Thank you very much for the kind words. More drapery is coming… after the short break (sculpting folds for entire week is quite tedious).
Beautiful job on these draping fabric studies. 
Thanks a lot, I do my best 
Hey Vir!
Dude, tackling the drapes, super complex study and well worth doing from what I see. Excellent study!
Is this part of a larger whole or separate study?
Also, quick soapbox: [Disclaimer, I am a lifetime student of art, and only know one thing; I like art, soo…]
NEVER feel bad guilt about looking at a reference. NEVER feel bad about it.
I have heard some art directors say a concept is not interesting unless at least three separate references are used.
Something many of my students try to get away with (in introductory Zbrush) is use reference only as a tracing plane, and DONT train their eye by looking and executing, or they try not to use reference at all!
I have tried it… and even in creature design what happens is you end up with something unreal, unrecognizable, or something with brazing glaring errors that distract from the message of piece.
Many of my students had the same guilt, where they feel they are cheating or something, but after I presented my arguments and showed them a good way to approach it (Kuradro anybody?) those who did not do so before began to train their eye with reference, and their pieces improved DRAMATICALLY.
There is a time and place for not using reference though IMO, and those places are (pure theory BTW):
- Finding personal style (after you have looked at ton of references from your favorite artist and made a few pieces with solid refrences)
- Lunchbreak sculpture or sketch
- Directly after lifedrawing sessions or searching for a interesting gesture.
Hello and thank you for comprehensive feedback!
These sculpts are just regular studies for gaining experience and understand the folds better. I am still working on my girl-characters and I find that I have problems with sculpting clothing from imagination (Nastya’s blouse and dress are looking kinda formless). So I decided to do some studies before coming back to my heroines. The more complex drapery above is from da Vinci. You can simply google for “da vinci cloth” (not clothing, otherwise it will show you a bunch of t-shirts), and see the original drawing. It is more or less a straight copy since I also tried to train my eyes. But there are some improvisations in areas where drawing wasn’t too clear. And of course I tried to analyze how exactly the underlying surface affects the drapery. I hope this will help me in my main projects.
To be honest I am a person with a lot of quirks. And I often don’t accept the easy solutions, constantly overcomplicating my life. One of the reason I don’t use references is because I just don’t have enough patience to gather lots of references so I jump straight to sculpting. And sometimes like in case of my fantasy character I simply have no idea how to make a proper search request for blouses with puckered sleeves. For me it is easier to start sketching and find the desired shape in process.
But the main reason is that I want my sculpts to stay as… personal or unique as possible. This applies to all stuff but mostly for actual characters. Sure I have a thousands of images of different girls on my hard drive. Plus a lot of artworks from many artists. I constantly look at them and absorb features that I find attractive, forming mental image of a beauty that appeals to me. So definitely I cannot say that I don’t use references. But when it finally comes to sculpting I prefer to abstract from any references and take inspiration from that mental image I described above. It is really hard to explain with words, it is all about feelings. When you create something new and unique and let it free from your mind. If I start making character with mindset like: “Lets copy the face from this actress and paste a breast from that model” I’ll feel bad. Same thing applies to texturing - when you made a unique character IMHO it is a crime to cover it with photo of someone’s face instead of painting it with brushes. Cause it also kills the personality of your creation.
I’m afraid I’m going a bit off topic but it was necessary to describe why I’m staying away from putting images on second monitor and work that way. I totally agree with you and I also find that my sculpts look far better when based on good references.
And sure everything I said here applies for art, not for craft. So If I do something for client then no doubts that any shortcuts and cheats are good.
Off the chart buddy.Love it.
Diablo Thank you my friend Took me a while to sculpt it but it is a pleasure when people like the final result.
Vir, i totally agree with Takai. Being afraid or guilt of using references i think it’s a big mistake.
We all, as artists, tend to create something based on reality and without reference it would be impossible.
Thats how you train your eye, your mental imagery, so that you find mistakes all the time in your model or project.
