ZBrushCentral

How do YOU sculpt shoulder pauldrons for video games?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi,

Thanks for reading my post. I have been working with zbrush for some time and have done a few characters for practice. I recently decided that I wanted to make a medieval knight type character and I am able to block out most of the armor pieces with the exception of one thing, pauldrons. Now, to be clear, I am not talking about the smaller “spaulders” that sort of just sit on the top side of the shoulder. I am talking about the bigger pauldrons that cover the shoulder, a small top portion of the back and chest.

My problem is that I don’t understand how these things attach and animate. Are they attached to the clavicle or are they attached to the humerus? They seem to sit at a 90 degree angle and cover a portion of the top of the shoulder and deltoid. I wonder how are characters that wear this armor able to animate without clipping issues? For a good idea of the armor piece I am referring to, take a look at the knight characters from the game For Honor, or the knight characters from Iron Blade.
So, for those of you that do sculpting for games, how do you handle those pieces?
Any tips, tricks, advice or resources to watch/read would be super helpful.

THANK YOU!pauldrons.jpg

#2

Hopefully you’ll get lucky and someone might have some helpful advice for you, but I have to believe since your inquiry is specifically about animating, a resource dedicated to the tool you’ll be using to animate your mesh might be a better bet.

If you have any questions about sculpting (physically shaping the) pauldrons, just let me know. I’ve got lots of tips there :wink:

#3

Hi Spyndel. Thanks for the response. Any tips, tricks, or advice regarding being able to even get them blocked out properly would be much appreciated. My apologies if the question is confusing. But, I am looking to sculpt them in zbrush for a character that would eventually be animated with a combination of iClone and MoCap. But for now my concern is just getting started properly with the right shape. Thank you.

#4

Ah, in that case I can be slightly less useless.

To get going, you just need to create some quick geometry that roughly conforms to the shoulder. I’d probably go with a mesh extract for this, though you could also use the topology brush or zsphere retopology.

The key is to keep it as low poly as possible, so you can pull the points out to conform to the shape you want–the more points, the easier it will be to distort the mesh. If you can keep it low poly enough, Zmodeler could be useful to extrude sections of trim or raised edges.

If you need the shape to be machine perfect (like a perfect sphere for sci fi armor or something), you could position the sphere over the shoulder and use live boolean to find the shape you need with cutouts. Something like a 40k space marine pauldron would also be a simple machine shape that you would create individually, and then position over the shoulder.

Once you have the general shape you need, then subdivide and do any detail sculpting. The matchmaker brush would be useful for getting individually sculpted forms to adhere to the shape of the pauldron, like in the case of that lion head on the picture you posted.

#5

Thanks again Spyndel. You’ve given me much to think about. I appreciate the information.