the above are renders in Arnold, below are screenshot straight from zbrush
BREAKDOWN
Chosing Concepts
When I’m looking for a design, I think about what I want to show off and the skills I want to highlight. For this project, my goal is to demonstrate my knowledge and skills in sculpting and modeling:
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Sculpting surface to accurately reflect the texture.
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Anatomy and facial expression
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Ensuring balance when turning a 2D image into a 3D model.
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Consistency. Making sure that the details are consistent across the whole character.
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Hard surface modeling
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Topology
SparrowG’s “Head of the East Coast Mafia” really caught my eye. It features leather, metal accessories, a gun, a harness, and various types of fabric. What I especially love is the little frown between the brows and the African ethnicity.
Blockout
Blockout is hands down my favorite part of the process. All the process are done in Zbrush. Blocking out is all about playing with big shapes and it’s very effective in Zbrush. This phase usually takes me around 2-3 days. I kick things off with my own base mesh, and for all the clothes, I do a duplicated extrusion from that base mesh. Depending on the material, I would use clothe simulation in zbrush to help the process. It sets me up nicely for sorting out the topology and UV.
Once the blockout’s done, I dive straight into refining the topology.
Posing
I broke the symmetry pretty early for this project. Fabric sculpting is my main challenge this time, clothes deform when posed differently so I wanted to set the pose down as soon as I could. Take the blouse in my hero shot for instance— fabric around bent elbow and straight elbow is completely different. So, I made sure to sculpt it in pose as early as possible.
Fabric sculpting
I use the layer function in Zbrush heavily. I broke it down in 4 differnt layers: Big shape , secondary shape, alpha stroke and fix.
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big shapes: push and pull with move brush to get the overall silhouette
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secondary shape: I use a combination of claybrush, Damstandard, hpolish to get my secondary shapes
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alpha stroke: I place the alpha in standard brush and just dragged it out where I see fit
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fix: this layer I use for emergencies. It happens very often that at some point I want to change the pose and for changes like that I would use this layer to make the change so that I don’t break the other layers.
Hand Sculpting
This is one area I really love working on — sculpting the boney knuckles with the small skin folds on top. I had a few references on my board, but mostly, it’s a reference of my own hand holding a deodorant. We are our best reference !
Thank you for reading all the way here.
I have some more video clips and turnaround that I can’t upload here due to size.
If it interest you, check out my renders on artstation
Any feedback is welcomed!