The more you do it, less mistakes you tend to get but you’ll never be reference free unless you do lunch crunch just for fun.
References are our only way of studying… studying the real world and, in this area, we do it for life.
By the way, you can try marvelous designer. If you don’t want to use the simulated cloth, you can always use as reference of how you want your clothes to be on a specific model.
Hello and sorry for the late reply.
I didn’t really said that I don’t use references at all. First of all lets clarify it: we started conversation about drapery sculpting but I shifted the topic towards characters and anatomy since that is what I do most often. So now I will continue talking mostly about sculpting organic stuff.
You know, we are all different so if one rule applies to one person it doesn’t mean that it will work for another one. As I said previously I have a lot of references on my hard drive. I bet more than most of people here do have. There are tens of thousands of them and they are all categorized by gender, body type, muscle development, curviness, breast size/shape, pose etc. All this was made for easy studying and better understanding about what kind of shape do I want. I study this images a lot on my free time and develop some sort of mental archetype of beauty or masculinity (in case of doing males), but not looking at them during the sculpting process. You know, in this world not so many things belongs to me and not too much will left after. My characters is pretty much the only thing I brought to this world so I want them to be unique as much as possible. As I said I don’t like this approach when artist looks at reference and transfers features from different models. I tried this and I felt like Dr. Frankenstein piecing his monster. I prefer to take them from archetype in my mind instead. Yes, this mental image was constructed from many faces/bodies I’ve seen before, but not from specific personalized features, but rather from ideas. For example here is my references when I started thinking about Nastya’s face. Despite the fact they are all made in different styles you can clearly find some similarities. Examination of their faces for several hours helped me with creating the archetype I want. Once I knew what do I want I hid this image with specific faces and started working with abstract ideas of beauty. Sorry, my level of English doesn’t allow me to fully express my thoughts right now.
Sure there are cases when I get stuck or just forget some proportions or how particular muscle looks like. In this cases I don’t mind to open a reference or anatomy book and check it. And of course when I do not-personal projects or simply practicing stuff then I use guides. Still it is more interesting to train memory. I agree that it might be counterproductive but I noticed already that I have a lot of quirks. I also find that very often I learn better when the final result is achieved after many trials and errors. Basically I must invent the proper shape breaking through the sea of mistakes. For me it is not so interesting to sculpt when the process is not challenging enough. Same applies to cloth simulations, 3D scanning, phototexrures, Zremeshing… But again I’m talking about art. When you have a client and deadline then use what you want. Typing this so people don’t think I am complete moron.
Lol, I think I will end here. This post already looks too selfish and for people who watch this thread would be a pain to read all this mess.
I don’t have Marvelous Designer. It is too expensive for me, especially considering to use it just as a reference. When I am not sure in something I just use my own drapery and study it. Or go outside and look at people
Damm Vir, break the text for better reading plz xD
I not trying to imply for you to do something totally different to what you have been doing so far. Maybe you didn’t quite get what i meant.
First of all “we are all different but we end doing the same mistakes” xD
I agree with everything you said, i don’t like copy paste nose, mouth eyes, etc. from different people and glue them together.
That’s juts damn silly! It’s not natural and it never works. What i said is for you to not feel guilty about using references, and when i say “using” i mean using in a proper way. (Mostly the way you’ve said it now)
I’m backing what Takai said and what you said early:
- “Always feel guilty when copying stuff from photos or drawings”
-“One of the reason I don’t use references is because I just don’t have enough patience to gather lots of references so I jump straight to sculpting.”
References are the only way for us to study the world and all its details (or going outside and look for ourselves like you said) by growing our ‘mental imagery’, knowing how things work, how details are etc.
It doesn’t matter if you have them opened or not when your sculpting, you used them to study your eyes, your notion of anatomy etc etc.
‘Train our eyes’ as i said and as you said again.
After a while you tend to do very well with few, and maybe no references but you always go back to check for mistakes in anatomy, proportion, material properties, Forms , etc.
