FlippedNormals: Sculpting the Base

the way we start our own project here is by opening up lightbox and opening up a dynamesh project this will just give us a sphere with the dynamic order in Abel on it the first thing I do is we change the madcap for it to get something more appealing and we just make a central line for it with the faces and with the Isar I should probably mention that the lightbox you can bring it up with the comma key yeah yeah this is just a personal preference as well though there is no it's not a right or wrong thing to start off with with the head or the eyes this is a personal preference yeah this just makes it easier for us to sort of we just define the plane where the eye and the center line is and that just sort of we just build from there we just like to work like that yeah and then we use the move brush and the snake trip brush now in a moment to just block in the body for it which is it's just a nice way to get some big shapes down not worrying about details for just worrying about getting the main form down for the body kind of like a little sausage now for your sauce it's like this Lego brush is really great for these sort of fluid forms um the limbs and things like that with a move brush is great for more control over moving big chunks of clay or Polly's around yeah exactly you want to be a little careful it's naked brush star customer easily like destroy your model if you look at the if you look at a line it's a little bit stretched but that's usually fine with dynamesh you just have to keep in mind yeah cuz like whenever you use the snake or brush it it can it can mess up your mesh a little bit if you stretch it too far but as soon as we rematch it it's it's going to be fixed so just for worrying now about getting domain topology down for this well so do we know we have enough Polly's to actually actually work on mmm and in the beginning it's going to be very very much about proportions and and just figuring out where like the relationship between arms legs and and the tail and now we're using the curved tube brush just to get the poly down for the arms we're not worrying about as you clearly see we're not wearing fun to design for it it's purely a technical thing just to get to the polity down basically like here are arms here are legs yeah and so that's all it is now and then we are using the claybuildup brush with them with no alpha and in the beginning we have an alpha but we then we disable it to get a really nice smooth brush yeah the problem with using the the clay claybuildup brush with the Alpha is that it tends to be there tends to be a lot of cleanup yeah in the process it can be great for just sculpting sort of like something that looks more like real life would be like but for this that's not really what we want we just want a clean base we don't want a lot of noise in our bases yeah the brush strokes are awesome later on but at this point we just want it we just want clean shapes and now we're just finding some more the shapes a little bit more using the move brush just come over like the arms getting some more shapes into it the legs and just getting the very broad shapes down and one thing to keep in mind is that I mean at this stage everything is going to look terrible after like a couple of minutes of sculpting your in your view your sculpt is not going to look great but that shouldn't like buggy down you just have to like keep in mind that it'll be great later on and this is purely just to get down the main proportions find the landmarks all that kind of stuff yeah it's being a landmarks this is one of the things we're doing right now is so important to get down the main landmarks first and blend which will mean bony landmarks where you see the skeleton so you can see what's already finer is the scapula really just a shoulder blade which is so important for the back the hip which is being done right now and a rib cage now once you have the relationship between the scapula and and the ridge of the hip sort of like with the rib cage as well you can sort of start filling in all the muscles and and that yeah and if you don't have proper bony landmarks your entire figure is going to lack structure and perform you might not see exactly what's wrong with it but something is going to feel off it can be very hard to define exactly what's off about your sculpt if if your base wasn't correct I mean the landmarks are so helpful for like setting boundaries and if you just jump directly into muscles it can be very confusing because there's just just so much to like think about whereas if you have your landmarks already defined you you have this base to build from do you know exactly like the relationship between the hip and the shoulder and the kind of muscles that need to be filled in there and all muscles are connected to bone anyway so if you if you try to do the back or without without having the scapula there or having some kind of defined spine you're gonna be in trouble because there's nothing the muscles can attach to like and it's get a little bit weird it's not gonna it's just not gonna work no but you can see it's very rough what we're doing here like the elbow here is just like three strokes just to like get the main shape of the elbow down just is literally just a spot on the mesh there's no detail that and I think that's an important one to mention as well like at this stage don't detail anything at all um it's really about exploring your design and just trying to like figure out where everything goes yeah because it's very easy to assume that what you're seeing a sculptor is just like blobs on a mesh but every stroke here has a function like it's either like to to define the structure like in a bone memory or to define a muscle or syllabus the silhouette or some lette and we just want you to not be confused about this there's a purpose behind everything it's not just random and and youyou probably should have a bit of a foundation in Anatomy like you should know some of it because we just jump straight into sculpting something like this you're probably going to get a little frustrated