here i am, here's Elephant and the flower, the last challenge before moving on studying anatomy.
That's it for now, i'm gonna start studying skull proportions now and will post here my results.
Thank you for reading this and stay safe.
I did 5 skulls studies, only basic shapes to try and get the proportions right, while doing the sculpting i noticed that perspective is a real thing and not some irrelevant dilemma of if you should sculpt with it on or not, i mean that because while i was sculpting the front part of the skull everything seemed way too big, but if you look the side of the skull the proportion is actually not that wrong.
So for the sake of testing i sculpted the 5th skull with perspective view off. Here's there 5 skulls in order:
and of course i couldn't hold my self and started another creature again, this time is a troll, heres the WIP so far:
And here is the concept art from Klaher Baklaher:
Feedback is very welcome in both the skulls and the troll, see you in a few days and stay safe!
Heres the basic sculpt, basic primary forms:
I did changed the perspective to 90 during this study, learned my lesson after 5 skulls. after that i did some detailing and fixed some issues on the primary forms.
When that was finished i added the teeth and did some final touches and details:
Here's the final render:
Hope you guys like it and feedback is appreciated.
I gave up on that troll thing because i made the mistake of detailing everything then i tried to pose him, oh well it served as practice i guess. The plan now is to make variations of skulls by age, sex and
Thank you for reading this post, stay safe.
(ignore the glabella, it was not actually sculpted)
Not until the last one on the right i noticed some volumes i missed in the first 3 ones, i will probably sculpt a few more for training purposes then i will start practicing the eyes.
Ok, i made 2 eyes, the hardest part was to make the shape of the eyes, here's the overall shape i used as reference and how i saw the lines:
But bear in mind i've not tried to copy exactly the reference, because that's a likeness and it's one of the hardest things to try and make imo, so i did some studies trying to get the basic shapes in a way that makes sense, here's the result:
That's it for now, thanks for seeing this and stay safe!
I've got a mixed bag of tips about eyes, some useful some likely not.
Eyelid thickness
First here's an extra resource to analyze the waterline shape:
Two eyes with the same waterline shape can still be radically different because the eyelids have a huge impact on their look, and eyelids depend on the bone structure. The planes of the head does a nice job in exaggerating the planes difference to highlight the eyelid thickness change in the different sections of the eyelid. For example, you usually see a slight thickening of the lower waterline close to the medial canthus. Don't get too attached to this though, look at your references knowing there will be a variation—any variation—you'll be searching for instead.
Note that the sharpness of the edges also varies, expanding or stealing parts of the waterline.
Eye Z rotation
Not saying your eyes suffer from this but this is a common pitfall. The canthus of an eye hardly fall in the same Y depth, with eyes usually slightly rotated outwards, following the skull's curvature.
Have you ever looked at a 3D face and felt the eyes look too close yet they aren't? This is the effect of a medial inner canthus at the wrong depth; it gets too marked creating an unsettling sensation. So take this as a debug tool: If you ever feel the eyes are incorrectly positioned it could be the corners depth.
Combine this rotation with the eyelid thickness and you'll have the answer why there's a sudden thickness increase in the medial canthus: It's the mass (skin, muscle, fat) trying to form a bridge straight from the center of the eye to the nose, forming a gentler outer curve on the waterline. That's also why it varies: Eye depth, nose shape, tone...
Eye socket
I'd like to highlight what exactly are the blue and green plane transitions in that picture because it's a key bit of information to sculpt them properly. It's bone and not-bone. It's skin switching from a hard area to a very soft, nearly unsupported one. You'll see quite some variation depending on age, amount of fat and firmness, but every time you can see this transition you'll likely see the action of gravity as well. It won't read as a concave V as much as something hard covered by a mushy substance like thick honey.
Here's an eyelid with so little fat I hope highlights that bone dynamic.
To reinforce this notion do the highly scientific experiment of touching the full extension of your upper eyelids and brow in search of the bone.
The Gravity of Wrinkles
Okay, so you start to see that eye socket bone crests with ease, but how to depict the not-bone part?
The eyelid fold is nothing but a big wrinkle. Being big it's subject to gravity in a more obvious way than most minor wrinkles. The nice thing about it is that once you get comfortable with it you get a blueprint to depict wrinkles on other body parts for free. Eyelids can be more firm, have more fat or be notoriously devoid of fat. This creates distinct types of wrinkles.
- When you have a well-padded, firm region of the body you get a more gradual plane change. There's still gravity, but you don't easily see the points of attachment.
