2D to 3D! Sculpting a Beautiful Female Bust From Start to Finish!

welcome back everyone to another 2d to 3d video i am polygon and in this video i'm going to show you my entire digital character sculpting process from beginning to end click that subscribe button if you are new around here and if you want to learn more about digital sculpting check out the links down below for all of my custom brushes my materials courses and some other free goodies so this time around i am working on a beautiful female bust inspired by the artwork of eddowatodono.art on instagram i'll be turning this 2d concept into 3d using my software of choice zbrush digitally sculpted here on my cintiq graphics tablet that lets me use a pen to control my digital clay i am beginning my sculpt here with the basic forms of my head starting to carve into my shape and take that sphere and start to get most of my landmarks into place all of this work at the beginning part of the process i often refer to as the blockout this is when we're just looking for main shapes in silhouette things like the basic shape of a nose or the basic shape of an ear we're not trying to create any details at this stage and we're not trying to focus on anything that might be considered a secondary form so for the most part we're just looking for big shapes anything small we'll forget about for now and come back to later the reason for this is if you start to create any kind of detail at this stage or any kind of small piece in the silhouette there's a very strong chance that if you make a mistake which happens all the time in sculpture or at least it does for me you are going to have to take some steps later to correct those big shapes or those primary forms as we love to call them and because of that it's going to most likely mess up any of your secondary or tertiary details so for that reason we try to ignore those here in the beginning and only focus on our big shapes and that often causes your face as you can see here to look uh more than a little odd or alien here during the beginning part of your sculpt this is what i love to call the alien phase or the alien part of your sculpture and every single thing that i sculpt starts out looking like this looking very awkward very weird so hey if your sculpt is looking very awkward or weird in the beginning don't feel bad about it know that professionals have their work start off the very same much like with a drawing when you make a few uh pen strokes or you know pencil strokes on your paper you're not really concerned with it looking like your finished piece right away and that is because you are just laying down the groundwork and you will be doing more work later on to refine and continue to build that up and polish it even later into the process well hey it's starting to look a little more like a human now as we're starting to get in and refine some of our work mainly still working on those big shapes but starting to add in things like our lips our eyelids our nostrils some more shapes there for the ears as you can see and starting to get things to feel well a little less alien and maybe a little more human this is the part of the process that requires the most amount of mental work that beginning process being very difficult as well but this is when i am constantly looking at my two-dimensional reference and trying to get as close as i possibly can here in the big shapes it is very difficult i will say at least in my opinion to continue to push on that while not getting bogged down with some of the little asymmetries and tiny details that feel extremely off you definitely have to turn off a part of your brain which is probably a little easier for me than most i've been doing this a little while and hey my brain is turned off most of the time so not really a huge deal for me for those that are unfamiliar with the basic idea of a bust essentially what we're doing is focusing on the head of a character and creating maybe the upper torso or shoulders or just the chest of the rest of the characters so not a full figure we're not sculpting the entire body here we're just focused on the upper portion which i absolutely love to do my favorite part of sculpting and creating characters is the face it is the most interesting part of sculpting and it is the most difficult so hey if you guys are looking to level up and get some practice in and some reps on your faces stop wasting time making full characters and get in and start making some character busts i'm sure many of you are noticing a lot of these hard edges that i have on my face i go through and i soften those out as you just saw there on screen this is as simple as holding down the shift key on your keyboard to activate your smooth brush and going over top of those hard edges those are what are called plane changes or maybe an easier way to describe them might be a surface turn think of a cube or a really simple shape where we go from one edge to another or one surface to another that is where we have a plane change or a surface turn and that is exactly what we have on a face it's just a little more complicated here on the human face but the same basic or general idea you do have to be super careful with that smooth brush it is very destructive when we're talking about working on and refining these forms and it's very easy to destroy a lot of the hard work that you've created up to this point so i am being very careful with that you'll also see me using a lot of what is called a pinch brush there are quite a few different types of pinch brushes by default in zbrush the one that i'm using right now is my custom mech brush i use this brush all the time you can see that i have a lot of custom brushes down here at the bottom of the screen if you are interested in grabbing those those are available at the link down below in the description for my gum road however i 100 recommend if you are just starting out just use the default brushes you can do you know more than enough with those i would only recommend grabbing my brushes or really anybody else's custom brushes if there is a really specific brush that you want or you really like how they use them and you would like to try to