- [Zach] Hi everyone,
and Zach Reinhardt here for cgboost.com. And in this video, let's
have a look at how to create a high quality sculpting in Blender, by using some of the
new sculpting features, going from this simple base
mesh to this final result. This is a workflow video with a lot of tips and
tricks along the way. So it's more suitable
for intermediate users that know Blender and the sculpting tools already quite a bit, but it can serve as inspiration
for everyone of course. If you're completely new
to sculpting in Blender and want to learn the basics
and get to a decent level fast, I'm currently updating my
Blender sculpting course through the latest Blender version, meaning I'm basically
recreating it from scratch with many new lessons and chapters. The first updated chapters are already up and more's coming soon. And the best, if you
have the course already you get all the updates for free. Check out the link in the video
description to learn more. For sculpting this creature
in this video here, I'm using a graphics tablet. In my case, a Wacom Intuos Pro M. And if you're interested
in my system specs, they are in the description below. Also, you can download the
project files for this video here and our regularly updated
Blender shortcut PDF including all important
Sculpt mode shortcuts in our resource section
at cgboost.com/resources. The link is as always in
the video description, and an email is required to sign up. This video here is a bit longer. So check out the timestamps, if you want to jump to a specific section. And now without further
words, let's get started. So let's start sculpting something. But what? Well, I actually have no idea. So let's just steal some
ideas from other artists, the smart way. (laughs) In general, I think
let's go with creatures. Creatures are always nice to sculpt, since we can be a bit
more creative on them and don't need to be anatomy experts. Well, let's go to
artstation.com for example, and just grab some cool
looking creature designs from other artists, and
put this here into PureRef. PureRef, if you don't know this tool, it's an awesome tool
to quickly put together some reference images for your art. You can download PureRef
for free by the way, just go to pureref.com, click on download, select your platform. In here, just go to custom
amount and enter zero. Then you can download it for free. Of course, since this is an awesome tool, consider donating something
to support the creators. Now with some cool references on hand, I will not just recreate
one of these images here. If you don't feel creative
at all, (chuckles) you can of course do that. But then I would recommend
to ask the original author for permission. In my case, I wanna take inspiration from some of these creatures, and remix them into my own idea. For that, you can do an
ugly sketch if you like, but this is not really necessary. Because we can also create
our sketch in 3D already when we are creating the base mesh. However, it's still good
to look at the references and pick some parts of these
creatures which we like. For example, what I really
liked was this creature here, with this big beak. On this creature, I
like the thin upper arms and the big lower arms. On this creature, I liked the horns. Here, I liked the general
pose of the creature which I wanted to recreate. On these two creatures, I like the legs and the feet for example. And here, I got my
inspiration for the tail. And in the end, I also wanna give the
creature some clothing. So I have some references
for that as well. And now with all the references on hand, and a rough idea what we wanna create, let's jump into Blender. So with my reference
open on my second screen, let's start Blender. I'm using the alpha version
of Blender 2.93 here, which gives me some additional features. The download link to
this experimental build, you can find down below
in the video description. Here in Blender, I start
with the sculpting workspace. Which opens up the
Sculpt mode immediately, and gives us the squat sphere
to sculpt on right away which we don't use in this case. However, we leave it there for now and we stay in Sculpt mode. First, we need a proper base mesh, especially, when you
create more complex shapes like we want to do here. And the base mesh defines the basic shapes which helps us to adjust
the proportions quickly without going into the details just yet. Let's do this with a new
feature, the lasso trim tool. Down here, left click and
hold on the box trim tool, and select lasso trim. The main purpose of this tool is actually to cut geometry away. However, we can also use
this to create new geometry. So up here, in the tool settings, let's change the trim mode to join. The shape orientation we leave at view. And we enable, use cursor, for depth. This allows us now to
draw a shape from our view and it will generate a shape with the thickness of the brush radius. That is why we enabled the
use cursor for depth option. Otherwise, it will create this
super long and thick shapes. And the join Trim mode which we enabled, adds all the new shapes
inside the same object. Which is, this squat sphere in this case, since we are currently in Sculpt
mode of this squat sphere. So, make the radius a bit
smaller by pressing F, then make sure that X symmetry is enabled so everything we draw will be mirrored, which will make our life a lot easier. And now we start drawing simple shapes for all the major forms of the body. Let's go to side view and start
with the head and the beak. Don't worry when anything is
placed a bit weirdly in space, this we will adjust later. But remember that we will
draw the shapes from our view, so adjust it when necessary. Change the radius of the brush to make the shapes thicker or thinner. Also take a look at your references and try to create simple
