Hello!
Here I finally get to share my WIPs with the Zbrush community.
I started this project a few days ago. It’s a 3D study of a drawing by Song Nan Li. I’m not used to sculpting from a direct reference, so you feedback is welcome!
Attachments
I know it’s time consuming, but masking out individual areas of the scalp and applying fibermesh manually is so much more effective than polygrouping, or just doing the whole shape at once. Otherwise you’re just left with unnatural looking blocks of fibers that are assumed to be hair, rather than naturally just being hair. It’s also much easier to style small strands that are all on the same side.
The sculpting itself though looks great, forehead is obviously a little big, but I feel like you meant to, it definitely gives it a unique feel.
Thanks for the advices! I wanted to put them to practise before I posted an update, but a week went by before I knew it.
Sorry for the delay in my response. The big forehead is bringing indeed some feel to the piece, reminiscent of an ancient chinese haircut. Here, I saved the space to draw the streaks of hair running downwards, and I didn’t figure I wasn’t finished with the haircut when I uploaded the rendered images.
Thanks for the compliment on the scuplt. I want to go for the perspective of my source image, but sadly I can’t pull it out yet. Also I can’t resolve the eyebrow line; the sculpt doesn’t bring me satisfaction from front view.
In the meantime, I felt that I had too much expectations out of myself by trying to doing long hair to getting to know fibermesh. So I went for short hair.
Here is an old project I did inspired out of a french(or belgian?) comic called “Les forêts d’Opale”. It’s the portrait of a secondary character villain. I added some hair to him to be closer to model.
I felt by going short hair, I could go for larger masked patches. It’s working out “meh”.
Still, I’m getting to know better the groom brush. I will soon get back to the portrait I opened the thread with.
Quick update on the OP project. I figured out the perspective by oversizing the canvas and focusing Zbrush’s viewfield on the desired part of it, as the vanishing point is at the center of the document.
I should have thought of that a bit earlier in the project. Getting the perspective right pinpoints I’m way more off the reference than I thought I was.
Anyways, here is a beauty render with the perspective I’ve been using throughout the project. Basic material, Lightcap, BPR filters straight out of Zbrush. The hair do not seem to pick much the lighting I set.
Any tricks/solution?
Inspiration by a 2D artwork by Song Nan Li
I re-rendered my piece and took the time to take several shots. I also included wireframe.
I also stumbled across Paul Gaboury’s Did You Know That stream, explaining Fibermesh among other things. I could have gotten along my project better with his vid.
Yet I’m glad enough of what I came up with using a large segment count and no gravity setting. I set the hair root orientation with the GroomBrush (‘B’+‘G’+‘1’). Then I put the “handful” of hair to form with move and smooth. The mask by fibers/fibermask feature is key to getting where you want. The Ctrl+draw is going to mask the whole hair.
At this stage I will call it a day and will post it to my ArtStation page.