emulate that and of course everything that i do with my custom brushes here you can do with the default brushes in zbrush it might just take a little more work or a little more tweaking one thing i am often very careful with are my characters eyes they are a hugely expressive part of the human face and without things like eyelashes or eyebrows and the general paint on your eye for that general pupil iris combo is what i often call it at least in this case very kind of cartoony style there right well without those aspects of your face it can feel very off so i make sure to get those in pretty early during the process of sculpting my character of course here you can see me going in and extracting some geometry uh repurposing what i already have to start creating some basic shapes for my eyebrows i keep these relatively simple the same thing for my eyelashes i don't like to spend a ton of time on these early on but i do try to keep my eyelashes a little more clean as it just makes it a little easier to control especially if you're going in and manipulating the shape a lot later on the profile of this character or the side view of this character was really important to me and i wanted to spend a lot of time to make sure that that felt nice and clean and because i don't have a reference to use for the side or profile view of this character it definitely makes it a little more difficult as i have to come up with my own form and proportion there however i can use and i am using the shape language that i can see for the character from the front view and starting to integrate and emulate some of that from the profile trying to make that as believable or as similar as i possibly can i will say i definitely struggled with the proportions on this face at least during the early stages from the profile there was just something that was feeling off to me and i really couldn't put a pin in exactly what it was and i did what i loved to do and took a break and refreshed my eyes and came back to it the next day and then realized that there were quite a few things off just in terms of general proportions after a few tweaks i was able to make that start to feel a lot better so i definitely recommend taking breaks i mentioned this in all of my videos it's extremely helpful for just making things a lot more obvious you can get used to seeing your character and seeing kind of the wonkiness for other artists out there i'm sure you're all very familiar with the idea of finishing an artwork and then you come back to it the next day or maybe you look at it a week later or a month later and you're like what the absolute heck was i thinking how in the world did i not see that that is the most obvious thing in the world and that's what happens here with sculpture it takes a really long time to sculpt a character it's a really long process sculpting is one of the longer artistic forms it takes quite a bit of time to create a finished character it takes quite a bit of time to even create a finished character bust and during that process it's very easy to get you know caught up in what your character is looking like and not really notice some of those awkward places so that definitely happens with me all the time hence why i am constantly trying to self-critique my own work and improve and do as much here as i can to make sure that i can see those mistakes when they pop up and there are quite a few of them but with enough time we'll get rid of them and try to get this as close to the original 2d artwork as we possibly can i am now making just the tiniest bit of cleanup to my character as you can see i've combined some different parts i have combined my ears to my head a lot of the time i'll keep those floating off as a separate uh individual piece of digital clay or or geometry here as it's called but i've combined the ears i've combined the body and now i'm going in and beginning to paint my character if you have seen any of my work in the past then you know i often refer to my first pass of paint as my clown paint i often make my characters really kind of um kind of over exaggerated very cartoony you know way too saturated it looks pretty absurd so i often do that in the early stages much like i would during the blockout stage of sculpting where i am just working really fast and trying to get something on my canvas i find it a lot more helpful to just be messy in the beginning some people might disagree you know maybe you're more of a planner and you like to take your time during the early stages i like to just get in and get messy and get rough so that i have something on my canvas so that i can reference that against where i need to go the art of having a the art not intentional the idea of having a blank page in front of me i absolutely hate that feeling and i just want to get in and mess it up and i definitely don't want to waste too much time during the early stage i want to get in and get to work as fast as possible next up i am sculpting my hair this might be an interesting technique for many of you who have never done this before i'm sure a lot of you are familiar with curved brushes or imm primitive brushes and those kinds of things what i'm doing here is i'm taking a basic shape of a sphere and i'm stretching that out over top of my entire character and then i am just cutting away that front half and it makes a really nice clean general shape for a quick hairdo and you can do that for long hair short medium you know whatever kind of floats your boat it works really well here for just a quick basic shape and then you can go back in and you know refine that as you need to which of course i'm going to do here as we continue forward you also saw me create what i often call a hair base this is just the kind of short hair that you have on top of your head i create it really quick just by using a mask and an extraction i'm sure many of you are familiar with that general technique super quick and easy to do and it's nice to have as a good base form for the rest of your hair and later on you can combine those if you want i often keep them separate but that is an additional technique that you can have there in your tool kit for the earrings they are