shapes off the parts you want to include in your sculpting. Now there's still this
squat sphere down here. Let's get rid of it, by clicking
on the edit face set tool, and change the mode up
here to delete geometry. You can see that each shape we have drawn has a different color, meaning a new face set
was applied to each shape. The face set is something like
a mask or a group of faces, that allows us to hide specific mesh parts or isolate mesh parts for certain actions, like here, deleting the geometry. So, simply click on the
squat sphere down here, and it is gone forever. Then let's go back to the lasso trim tool and draw the rest of the shapes, make sure to change the view
to draw the arms and the legs. You will get used to this view changing when playing around with this tool a bit. Here I also draw the fingers and toes, but just as a reference. Later I will replace
them with proper objects during the sculpting process. So, now all shapes are
drawn and this is we have. Well looks still a bit
weird with these two tails, and the horns being merged
into each other and so on. So let's adjust this a bit. For that, let's go up here
and add the layout workspace. And we automatically switch to this. Now we are back in object mode. And all the elements we have drawn are picked into one object, as you can see. So, let's separate these. Let's go to edit mode. Press P to open up their separate menu, and then click on by loose
parts, and now all the parts were separated into individual objects, as you can see up here. Now outliner for example, and
also here in the 3D view part we can select all of these. To better see that these
are all individual objects, let's go to the Viewport shading, and under color enable random. Now each object is giving a random color. Now we wanna start posing this base mesh. But as you can see, the origin of each object
is still down here, where it was originally. To change this, select everything, right click, go to set origin, and then set origin to geometry. Now the origins are back to the objects. Now although we edit
everything symmetrically, I now wanna change the
objects here in object mode, and everything on the other
side should also change as well. But since we separated now,
everything from each other, this is not working anymore. So what I do now? Let's delete everything on the one side. Also take care of the
overlapping objects here in the center, something like this. And now with our 3D cursor down here, if it's not there, press shift C. Let's add an empty object. A plane axis. Let's call this one, "Newer." Select one object here,
go to the modifiers, add a mirror modifier, and
then add this empty object. Now, this empty object will be
used as mirroring axis here. But we can still move
and rotate the object around its own origin. Then let's select all
the other objects here. Make sure that the shoulder
part is still active, so it's highlighted. Then we have access to the modifier here, and then let's press control
L, and click on copy modifiers. Then from the active element, all the modifiers will be copied, to all other selected objects. And now everything is still mirrored here and we can start shaping the stuff and everything on other
side is moving along. And to make this process a bit easier, you can enable the move tool up here and change the transform
orientation to local, to see the local axis of each object. And, if you wanna change the origin or the orientation off the axis, you can go up here to options,
enable affect only origins, and then for example, move
this to the right place and rotate the axis, and then disable this to make moving this around a bit easier. Or if this is too much work for you, you can also switch up here
to the 3D cursor pivot point. Then with shift right click,
place a 3D cursor somewhere, and then as you can
see, the transform gismo will be placed in this position, which can also make
transforming the objects here a bit easier. Yeah, now let's clean up
this space mesh a bit, by transforming all the objects, put them into nice positions. For some of the objects, scale them down like the horns,
for example, or the toes. And adjust everything until
everything looks nice. By the way, since we will
join most of the objects later on together again, I saved the work and don't
renamed all these objects in the outliner. Yeah, and this is the final base mesh, looks much better now as you can see. And now we are finally
ready to start sculpting. And in order to do this, we need to adjust the meshes here a bit. First of all, we have the
mirror modifiers still enabled, and we don't need them for all the parts which are here at the center and not really mirrored on the other side. So let's select everything
here in a center, and press control A, and click
on visual geometry to mesh. This will apply all the modifiers for all the selected objects. However, for these
objects here on the side, we leave the mirror modifier enabled. So after we added the
first layer of sculpting, we can still move this around and pose the creature a
bit differently if needed. By the way, let's switch the
pivot point to medium point. So the gismo appears here on the objects. However, for all the parts in the center, we will use the symmetry
function in Sculpt mode. However, you can see the
origin is now set here and the orientation is in this direction. That means this will be the
mirroring axis in Sculpt mode, which is not in the center. So let's select all these objects here. Once again, press right
click or to a set origin, origin to geometry. And in order to correct the
orientation, press control A, and click on apply rotation. Now the orientation of the
local axis of these objects are aligned with the global axis. So, and there's one other
thing we need to take care of. If I press N, we can see that