because once you get to a point where you don't know what muscles or what bones should be where you just start making it up and you start filling in what you think is there and what you think is there most that most of the time is is not right so we'd really recommend you just to just to look at some some creature Anatomy some human anatomy just to figure out where does everything go now that said it's also important too that your figure fields functional I'd say it's more important that you figure feels functional then it every single origin insertion on a mortal muscle is Gloria definitely and I don't necessarily have to in the beginning get bogged down with like learning all the names and learning all the technical aspects up to now um you know if you if that interests you you could always explore that later on definitely so we're just going over it now and just getting some more some slight modification you like we're adding a mouth to it just some rough definition you can see the ice will have been kind of kind of placed very roughly not uh yeah and that's the thing like the the definition from the beginning of the the middle plane of the butt of the face and I it's like the eyes have changed a little bit from the position but I mean that's okay you know this is this that's what this is about we're just concept in a creature and anything you put down at any point if it doesn't feel right you should change it now if you get to a point where you're like okay this this doesn't work anymore but I've already spent like 10 15 minutes sculpting it I'll just leave it don't like go back yeah change it because your design will be much better much better yeah so what we're doing a lot of times with sculpting is is doing big shapes by just blocking out the big forms and then defining it and we do this all the time this is just a theme which goes again and again in our videos and it's very nice way of doing it because you you're valuating model you do changes and you just keep doing it yeah and also you can see that we didn't split the video into like a leg part and a head part tail part and so on working all over the body at all times it's very important not to get bogged down with one area yeah because as soon as it comes back to the detailing part again and we're gonna be repeating that a lot because like as soon as you start detailing your face let's say you start detailing like the arm like we're sculpting now if we started to deal tail detail that a lot that would define the rest of the mesh and as soon as that's been detailed you don't really want to make changes to it you're like okay this arm is great now and then the rest of body has to like follow that whereas if you start you know if you jump around and spend a few minutes on the face on the legs everything will just sort of it'll work better together and also the fact that you wanted to feel like a coherent creature if something something has weighing with detail or is sculpting different style it is going to look wait like let's say you do you do the arm one day then two days later a week later or somewhat you you work on a different arm or or a head it's not gonna have the same feel because it's done it's done in a different session yeah and your mental state is going to be different so it's I just think it's very important to to bring everything up to the same level and then start detailing once you're happy with that yeah but you really don't want to go into detail unlike the arm or head whatever that before your main shapes are working it's going to be a while before we we start detailing the sculpt it's a lot of times it's just going to be moving moving proportions around just defining a little bit of muscle here it's it's very important not not to jump into it too soon it's very tempting it's already now be like all right this is great my scope that's perfect I'm just gonna add some some wrinkles and whatever but just don't yes don't before the big shapes are working just don't even consider doing wrinkles or anything that the model is going on it's going to feel it's just going to feel weird it's not going to look believable at all so at this stage it's it's big shapes it's the big muscles I like the deltoids here you see just defining biceps defining some forearm Anatomy stuff which is gonna affect this silhouette pretty much hm but we're working with mostly external shapes I'm not working with internal silhouette what that means is that we're working on things which is gonna again break this silhouette for not working on on on very small details in the face we're not defining the eyes at this point of the nose any sort of internal workings and turny like the internal silhouette is gonna that's at a later stage a much later stage when we start shoulda like not the detailing part of it but the part before that's when we kind of start working with that as we go over now and adding again more definition to bony landmarks this is just a scapula and the scapula is really an area you want to get right if if the scalpel is working you're gonna have such a neat time with the back compared to if the scapula isn't working and I feel like it's very common it's a I don't know I don't I wouldn't really I wouldn't necessarily call it a common beginner mistake because I feel like it's very prevalent in a lot of sculpts even in sort of very you know experience sculpt that is the back anatomy of the back because you know the front is such a fascination for everyone because that's what we spend the most time looking at um you know that's the that's what's presented to us in in like advertising and there's a lot of focus on just like the front of people so you actually don't see the back of of people or anatomy that much so a lot of the time people just sort of wing it when it comes to the back and that's where something like the scapula can really help you yeah placing it correctly understanding the relationship between the scapula and like the muscles on the back that really help your anatomy a lot they will it will just make it feel more believable yeah so please don't don't take that