kind of an awkward shape based on my reference and i was having some difficulty getting them to line up exactly how i wanted them so i took quite a lot of time a little more than i wanted on this pretty simplistic shape it's you know just a basic cylinder you can see there me trying to line up the original 2d reference with my character and a lot of stuff is lining up really well there are you know couple awkward areas especially with the asymmetry of the original painting eddie did a really fantastic job on this i think they mentioned in their instagram post something about in the future they are going to be using uh symmetry tools which hey eddie i i definitely recommend it i'm using some symmetry tools here as i sculpt my character it makes it a lot faster but i had to do quite a bit of work here uh in a little bit we'll show some of that to start fitting that asymmetry uh so the left and right side of the face have slight or minor differences here and it took a little time to get some of that to align and make a little more sense a lot of time you got to be super careful here when we're talking about translating 2d to 3d it is often the case that sometimes things are pushed a little too far and they can completely break down in 3d for instance here with this character that was definitely happening around the character's eyes and definitely happening with the brow and the eyebrow as well things were just pushed off to the side and a little too far down to where things were kind of breaking or getting a little stretched from the side or profile view so i was not a big fan of that so i spent some time to really kind of work back and forth between the 2d concept and between my 3d digital sculpt here trying to get things to align nicely but still makes sense in 3d a lot of the time you got to find balance when we're talking about translating 2d artwork to 3d because a lot of the time there's just some stuff that just absolutely you know as much as you want it to will not perfectly translate to 3d and it's all about like i said finding that balance trying to make things uh look as close as possible without sacrificing on your 3d sculpt and having things feel just completely absurd in 3d which sometimes i do lean more in that direction i definitely have a few uh videos here on my channel where i have push in that direction notably the one that comes to mind is my homer simpson sculpt that i made based on i believe it's max grecky's artwork max grecky for those that don't know an amazing artist if you guys don't follow him uh definitely go check out some of his work he pushes his work to the absolute extreme and uh is a really great study if you guys are looking for some cool artists to follow either way we are continuing forward as i am projecting some of the paint from my 2d image onto the 3d here trying to push this paint to be a little closer i was noticing that even after my first pass on my paint job some areas were looking a little too a little too saturated a little too white in some areas i'm a little too dark in others so i took the time here to project i think i did like a .75 projection or something like that so it wasn't completely over top or erasing my original paint uh but here you can see me going back in now trying to correct some of this stuff that just isn't quite aligning with my 3d sculpt so some of that paint is a little awkward so i'm taking some time to go in and correct some of that and the exact same thing is happening here on the eyes i tried projecting some of the paint from the original illustration here onto the eyes but obviously i need to go back in and correct some of that there's quite a few errors whenever you try something like this uh either with blurring pixelation or you know you're gonna get some hand-painted highlights like i had in my eyes or some hand-painted shadows all over your face and that was uh definitely happening here with this sculpt next up a quick extraction for the shirt of the character just something super simple down there real quick get that finished up and then it's back to our hair to start pushing this to the next stage so before i get in and start sculpting on my hair and doing anything with huge huge amounts of detail or anything like that any kind of texture i like to get in these stray strands of hair or at least that's what i call them anything that's flying off from the main form of the hair that really starts to break up the silhouette and add some character a lot of the time you'll find these in illustrations and sculpts focused around the main area of the face you won't see a ton of these way down by the shoulders or in the back of the head where you know your interest is not supposed to be drawn they're often used to pull you into that main focal point that's why you'll often see a lot of them or you know at least a few of them surrounding the eyes mouth those super expressive parts of the face and this artwork is no different working to push on that and continue to get that hair to the next level you've seen me flip back and forth between working with paint on and paint off and perspective on and you know an orthographic view for those that are familiar with that my go-to advice here because i get asked about this kind of stuff all the time is never to just work one way uh specifically with paint here for example i never always work with paint or you know save paint till the very end i am constantly toggling it on and off so that i can see how my form is looking without paint so i can just get a really good sense of how my form is looking and then obviously with the paint on and how i need to go through and refine that i find that you can be working on a sculpt for a very long time with your paint on and then you know hours or even days later turn that paint off and there's just some huge glaring issue that you could not see because of this really strong or potentially really dark paint that you had on your surface and that is something that you just need to be super wary of i think that's something that kind of comes with experience but hey a little uh tip or piece of advice there for you as you guys continue forward on your sculpting journey but now