for some of these objects, the scale values are not one, one, one. And this, if I take
this to an extreme level and switch over to Sculpt mode, first, we get this
warning message down here, but you can also see that my
brush is now stretched as well. That means this scale
values will not affect only the scale of the object, but also all the tools we
are using on the object. And this can lead to a
lot of problems later on. That means we need to apply the scale. So we say, Blender,
everything we have scaled here in object mode, is now
the new default scaling of all these objects. In order to do this, select everything, press control A, and click on apply scale. Now, as you can see, the scale
is setback to one, one, one and we can start working. So at this point I don't wanna
join all the parts together and then sculpt on these. I still wanna be able to
move everything around a bit, to pose the creature. So, I leave all these objects separate, except the parts which
belong to the body here. So let's select all of them,
press control J to join them. Now they are all merged into one object. However, they are still
sticked into each other. That means we need to
remesh the whole thing in Sculpt mode. For that, we use the Voxel Remesher, which you can find up here, or in the tool settings under remesh. Then all we need to do here
is to change the Voxel size, and then click on remesh. However, we have to test how high or low we wanna make the resolution for that. In the 3D Viewport, press shift R, and then we can see this grid. And when you move your mouse around, we can change the resolution. And for the first sculpting layer, we only wanna change the major shapes without going into the details. So let's go with something like this. And then either click
here, or press control R to run the remesher. Now, as you can see, everything is merged, and we can start sculpting. Maybe let's switch over to
the sculpting workspace. And here in the Viewport shading enable a random color as well. And now I'm usually using two brushes. The clay strips brush, which allows us to
quickly add new geometry or remove geometry carefully. And the grab brush, which
we can also enable with G, to grab bigger chunks of the geometry. And no matter what
brush you have selected, you can hold on shift and
smooth out the geometry. And this is mainly what I'm doing now. I'm also taking a look at
human anatomy references, which helps me to get the basic idea of these different shapes. And this is now what I do
with each of these parts. By the way, I would recommend
to use the same resolution for all the different objects. So what we can do, and let's go to remesh, by hovering my mouse above
this, press control C, to copy the value. And now there's a cool
experimental feature to switch to different objects without always switching
over to object mode. Select the different object,
switch over to Sculpt mode. This only works in Blender 2.93 Alpha, or probably the stable
version of Blender 2.93 if they don't postpone this
tool to a later version, but maybe this is already
enabled by default. If you're using a later version than 2.93, press F4, and then click on preferences, then go to interface,
enable developer extras, then go to experimental, and enable switch object operator. And now if I switch over to scalp mode, I can hover my mouse above any
of these objects and press D to switch to the sculpt mode
of this specific object, which is super fast. Then here let's paste the value by hovering my mouse above this. Press control V, and then click on remesh. And if you quickly wanna
smooth the entire object, you can use it the mesh filter down here, change this to smooth and
left click and hold somewhere and move your mouse to
the right or to the left to smooth this. And if this part now gets too small, you can change this to inflate. Left click and hold and make it bigger. Then press G for the Grab brush and change this around so that
the whole shape looks nice. And one little note here, since we are still having the
mirror modifier enabled here, which allows us later on
to move this around still in object mode, and to reflect the changes
on the other side as well. Everything, what we are
sculpting on the one side will be mirrored on the other side anyway, so we can disable X symmetry up here. And by the way the X symmetry up there, is an object specific setting. So if you're changing
over to other objects this might be enabled again. So make sure to disable this if needed. And now enjoy a quick time-lapse, on where I adjust all these
parts here on the object. Yeah, and this is the result after the first sculpting layer. And as you can see, everything
is still a relatively rough. I just have the major
shapes here and no details and the resolution is
still a relatively low. So and only when you have
the major shapes in place and you are happy with these, it's time to move on with detailing. Next, I wanted to have
everything ready to go over to define the shapes more
with a higher resolution. For that I added a simple eye,
created out of a UV sphere with one ring around the iris, so we can better see where
the eyes are looking at. And I use the same mirroring
trick as for the base mesh, using the Mirror modifier
and the mirror empty object at the center of our scene. Then I placed it on the right spot and sculpted some basic eyelids around it. After that, I wanted to replace
the ugly fingers and toes with proper shaped ones. For that, I created an edge
and put the skin modifier on it which generates a mesh around the edge. Now with x-ray enabled up
here, we can adjust the edge and shape the finger accordingly. And with the SubSurf modifier on top, I smooth this out a bit,
so it looks much better. With one or more vertices selected, in edit mode we can press control A and scale the skin modifier