So your never free of references nor you should feel bad about them. And that doesn’t make you a bad artist, neither brakes your art.
They are not to copy but to give you an ideia of what you want and to fix mistakes (most of the ‘sea of mistakes’ you see in ZBC is in the basic - Anatomy - and that’s when good book and references come to help: not implying you by the way)
Don’t end this conversation like you you or mad or something it was just an advice to push you to keep studying…whit all the challenge there is.
3D scanning, zremeshing and other stuff are just here to help us in some tedious ways, not to replace our work. Hack… 3d scanning has been a great source of anatomy study - a good reference 
No One thinks your a moron unless you keep texting with no brackets!! All these small joined white letters in this grey background kill my eyes xD
P.s. I said for you to TRY Marvelous designer, it has good clothing simulations and might be a bonus in helping you understand how drapery works
Sorry for the lack of brackets. Didn’t even think this might be hard to read. I am a book worm so I used for big text massifs. But the white text on dark background hurts my eyes too (I also hate the fact that most of 2d/3d softwares shifted their UIs to black themed). Here on ZBC I simply use Invert colors filter in my browser to make it more readable.
So yes, I mostly meant that I feel bad when copying stuff since the drapery above was heavily based on existing drawing. Not so crucial for studies when filling the gaps in your knowledges but when comes to designing stuff or characters this approach is indeed silly as you said. I wouldn’t even talk about it if I didn’t know a lot of people which do that exactly. Or even worse - they literally put a reference on background and trace everything. Similarly to tracing with carbon paper in real life I cannot call it an art.
And speaking about stuff like Zremesher, scanning etc. There is no doubt they were made to make our life easier. I personally learn anatomy a lot from looking at scans. Separately these are good tools. But when combined… Let me show you some examples. Imagine someone submitted a cool looking character. Lets say a fantasy girl. You feel excited and inspired, amazed with high level of artist’s experience. Then you read comments and realize, that original design was made by other 2D artist, the head is just cleaned 3D scan, the body is downloaded model from Renderosity, the cloth is mainly simulations, the textures are just projected images, some props are also bought… even shaders are coming from downloaded bundles. Now this example is quite extreme (though I often see that on Deviantart), but there is a limit, after crossing which the viewer start thinking like “Am I watching the artwork or rather manufactured piece?”. When I realize that artistic input was minimal and almost no creativity was used I simply lose interest.
Remember in the mid ages of CG there was a joke. A newbie on forum says that he downloaded a 3Ds Max but cannot find a button to create a car. And the logical answer was that there is no button called “make it pretty”. CG is a hard medium where you must put a lot of effort to create a good stuff. Now all this progress in CG field brings us closer to the moment when this button will be invented.
You might say that it is not our business how other people achieve their results. But this indeed affects people that work… lets say traditionally in CG field. I bet you know how much of patience and time it takes to make original character/creature from scratch. I’m sure most people here sculpt mostly for themselves because they like a process. But the appreciation from other people also means a lot.
Several years ago I had another account on Deviantart. I registered because I heard a lot about how cool this community is. I become a member to study from experienced artists and help beginners. I literally was shocked when I realized that most of 3D related groups are filled with DAZ/Poser crap. Filled with works similar to those I described above where almost no artistic input was used and everything is bought/downloaded/generated/copied. And because this “artists” picked the easier way, they now are able to produce renders ten/twenty times faster compare to honest modelers/sculptors. And because of this conveyor and explotational themes (huge spherical breasts, botoxed lips, straight pornography etc) they gain huge popularity. For me it is devastating to see this crap with 300-500k views per image and compare to wonderful works of some great artists that have 1-2k and simply get lost in abyss of mediocrity.
Sorry, I am getting off topic. But to summarize all what I have said, my opinion is: modern tools are definitely useful in process of art creation but might be destructive when overused or replace artist completely (might sound ridiculous but I see it more and more often).