it's time for me to start adding some extra form to this hair again going back to that mech brush i love getting in and pinching things up i'm a big fan of making super sharp forms as you have seen on my face and then later going back over top and softening some of those another technique that i use here is the move brush with a little feature called acucurve i'm sure many of you are familiar with it and know and love accu-curve which you can find in the brush menu under brush curve accu-curve it turns your brush into a really sharp pull-out and allows you to create some well really sharp forms and i love using that on areas like hair i love using that on areas if you have like a pointy chin or a pointy piece of form that you need to create for a longer piece of hair anything like that it's got a ton of uses and i use it all the time well now i am moving into the stage of finishing touches or polish this is when i'm not really creating anything new i'm more so taking what i already have and pushing it to be as good as possible so this is going to involve things like adding texture to my hair starting to add in just a little bit of secondary form and really push that to feel a little more like it has some flow to it really start to get that general directionality of this long hair into place this takes quite a bit of time it's pretty repetitive not incredibly interesting but it is a great time for you to turn on a podcast or maybe an audiobook and just kind of zone out while you continue to go through and create some some simple texture there for your hair also during the stage of polish is when i like to really take my time with my sculpt make sure that there's not anything that i'm forgetting you know just a little thing maybe showing it to some friends or family or co-workers and really just um getting some separate eyes on it because at this point you've been staring at your work for such a long time it can be hard to notice some glaring issues so even if it's someone that's not an artist at all they can often give you some nice advice or at least maybe point out something that needs a little more work now we are heading off to blender i have imported all of my geometry and i am simply setting up my materials i don't often show too much of this process because it's really not all that complicated however if you are interested in learning about my rendering process here in blender i have a tutorial available on my gumroad you can check it out at the link down below in the description for this character i am using a 120 millimeter lens to create a relatively flat portrait that is pretty common for this kind of photography you'll often see something in the 100 to maybe 130 range i have a single main light a very soft uh side light just helping to illuminate a little more so we don't have too many dark shadows and then i have just a nice halo effect behind the character helping to separate her from the background the last thing that i do on this character is go in and start tweaking some of my materials adjusting a small amount of roughness here and there as well as adding some subsurface scattering but after that it's time to hit f12 on our keyboard and get this render rolling but before we look at those here is a quick turntable of the finished character straight out of zbrush i might add i really love the way sculpts look directly out of zbrush without any rendering it really helps me just get a feel for the general form of a character and i feel like this is you know just preferentially the way i prefer to see characters whenever we add in you know all the special effects with rendering and lighting it of course it looks more beautiful or more realistic but at the end of the day i'm more interested not necessarily in a beauty shot but more so a really highly polished form but hey i know i'm in the minority on that but either way now for the part that so many skip to the final renders hello skippers as i love to say here at the end glad to see you but hey if you like what you see i think you'll also really enjoy learning more about the process of how i made this character consider going back through and giving it a watch if you did just so happen to skip here to the end yes yes i know as always i have caught you but hey no hard feelings either way i appreciate your interest in my art if you would like to learn more about digital sculpting check out the links down below in the description to my gum road which is where you can find all of my tutorials and my custom brushes the appeal academy is my big course and mentorship program that includes an ever expanding massive library of videos on everything i know about creating appealing characters and if you're not ready for that yet i recommend checking out my patreon i have an awesome part two coming out on this character right here phoenix from valorant coming out very soon really big tutorial the first part was huge the second part is going to be big 2. if that sounds like a lot of fun and you want to learn how to make this character go check it out link down below to my patreon all right we got to get serious here at the end because this video is not free you have to pay up if you are new around here the way you can do that is by clicking that subscribe button and if you enjoyed the video click that like button yeah yeah yeah i know i know not actually very serious but it really helps me out it helps the channel out a lot and if you guys enjoyed the content out helps me know that you guys want to see more of it in the future well hey i appreciate you so much thank you for watching and i will see you all in the next one you

Channel: Follygon

Views: 77,708

Keywords: art, zbrush, digital sculpting, 2d to 3d, sculpting, portrait, portrait sculpting, follygon, anatomy sculpting, create characters in zbrush, zbrush characters, folligon, sketch, sketching, painting, paint, portrait painting, 3D sculpting, 3d art, beautiful girl, sculpting a girl, drawing a girl, painting a girl, sculpting a bust, drawing abust, tiktok artists, instagram artist, youtube artist, art channel

Id: Txyc8WEX3d4

Length: 23min 12sec (1392 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022