mesh around the vertices. With the mirror modifier
trick we have used before, I mirrored the finger and then
I just copy and duplicated it for the whole hand and
for the toes on the feet. And now we are ready to continue the next sculpting layer, with a slightly higher resolution. First I join the upper and lower arm, and the upper and lower leg. Remeshed them with a
slightly higher resolution, and then it was about
refining the shapes even more. Here on the feet in order to
flatten the lower part of it, so that it could stand
straight on the ground, I used the line project tool
to cut a clean straight line. Then I added some more details on top. And by pressing M, using the mask brush and masking out the bottom of the feet, I could change the top of the feet without moving the bottom
part, which is very useful. All in all the draw sharp brush, is my brush of choice when
adding creases to the body, because it's not pinching the geometry like the crease brush. Of course, in some cases, the crease brush is also very useful. Again, my reference port in PureRef was a great resource to look
up some anatomy references of creatures. Which helped me for the feet, hands and the arms and legs especially. Then I did a quick cleanup of the arm and we are ready for joining the toes. For that, I applied the
modifiers of the toes and then joined them to the legs, and remeshed them using
the Voxel Remesher. This time again with a
slightly higher resolution to add even more details. Especially when working on
the thin fingers and toes we need a higher resolution. Otherwise we might lose
some details when remeshing, or maybe we even merge close
line geometry in a ugly way. So always play around with the resolution, if it's too high or too low just undo it and then try a different resolution, and remesh again. Yeah, and then, I added some
more details to the feet. If you realize that your toes
are not rotated correctly you can add a quick mask down here by moving the mouse to the tip here, pressing shift A then add this
topology mask around the toe, then use the pose brush. And then depending on
the size of the brush, we have this line here. If it's too short, you can
also zoom back a little bit. And then we can just move it around, as if there was a bone inside. And then you can move it down or up. And of course you can also make it shorter if you only wanna move
the tip of this toe here. However, the mask prevents us
from moving the other toes. If they are in the
range of the brush here. With alt M, you can remove the mask again. We will learn a bit more
about the pose brush later in this video. Yeah and the same workflow
I used for the fingers and the hands as well. Meaning I applied the
modifiers of the fingers, joined them to the arms,
and then remeshed it with a higher resolution,
and then added the details. And this is what we have so far. It looks pretty decent already. We are slowly getting there. Now it is all about getting
the sculpting polished in order to move over to the
retopology stage afterwards. So I joined the arms and
the legs to the body, then I remeshed everything again with a slightly higher resolution. And then I began to polish everything to a kind of final stage, except adding the very high details like the skin details for example. Here I mainly used the clay strips, the draw sharp and the smooth brush. So nothing special. These are the brushes I
mainly use all the time. Then I defined different
details like here for the body. And then I used a cool trick to pull all these thin like shapes. First, I drew a thin
mask using the mask brush along the lower body. Then with control I, inverted the mask. Meaning that I can only
manipulate the thin line across the body. And then with the grab brush,
I pulled out the geometry. With alt M, I can remove the mask. Then after some more refinement, I did the same thing for
the back of the creature. And here also for the tip of the tail. And this here is a result
after this sculpting stage. For creating the nails or the claws, I added some face sets
to the tip of the fingers and the toes, in the shape of the nails. With holding down shift, I could easily straighten
the edges of the face sets, resulting in this nice clean lines. Now I wanna generate a new
mesh out of these face sets. But since all of the face
sets have a different color I can't do it all at once. And I don't wanna separate all
of these nails individually. So what we can do, and let's hover our mouse
above the body here. And even though this is
just the default gray color, this is also a face set. So we can press shift H, while hovering our mouse above the body. Then the entire body
face set will be hidden, and we can only see the nails here. And now, if I hold on W, then this face sets edit pie menu opens. And now let's hover our mouse
above face set from visible and release the W button. And now all the visible
face sets will be merged into just one face set. Now let's press alt H to
unhide the body collection. And now let's zoom in here a bit, then click on face sets and
click on extract face set. Now this eyedropper appears, and now let's click on one of the nails and this will generate a new mesh, as you can see here and we automatically
switched to object mode. Then if we switch over to the modifiers you can see that this
solidify modifier was added. Here we can change the
thickness of the nails. First of all, let's
change the offset to zero. So it's basically kind
of sitting on the surface and not inside. And then let's change the
thickness to something like 0.05. But they still looks a bit weird. The edge is too sharp. So let's add another
modifier, the smooth modifier. And let's repeat this 10
times, so it's a bit smoother. And the resolution doesn't look so nice, so let's add another