- When you have a less firm but still padded region you get a droopy shape like a thick substance slowly making its way over a random surface. You can see where it's attached to bone or other landmark but it's still full and very tactile looking. That padding is strongly bound to the skin covering it, it goes where the skin goes. Other body parts where you can clearly see this in action: breasts and buttocks.
- When you get an area without padding you get the thin folds we think of as wrinkles. They read as skin folding over a surface instead of a solid mass over it, loose and outlining underlying structure more closely. Gravity still affects it and in an area hanging out like eyelids you'll get a softer upper crease and a clear change where it tries to wrap around the eyeball, which is harder. This is the same type of fine wrinkles we see on other parts of the face.
And that's it for now. I hope this helps and keep the studies coming! I love this thread.
The course teaches the whole workflow, sculpt/modeling -> retopo -> bake -> texture. So i decided to do it to take a look on how it works, and man what a difficult but awesome journey.
This is the concept:
I started with the sculpting, because it's the part the i have experience already.
The sculpting part i actually didn't followed the course, but did it by myself following the concept as well.
i spent almost a day sculpting the hair, it was my first time trying to make a stylized version and the shape didn't really helped me, i was happy with the final result.
With the sculpting part done, it was time to jump into Maya to model the props and get used with the software, in this part i followed the course every step because i was really lost.
There was a lot of props, i not only learned a lot of prop modeling in maya but even things that i used before like Zmodeler in zbrush makes a lot more sense now.
With the modeling done, it was time to start the part that i feared the most, Retopology, i never saw even a timelapse on how to actually do it, so i watched a couple of videos from flippednormals about it just to get used to it, and then i started mine with the help of the course.
Surprisingly it not THAT hard, but it's a lot of work, boring work, the model is asymmetrical too, making it harder.
Sorry about the photo, it's actually the only image that show the retopo process since i forgot to take screenshots, as you can see the chest was done for the last.
The body went from 1.43 Million to 12.4k polygons, when i finished it i felt so accomplished, that feeling i had before starting the course thinking doing something like this is impossible for someone like me vanished, i know a lot of mistakes were done, it may be not optimized and beautiful enough, but now i know it's actually possible to do it, and if i did, you can too.
Heres the final result from the retopo:
Bending it for fun and to see it there is any artifacts
With the UV done i jumped into SP to start texture the materials, heres a screenshot of the baking:
Baking results:
I was really surprised with the result, i though i would lose a lot of details after the retopo, baking is magical indeed.
I have and observation about using SP, it's actually painful to use it with a tablet, i don't know why there's not a zbrush nav preset in it, it would be awesome for handpainted details, i ended up using the mouse and didn't added any hand paint touches sadly, but i liked the results:
Marmoset was the render engine of choice from the course, so i gave it a try and really liked it, i will probably replace keyshot with it, but i have to do some test and research for high poly stuff:
And that's it for the course, but i wanted to go full in in the game ready aspect, so i watched a few tutorials on rigging in youtube to get it done, and here it is! Fully rigged!
With that i finished this course, heres the final results!
STYLIZED CHAR TURNTABLE - YouTube
What a journey, sorry for the ridiculously long post, but i wanted the share the whole process with you, that was by far my most complex project so far, and i'm really glad i didn't give up on it, i thought a lot about doing so, but didn't want to let my self get defeated.
Before finishing the post, here's a WIP of my new project, i'm doing everything in zbrush, no courses now, i want to actually do something by myself, after this one i will get back into anatomy study!
That's it for now, stay safe everyone!
The character workflow course was really extensive and exhausting, so i was not in the mood to jump right into the anatomy lectures of another course that i'm doing, i wanted to do something by myself, and i wanted to study the zbrush features, so i'm doing everything in zbrush, just the texturing process i'm still not sure which software to go. Here's the progress so far:
Turns out trying to follow a concept 100% is really, really hard. I've tried my best to keep the proportions and silhouette as close as possible, but if you compare the concept with the 3d model you can see a lot of mistakes, like the distance and scale of some objects being way different.
Still, i dare to say that this is the project i had the most fun so far, it's really satisfying to get this 2D amazing piece of art into the 3D world.
The little character is pretty much done, i can't see anything to improve right now so a feedback would be appreciated.
I will try a different approach in the companion's fur using curves!
Trying to use curves to make the creature's fur was a miserable failure, so i asked the help of a discord friend and he pointed me out again some useful tips, the one that i used for the fur was this one:
This is the result, i did used the orb crack with a bit more intensity than the tutorial because i wanted to give the feel of a thick fur.
