Good morning, everyone. I haven’t posted on this forum in a long time and figured would be a great day to get the creative fire going again and relearn a lot that I have missed out on. I’ve always enjoyed character modeling and after dusting off a model I haven’t touched in nearly two years, I decided to update the model and what better way than to do some anatomy practise.
For the last week or so off and on, and watching videos of other ZBrush artists using the blockout method to buiild characters, I took a crack at it and I really enjoy how so much easier it is to build a full figure without the headaches of topology. On this figure, I am going for a lean athletic build similar to what you would see on a soldier or a boxer and going with that. The main purpose for this exercise is not only practise, but also to build an animation ready topology on top of this character to be used for ALL of my characters (I will be using ZWrap for this process).
In this first screenshot, which was taken on Monday, I spent some time cleaning up the model and hoping the figure and muscle placement would look good before I merged all of the pieces together. The character is 6’5" so I needed to make sure the proportions were correct and the mesh was cleaned. I am not happy with some of the stuff in this shot, such as the Lats and the Serratus Anterior (I ended up erasing all of this and starting it over. SculptrisPro makes sculpting easier too).
In the shot below with the torso, I am aiming for a lean muscular look and while i think I nailed it (using a lot of references on Pinterest and an anatomy atlas), there were a lot of things I was not happy with, including how sketchy everything felt. I was also losing confidence in my abilities, but I pressed on
I’m feeling much better about this updated torso and how I managed to soften up a lot of the muscle details and tweaked the overall shape. I even love how the serratus anterior is looking as well! I’m slowly reworking the Teres Major and Minor muscles
What I really enjoyed about using the body blockout method is it allows me to focus on each section individually and try out new tools. For the legs, this was pretty straightforward as I wanted to keep the muscle build for the legs kind of average (In this session, I was trying to remember the placement of the three muscles in the quads, I will add them in later) and get the shaping right. It still needs work.
And the feet…God, this was NOT EASY and it was the first time in a long time that I’ve actually modelled them!! Ended up using my own feet as a reference and I think I nailed the look of them. I will definitely go back and get it clean up before retopology.
And the arms… no easy feat getting the muscle placement and shape correct… still working on this part and cleaning up the hands.
And lastly, a torso shot with the head disconnected from the rest. At a glance, he looks like Ronnie Coleman (unintentional)
The ultimate goal of this sketchbook is to not only share with you guys my projects made with ZBrush, but also to shake the rust and regain skills that have diminished over time. I LOVE character design and I aim to do more of this, more often! This model is called Regular Man and there will be a few versions after this called Regular Woman and Super Regular Man, who will be using the same topology (mostly). I have plans to also build face rigs in ZBrush and transfer them to all characters using ZWrap.
Any feedback will be greatly appreciated, sorry for the LONG post. Thank you