modifier the remesh modifier, which has this Voxel option as well. So let's decrease the Voxel size here to something like 0.01. And then we can see them. And this looks much better. Now, all we need to do
with the nail selected, control A and go on
visual geometry to mesh, to apply all modifiers. And then let's switch over to Sculpt mode. In Sculpt mode, I remeshed
it again a bit higher since I felt that the
resolution is not high enough. Then I used the mesh filter
with the smooth option to smooth them out even more. Which also shrink them down a bit. Then I used the grab brush and changed the falloff up here to sharp. So I can pull out these
sharp tips of the nails. After that, I adjusted
the top part of the nails to better move into the finger. And with Smooth brush, I
adjusted the shape a bit and made them a bit smaller. Then I used the same technique
for the nails at the feet, as you can see here. Again here, I don't want it
to add the final detail level to the nails, just the major
shapes should be in place. Then it was about time to
add the first detail level to the horns. Mainly I adjusted the shape a bit and drew a sharp line around the horns. Again, here I use my reference port as inspiration for the horns. And the very fine
details I will add later. After that, I added this first
detail layer to the beak. First, I added some lines
with the clay strips brush and smooth them a bit to
give it a rougher look. And with the grab brush, and
the sharp fall off enabled, I added these teeth like shapes here. And then I added a hole for the nostrils. And I realized that I didn't like the shape of the beak too much. So I changed the fall off of
the Grab brush back to smooth and adjusted some of
the bigger shapes again until I was happy. After that, I adjusted the
lower beak in a similar fashion, and changed the line around
the beak on the head a bit. After some final tweaks on
the body here and there, I renamed all the objects in the outliner. So I know exactly which object is what. And this here now is the final result before we now go over
to the retopology stage. As you can see, every shape
is pretty much defined so we don't wanna do
any big changes anymore. However, the very fine details are missing which we will add after
the retopology stage. Now it's time for retopology. Here we have the sculpted mesh which has a quite high resolution. And the topology, meaning the
flow of the mesh is not ideal. That means we now have
to trace the geometry with a much lower resolution
mesh, and with a good topology. This step is usually necessary to create a proper mesh
that can be textured, rigged, and animated later on. In our case, we want to
create a static sculpting. So retopology is an optional step. However, here I still need a
retopology mesh for two things. First, I want to use the
multi-resolution modifier to add very high details. For that, a quad based proper topology leads to a much better result. With a clean smooth surface. And second, I want to use
the pose brush later on to pose the creature a bit. And since the retopo mesh will have a much lower resolution, we can disable the multires modifier with all the high details, pose the low-res model quick and smoothly without a slow running Viewport. And then turn on all the details again, and we will have all the nice
details and a pose creature. Now how to retopologize. Well, there is a manual workflow. However, this workflow is a
very time consuming process, which some people hate
and some people love. I'm more on the love side. However, this is mostly used when you wanna create a
proper high quality mesh for production. However, since here we don't
want to create a creature for production, but rather
aesthetic high quality sculpting, We don't need a perfect, retopo mesh. So I decided to speed the whole process up like a million times, by
using an auto-retopo tool. In general, if you're interested in the manual retopology workflow, either check out my
Blender sculpting course, there I will add a full chapter
on this topic very soon. Or let us know in the comments below if you wanna see some free
videos about this subject here on YouTube. So what auto-retopo tools we have? First of all, Blender comes with the
free Quadriflow Remesher. Which sometimes works, but
most of the time not really as you can see here. As a good, quick, free alternative I would recommend this
standalone tool, Instant Meshes. You can find the free download link in the video description below. It's really nice. You have to export your model and reimport it into Blender though. But in general, it gives
a pretty nice result. There are some tutorials online, so we won't go over it here. Because instead of Instant Meshes, I used probably the
best auto-retopo add-on which is currently available for Blender, the Quad Remesher. Unfortunately, it's a paid add-on. However, in my opinion,
it is worth every penny. When you think about the fact, how much time it can save you. And you can't buy time with
any money on the world. So that's something. When you check out the website, there are different options
for commercial and personal use with different price tags. And if you're not sure of
this tool is what you need, there's also a free trial to test it out. So check it out, link down
below in the description. This tool allows to create a more than decent looking retopo mesh with more or less a single click. When you have the add-on installed, select the mesh you want to retopo, open up the sidebar with N, go to the Quadremesh tab
and just enable X symmetry to get a symmetrical mesh, and then to find the quad count up here, meaning the final polycount the new retopo mesh should have. Here, I usually start with
a default value of 5,000. And if the result is too high or too low, I undo it and then change the
value and remesh it again. However, in this case,
