Hi everyone. I’m a 3d art student and I got stuck with my showreel project. So I’m sculpting a model based on a painting where the main character is a zombie-like woman on a zombie horse. So the problem I have is that there is a lot of hanging skin, holes in the body and other skin details and I don’t know how to approach this.
So in the final render I wanted to make the skin moving the wind. Should I sculpt every detail in ZBrush and retopo in Maya, can it be done with just a displacement or with Substance Designer, or is there any other way that would be the best in this situation?
Thanks!
Hello @sylv.g_art
A Mesh Extract might be a good way to generate sections of skin as a separate subtool that can sculpted and distressed as desired. For tasks like this I sometimes duplicate the body mesh as a separate subtool, perform a small negative inflate operation on the interior mesh via Tool > Deformation > Inflate, and have that be the interior musculature, while the other mesh is the skin or surface detail mesh. This will let you work on them both separately, and fuse them together when you’re done.
A brush in Sculptris pro mode will let you stretch and dissolve the skin. If working with an extract, the quality of the masking you paint will determine what kind of extract you get. So you could simply leave a lot of “holes” in the masking prior to creating the extract, then sculpt the piece into shape.
In the scenario I mentioned above where you have two overlapping meshes (interior and exterior), performing a negative sculpting action (sculpting inward instead of outward) will press the exterior surface into the interior surface until it gets clipped off by the interior surface. This will let you sculpt “holes” and lesions easily in the outer surface. When you’re ready, you can then fuse the two surfaces together with Dynamesh or Live Boolean, and remove any overlapped geometry at the same time.
To really understand the potential of mesh extracts, you have to understand that you don’t have to create them based on the original geometry. To make flowing garments (or skin as the case may be), you can duplicate your mesh so the original is preserved, then start sculpting it into a sort of “mold” that the extract can be based on. So you can preserve the musculature where it makes sense to do so, then start sculpting the form into a more “windblown” shape with windy tendrils you can then paint your masking on, complete with holes, to create an extract. The resulting extract when paired with the original mesh will look like a flowing garment that conforms to the musculature on the windward side, but flows in the wind on the other.
I find sculpting this sort of mesh into shape and performing an extract far easier and more intuitive than trying to push and pull the points into a windblown shape.
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Thank you for your help! The idea of two subtools for a skin and a muscle structure is great, I will definitely try it. With the “windblown” shapes I will work on it in Maya probably, maybe using cloth simulation, after I retopo my model. My model is going to be rigged and animated in the final scene. I’ll see how I go, if it won’t work then I’ll make it a static scene sculpted fully in ZBrush. Thank you again for your tips!