PS Now I know what painters felt when photography was developed and pushed them away from industry.
PPS When I was a teenager I honestly thought that computer games is a part of art. It has a lot of artistic components but the most exciting part for me was character design and modeling. Now I see how game studios use scanning more frequently. Take a Quite from MGS for example. At first I was excited how natural she looks (not counting silly design of her clothes) but when I saw they just scanned live model I was like “Meh, not interesting at all”. But who I am to judge the developers?
PPPS You mean trying Demo version of MD for 30 days? Well, I can try. Though I don’t really sculpt clothing that often so most of the demo version will be wasted
Yeah new technologies have their pros but mostly come with a lot of cons.
I totally agree with you, i hate when people give less and less artistic input. In the same way there is zbrush with 3d scanners which make a lot of cool stuff but i always take my hat off to traditional sculpting.
The same happens in other artistic areas, like music for example. Mixing a music had just normal plugins that came with a program and then you used hardwares for compression, EQ, and other stuff.
Now you have plugins that save some bad recordings, saves bad singing and so on.
It actually makes me sick how many type of arts and crafts route trough the easy path. But hell… thats society and evolution of technology, what can we do?
Zremesher and other things are just a little push for me in some cases. Using models and props that were bought it’s like eating sh***t.
Keep up the good work Vir!
- Deleted post due to problems with Mature tag
Ups the post was deleted because of the language i think, but i read it everything by email notification. I couldn’t see the images you posted tough.
Either way, for references i use more Pinterest, Tumblr and Flickr… more than Google but sometimes is more how you search it over what you search.
Try to search for Gymnastic Body instead of Bodybuilder. Calisthenic and bodyweight exercise body’s are athletic, beautiful and not so buffed.
I deleted it because I was unable to put Mature Content tag. Couple years ago I was already warned when I posted naked girl without MA so I am really careful now. Anyways, doesn’t really matter since that was an experimental image and not really worth to be placed on my gallery.
And thank you for the tip about gymnasts. I had problems with formulating proper search-term for specific body-type I wanted. I was so desperate that I started searching on model’s and adult sites :lol:
You’re welcome
I redid the dress for Nastya. In previous attempt I was experimenting too much so it ended looking bad and lumpy. So here is a more cleaner version. It took me a while to clean this up. To be honest I hate, Hate, HATE sculpting this type of fabric folds. I am talking about long, uniform, gradually tapering pipe folds that overhang each other and wrap around another body. Jeez, I was so frustrated that I remodeled them from scratch in Blender. Here with lower polygon proxy it was much easier to achieve smooth looks without kinks and bumps. Also sculpting tightly twisted fabric is also very hard. It might look simple but those study from da Vinci was far simpler to sculpt.
Plus a new simpler haircut that fits the universe better.
By a story Nastya is too modest to wear such a revealing clothing. She grew up in very chaste and strict society where many things were prohibited. And now with the end of civilization all this stuff (like tasty food, elite clothing etc) and the entire world at her feet, so she cannot resist to temptation.
I’m also adding a bonus shot. I slightly changed her proportions and feel more satisfied. Still should be polished more. And oh, when I changed her forms it means I should tweak all the clothing I did for her like numerous panties. Some of them are quite complex with lacing.
Is anyone still reading this descriptions? I feel a bit dumb when I basically talk to myself in this thread. Probably will stop it and continue with images only.
Better resolution and quality is here.
Cheers
Oh wow, I really like the direction you took with her costume
Her anatomy is also positively and incredibly interesting
Hi and thank you for the kind words!
In this case I did mostly the cleanup job. In previous version I was combining different elements from dresses with similar fashion but it ended up too lumpy. So here I just stick to one specific design from photo I’ve found on the web. Though I still modified it - the original dress was too soft and mat, so I changed the fabric to more crisp and later will add shinier material.
And speaking about her body - in this character I am trying to mix realistic features with slightly exaggerated proportions. Glad to hear you find it interesting. Many people don’t dig it