the 5,000 were perfect. So look at this awesome result. Oh man, unbelievable. Then I did the same for all the
other objects like the beak, the horns, the nails. But this time, with a much
lower quad count of course, because the objects were much smaller. And the whole process which
when you go the manual route can take you hours. Just took a few seconds for me. Mind-blowing. So no matter what retopology
method you're using, make sure that you still have
the original sculpted mesh in your scene. If necessary, meaning if the retopo add-on removes the original sculpting, make sure that you have a duplicate since we still need it in the next step for the Multires modifier reprojection. So now up here, we have a collection with the base sculpting, and one collection with the retopo mesh. As you can see, I didn't retopo the eyes because I just wanna
leave them as they are. And if necessary, we could
replace 'em later on anyway. Since we don't wanna add any
sculpting details on them. So now I wanna add the Multires modifier. So let's click on the body here. Go to the modifiers, add
the Multires modifier, and then let's hit the
subdivide button a few times. For now, let's it do four times. But I add another level later on. However, you can now see that we still have kind of the
shape of the sculpting. However, it looks much smoother. So we lose a lot of details we had in the original sculpting. As you can see here in
this direct comparison. So what we need to do is to
reproject the new mesh here onto the old sculpting. And this we can do with
a Shrinkwrap modifier. So let's move this up here a bit and let's add the Shrinkwrap modifier. Then up here, let's open up
the base sculpt collection, click on this eyedropper. And in this case, click on the body. Now, if I hide the base sculpt here, you can see that the Shrinkwrap modifier is wrapping the new mesh
around the old mesh. So we have all the nice details. However, it might be that
we have some little glitches here and there. And that's why I would recommend to change some of the settings here, in the Shrinkwrap modifier. First of all, the wrap method,
changed this to project. Then it gets even worse. However, you just have to check negative, so it's projecting the
mesh in both direction, in the positive and
the negative direction. And that's basically all you need to do. Then everything should look pretty nice. And now, comes a cool trick. When I go into the Shrinkwrap modifier, and here click on this
arrow and hit apply, it won't be applied on the base mesh, however, all the
deformation will be stored in the Multires modifier. That means if I disabled the Multires, the original re topology
mesh hasn't changed at all. However, we still have all the details from the original sculpting. And after that, I could just
delete the original sculpting if I like. And then, continue the
work on this mesh here. Yeah, and the same workflow I use for all the other meshes here. So first of all, select the
beak add the Multires modifier, subdivide it four times, then
add the Shrinkwrap modifier, change the wrap method to project, enable negative and as
target, use the beak top. Then hit apply, and that's everything. And the same thing I quickly
do for the other objects. Yeah, now I reprojected everything. Of course, in this case now I
would probably move the eyes into the retopo collection. So it doesn't look too creepy. Then disable the base sculpting
collection or deleted it. But I would save a backup file, of course. And then we can continue
adding the very high details to this sculpting. Now I edit the first layer
of the very high details. For that, I left the multires modifier at four subdivisions, and I
used mainly the crease brush and some other brushes
like the clay strips brush, and the grab brush to add finer details. So here I just used the basic brushes, without any special settings. So in general, I edit a lot of
tiny creases here and there, to make the sculpting just
look more high resolution. As inspiration here, again, I used my reference board in PureRef. So, and since this is just
a very creative process, let's enjoy a quick time-lapse. So this is the result I have so far. But now, I wanna go one step further. Meaning, I have the body selected here and let's subdivide
the Multires even more, so that we have five subdivisions, because now I wanna add even more details. Like the very tiny skin details. And for that, on the one hand, I still use the draw sharp brush, to add like these very
tiny and sharp creases. However, I also use two setups
for adding the skin details. The first and easy setup. Let's go to the SculptDraw brush, to the brush settings over here. And first of all, let's
duplicate the brush so that we still have the original, and let's call this something
like, "Skin Jitter." Then let's go down here
into the brush settings, stroke and simply increase the jitter. If you like, you can also enable pressure
sensitivity over here so that when you're painting with a pen you can define how much
jitter it should be when you press harder or
lighter on your graphics tablet. And now as you can see, it's
creating these random dots. And this is very nice
to add some skin details here on the surface. But if you just wanna add
like a few bigger dots, you can also increase
their spacing up here. Then as you can see, we
just can create a few dots. And depending on the brush size, you can make it bigger or smaller. And if this is still too much, you can always increase the spacing here. And this is really cool to add some like, bumps here and there on the surface. And later on on the beak, I
also used the same technique, but inverted. So you can also hold down
control and invert this effect, as you can see over here. Let's get back to the body here. And I also wanted to add skin
