So I’ve decided to enter this month’s Infinite Journeys contest hosted by Clint Jones. The theme is “Journey” and my mind immediately pictured Earthworm Jim in a big ship cruising through space, so that’s what I’m going to try to create.
I’ve never created a fully detailed character in ZBrush, at least not one that’s humanoid, and not with detailed articles of clothing, so this is a learning process for me, and if you see me making any mistakes along the way, I welcome your critiques and tips!
I started this project with a basemesh that I modified to fit a character sheet of Jim.
I have a hard time with sculpting hands. Anyhow, here’s a look at one of my janky hands.
After tweaking the hand a bit, I combined it with the body and remeshed it.
Here’s the first test with color.
Looks like Jim, minus the worm part. Nice.
The gloves and straps are real janky, uneven, no clean topology. I learned how to combine extract, zremesher, and panel loops to get decent-looking forms, so I’m remaking the gloves, suspenders, and belt.
The geo is so much cleaner now.
Now I had to figure out suit detailing. So I brushed on a bunch of panel lines, and use polygroupit to create groups from my panel layout ideas. As a test, I masked the group edges and inflated them with a value of -.75.
Those edges need cleanup, but the layout looks nice. I dropped sub d’s, zremeshed with keep groups enabled and cleaned up the topology of my polygroups, re-subbed, then projected the original body onto my newly polygrouped mesh. This gave me clean shapes to then extract and panel loop!
And this is where I’m at right now. I still have some cleanup to do on some of the polygroups with janky edges that I missed when I did my remeshing, but I was able to extract some clean shapes from this that are ready to have some curves and IMM stitching.