Here's the bird for the scene, i tried to make him as simple as possible hence he's a tiny guy in the scene.
Speaking of, it's was finally time to get everything together, and now it's actually looking it's going somewhere!
Now there's only a few things left to add and some refinements to do. Like the cord between the character and the creature.
Now here's the thing, i started painting it using Zbrush, because i really didn't like the SP nav system, which is okay, i'm still learning this part but i think i getting somewhere, the thing is, i don't like the materials inside zbrush, so i will either have to figure out a way to export and use SP for the materials or i will do it in blender with the final render, i'm more into the second option, i would love to get some help in this part!
Heres the polypainting so far:
That's it for now, thank you for reading this and stay safe!
I hope you guys like it and stay safe!
If anyone is interested here's the arstation page of the work:
ArtStation - Travelling Salesman, Raphael Fabris
I did tried hair brushes, curve brushes, snake hook, but I was really unsatisfied with the results, so I ended up those big blobs of furs, and I too am not happy with the result, but I decided to move on and practice fur sculpting on a less complex project in the future.
Now, after finished that project I got really happy with the overall results, and the result of that was me trying to plan a routine to my 3d studies, because honestly the past 6 months (more or less) that I'm learning zbrush + sculpting it's been a mess, I feel like I learned a ton, but I could have learned more if I had a solid routine. So now I have a schedule set to learn anatomy + sculpting in general, I hope that help me on not focusing in just one project for weeks, will tell you guys it this experiment will fail or not.
And of course I started a new project, another stylized one, that's because I liked sculpting something stylized a lot, it's going to be a knight.
All the muscle details are just a plus, I'm practicing stylized anatomy but the character will have full plate armor. The most important is to achieve a good silhouette:
There are still some problems but I'm almost finished with the body. Can't wait for the fun part, sculpting the plate armor in zbrush.. that can't go wrong, right?
See you all.
Also heres a quick update on the character, i made him wear a little pant to make it safe for work
I made him look up so i can easily start making the armor.
For this guy, I can see where you're trying to form a nice stylized silhouette using the simple base. The frame of the character unfortunately feels very unstable at the moment. Part of this is growing in your understanding of anatomy. Muscles lay over bone, but you're currently sculpting them under the rib cage, for example. The forearm silhouette was laid out, but when forming the shapes that make up that silhouette, the muscle structure has been lost. These little things just stack up as a visual hole and make the sculpt feel weak.
The overall biggest challenge you currently face on this model is making him feel grounded. His large torso and elongated abdomen, even though it is over some thinner stylized legs, should still feel like it is resting and is fully supported by his hips and legs, which is again, your current understanding of anatomy. The torso will be the best place for you to really grasp how this all fits together. It is well worth the time to sit through some lectures and take notes and re-watch over and over, but Ryan Kingslien's anatomy breakdowns are great and also very relaxing
He has many others that might help you, but what you want to pay attention to here is the structure of your torso. The cradling of the muscles holding up the back and ribcage, for example, was an eye opening realization for me in my understanding of anatomy and starting to get some of these things right.
It is a weird language, and even I still get it wrong plenty of times, but you are clearly not giving up and your understanding through this stage of growth will only improve with time, so please keep going!
Thank you so much for the feedback and the tips, I will def watch it, about the rib cage, I didn't quite get it, I'm aware that the muscles needs to be over the bones, but isn't the exaggerated rib cage bone mark common on super buffed stylized characters? Maybe the references that i'm using are way too extremes.
REFERENCE 1
REFERENCE 2
There are a few more but the point is most of them have this line in the rib cage to exaggerate the bone mark. I might have over exaggerated it then?
About the project, here are some updates, I've started working on the armor:
Maybe consider sizing down his head and try to get him closer to 7 - 8 heads tall
So, i remade the alien and the dino.. again.. but i've tried to actually apply everything i've learned instead of remaking it quickly getting similar results, so here's the comparison:
LEFT is the old version:
The first dino i didn't even tried to make a proper render, here's the result of the old version:
And here's the new Dino:
And now I'm studying a full body anatomy before getting back to the head:
Also a sketch that i made yesterday(concept art from Jonathan Fletcher), I'm tempted to keep working on it:
Stay safe everyone!
You learned a lot and its nice to see how you try different topics and styles, keep it up!!!
A drama render:
Zbrush image:
I'm trying to get back into practicing human anatomy, so here's a quick practice of sexy lips and noses:
Also, a goblin study from magic that I'm still thinking about making it a bigger project::
That's it for now, hope you all are doing well, stay safe!