details using a texture brush. For that, let's go back
to the SculptDraw brush and also duplicate this. Let's simply call this "Skin." Go down here to texture. Click on "New." Let's call this "Skin" as well. And in order to add a texture,
click this button here, and then click on open. Then navigate to your sculpting brushes. These here by the way, you can download in our Blender resource section which you can sign up for free. Link is down below in
the video description. However, you need an email to sign up. So and here we have
this simple skin brush. Which is basically just
a black and white texture of this reptile skin. Let's hit open. Then let's go back to the brush settings. And here let's change a few things. First of all, let's change
the mapping to area plane. So it's basically similar
as the brush adjusting along the normal off the surface, so we don't get any weird stretching. And then I also enable random, that with each dot the stroke
is creating the texture will rotate randomly. So now we can draw along here, and this will add this
random skin details. However, if you feel
that this is too much, then you can go down
here to the stroke again and simply increase the spacing. So there's a little bit
of space between each dot. Of course, not too much. Something like this should work. And of course, we can reduce
the strengths quite a bit. And by the way, when you're
zooming in and zooming out, and if you wanna make sure that the brush stays the same size, so no matter if I draw
from here or from here, the skin details should
always look the same. For that, simply switch
the Radius Unit to scene. Then as you can see, the brush will scale according to how far or close
I am to the sculpting here. And then, I can simply
add the skin details, and I can switch over to the Jitter brush and add these random dots. And as mentioned, the draw sharp brush to add these very tiny creases here. And by the way, if the draw sharp brush is a little bit slow,
you can also go down here to the spacing of the stroke
and increase this a bit. And the higher you make it, the more fluent the stroke will be, because there will be less dots
Blender needs to calculate. Of course, if you go too far, then at some point, you can
see this dotted effect here which is not so nice. So play around what works for you. But the higher the value is the more smooth the stroke will be. Yeah, and now let's
enjoy a quick time-lapse on where I add these details. Yeah, and this is now the result with the very high
details, as you can see. So we have all this nice skin details, and these little creases and
bumps all over the place. So the sculpting phase is done. However, the creature still
stands in this kind of a pose, and I wanna pose it a bit more naturally. Of course, we could add
a new Armature system with bones and bind the mesh to the bones and then pose it. which of course gives us
a bit more flexibility. However, this can take a while to set up. So in this case, I wanna use
the pose brush over here. However, before we can use this properly, we need to add some face sets. But before we do that, let's quickly switch
over to the Layout tab, and adjust the model here a tiny bit. You can see if I select the
body here, this creature is now nearly eight meters
high, which is like super huge. And I want this creature
to be roughly human size. So let's scale it down just
to avoid any future problems. It's always nice to work
in real-world sizes, especially if you plan
to use any simulations or modifiers and stuff like this. So this can always help
to avoid future problems. And for the posing
later on in sculpt mode, it is also necessary that
we join all the objects here to one mesh. First of all, let's
have a look at the eyes. We still using the Mirror modifier here. Let's apply this. And let's get rid of
this SubSurf modifier. And then let's select
all the objects here. Also the nails, and then
we'll shift the body here. And since all of these objects, except the eyes in this case, are using the Multires modifier
with the same subdivision, joining these objects is not a problem. So let's press control J, to join these. And as you can see, now we
still have all the details on the different objects. Now let's press S, to scale it down. And let's have a look
at the Z dimension here, so that we have about two meters. Then from the front view,
let's move it down here. Something like this. So that it is basically
standing on the red axis here. And from the side view, let's move it to the front here a bit. And then let's reset the origin,
which is currently up here, down here in to the center of our scene. Make sure that the 3D cursor
here, if not press shift C, and then right-click set
origin, origin to 3D cursor. Now the scale is wrong here. So let's hit control
A and apply the scale. And now we are ready to start
preparing this for posing. For that, let's go over to
the sculpting workspace. Oh, look at how tiny this little
creature is now. (chuckles) No, actually it's two meters high. It's still pretty big. So, of course we don't
wanna pose a creature with the high resolution on. You can see the brush
runs pretty slow here. So let's disable the Multires modifier and this is much better. And now we need to draw some face sets, to define different body parts. For that, let's click on
the Box Face Sets tool. Left click and hold, and then click on the Lasso Face Set tool. I have X symmetry on here, and over here I make sure that
front faces only is disabled. And now we can simply draw these lasso around different areas, to create these different face sets. So first of all, let's do
some rough face sets here. And then if you wanna tweak this a bit, go to the Face Sets tool, then hover above this gray
area, hold on control, and then we can extend the gray area here. So we can basically erase something from the orange face set. Same over here, hold down
control above the orange one, then we can paint something
away from the blue one here. Then up here, let's draw one
face set around the head. Then another one around the neck here. And by the way, if you don't accidentally wanna
paint the other face sets, which are done already, you can press shift H, and hide these. And then as you can see, we can easily add more faces sets here,
without getting into trouble. Yeah, and after I have
drawn all the face sets this is what I got here. Now let's go over to the pose brush. And first of all, let's
change the rotation origins to Face Sets FK. And this now, when we
hover above one face set, places a kind of bone inside
this specific face set. And since we don't wanna pose
the creature symmetrical here, let's disable X symmetry up here. And now, depending on which
side you place your mouse, you can left click and hold,
and move the body part around. Now you can see the nails
won't move along with the hand. To avoid this disable connected only here. And now as you can see, the nails will move along with the hand. You can see that on the
transition to the other face set, it is now smoothing out the area here. If this is too strong for you, you can turn down the smooth iterations. You can see, then it's a bit harder. Also sometimes as you can see,
it's not working properly. So you really have to make sure that you are at the
right spot on the model in order to make this work. And now if I click over here for example, I can move the lower
arm including the hand. If I go up here, I can move the upper arm
and so on and so forth. And if this way of posing the creature is too limited for you, you can also switch over to Face Sets, and then we have this
Pose IK Segments option. And in this case, I wanna have
three segments for the arm. Then let's move down here. And you can see it creates a
bone chain into the whole arm. And now if I move this
around, you can see, it's moving like an IK
rig, which is pretty cool. Also works here on the other side. And the same down here
on the legs for example. It's a bit harder to control. So I would definitely recommend to also use the Face Sets
FK option from time to time, to adjust everything a bit more. Then for the tail, we of course, don't
wanna have harsh bending. What we can do, and let's of course, switch back to the Face
Sets IK option down here. And we have one, two,
three, four, five parts. So let's increase this
to five IK segments. And now, if I go in here, if
it's not picking the right one, make sure to scale down the brush a bit, then it should work. And now you can see the
bending is pretty harsh. In this case, increase the
smooth iterations quite a bit. Let's try 10, for example. It's still not smooth enough. So let's go with 20 here. And as you can see, this
looks pretty good already. It's not perfect, but this
way we can easily pose, like a more organic shape. Yeah, and this here is
the final result I had after the posing. Then of course we can turn on
the Multires modifier again. And if you wanna stay in Sculpt mode, and the face sets are the way, but you don't wanna delete them, then you can go up here
to the Viewport overlays, and disable the face sets. Or if you like, you can also
simply lower the opacity here. So guys this here is the
final sculpted creature. Looks pretty decent in my opinion, compared to our very first base mesh. And by the way, when we zoom in here, we can still see all the individual faces. So with A, select everything, right-click and click on shade smooth. That looks much better. And, after I was done with sculpting, I decided it would be cool to test out, to give this creature a little jacket. Which I created here. And although this was just a test, I liked it so much that I just kept it. I don't wanna go in how I
created this completely, but here just a quick overview. Let's disabled all the modifiers here. It's basically just an extracted face set. Similar as we did for the claws down here. Then over in Sculpt mode, I painted in some face sets
here on the seam areas. And then I used the claws filter and the filter type set to inflate. And over here, I set the options
auto-masking to face sets. And then I could make
the whole jacket thicker without affecting the
other face sets over here. And this, I did with a Multires modifier. Then I have drawn in some
more folds here and there. In Object mode with a Solidify modifier. And after that a SubSurf
modifier, it looked like this. Then I added a simple
zipper using a curve, and up here, this little
thing, which I quickly modeled. Yeah, and now you know, how to create high resolution
sculptings in Blender. Yeah, guys and gals, I hope you enjoyed this video. If so, give it a like and
subscribe to the channel and ring the bell, if you don't
wanna miss a future video. If you have created anything
by following this video here, share it with us on social
media or in the comments below. I would really love to
see what you create. All the links are down below
in the video description. Remember you can download the
project files for this video, and our regularly updated
Blender shortcut PDF in our resource section
at cgboost.com/resources an email is required to sign up. And if this was a bit too
advanced for you, as mentioned, I'm currently updating my
Blender sculpting course, which teaches you everything important about sculpting in Blender. Meaning there is no Blender
sculpting knowledge required to get started. So it also includes a full introduction. Not everything is fully updated yet, but I will add a lot more content in the coming weeks and months. The link to the course is down below in the video description. That's it. Thanks a lot for watching guys and gals. And I will see you in
one of my next videos. Goodbye.