shortcut and just be like ah whatever behind and at this point we're also going to over go over the model with the traumatic brush mm-hmm this brush is just awesome in other ways for you can use it for a lot of hard surface stuff but here it's simply for defining planes yeah it's great for that at this point we've been working with the clay brushes and the client brushes can be messy the Clippers are great for adding volume but some decide effect can be that sometimes you have too much texture or you just you just leave a little a little bit of a mess yeah this becomes a little too blobby sometimes and by using a trim dynamic or H polish for instance you can really quickly define some nice planes now in your model and this is important to sit like this as I said before like even though we like maybe like a like something we've done here like there is a nice little wrinkle something will like you which you often times have we still just we just sculpt the crap out of it now and just break it into planes yeah and so the trim dynamic is it's also great for cleanup yeah because it it unlike the smooth brush it doesn't take away too much detail but it can still kind of get rid of some of all the texture that's left by you know other brushes to try experimenting around with that instead of like going into the smooth brush and just having that as your default brush for smoothing a lot of times I personally prefer to use the determinant brush instead of smooth brush this is really nice for simplifying your model and a nice way of thinking about it is that you simplify your model to make this design stronger it's so easy in Si brush to get bogged down with with details because it's technically it's very easy to add details but the hard part is to keep it simple and criminai brush is it's fantastic this it's just very nice for getting the planes planes down and at this point this is where we sort of start to try to define parts of the face and it's like we mentioned before the the amount of detail that's on the rest of the body kind of has to match up with everything else and and that's where like now the face is kind of if the face is the first thing you see on anything that's you know as humans were just programmed to identify faces so one thing that's also interesting you can do with your sculpt is trying to like be sort of tactical with where you place your detail yeah because if you define sort of like that's like when we start talking about internal contrast in your mesh you know if you place detail more on the face than on the rest of the body or for your automatically just going to be drawn more to the face because that's at the most appealing area that said as mentioned before we you don't want to spend like all the efforts on the face you don't bring everything up to like a certain level yeah and then you can add some more definition to the face and that that's a really good point you you our eyes are drawn to detail and if you put your detail on on something like the back leg that's where you put your audio your money sculpting your eyes going to be drawn to the back leg so you want to you want to be put that where you want people to look if you don't want to look at the face don't put detail in the face net but if you want to and you most like to do is this creature and Mormons s were drawn to faces put put detail in face but not it is this stage so everything we've said but don't do it yeah we will we will come and find you and at this point we've sort of established sort of the main proportions you know everything everything is is you know I'd like a 10% of where we want it to be so at this stage is for like we jump into another stage of sculpting it's a little more I'm gonna call it detailing but it's more like just refining the shape a little bit more your Z so now the face is starting to be a little more detail than the rest of the body um we move on to the chest just sculpt a little bit more on other parts because again don't get bogged down by one area yeah this is still very very early on though and the cool thing about using something a dynamesh it said I'm so angry he's so angry but the cool thing is that we can we can change anything at any time right now like if the head doesn't work we can just we can remove it and cut it off you just cut off we can cut off literally any piece off off the body and replace with something else we can give him another arm we can cut off his tail cut them in half making it to a genie like whatever we can we can do it to this stage you should totally make a monster gene this is one of the great things about dynamesh is that it gives you so much freedom gives you so much freedom to sculpt already now like in the past 30 seconds look at how much this face has changed at four is she was like a her Peter kind of like ninja turtle and now he's a little more aggressive his shapes have been pulled down yeah you know his his his middle line has been been brought closer together and that sort of like ups the aggressiveness of his character yeah and when we're working is what we're trying to think about the character like what kind of character is he and then we try to shapes we turn justify the shapes based on the description like just a kind of the kind of strength we're using for brushes if it's a if it's a big hero character who's very muscular officer fragile old woman yeah it's a very different mentality yeah for something like this because he's this is this is a male creature this is a male character alpha male alpha like we defined in our when we talked about the references and all that kind of stuff that's the stuff that we found for him which you know based on gorillas based on you know this Peck sort of creature and and he was an older creature but he was definitely sort of like the leader of that pack before and we want that to reflect in him if you're doing something like um like a female creature it was the same thing with a female face female body you'd probably want to keep the shapes a little more elegant and subtle yeah with this Salty's subtlety is not where we want we don't we don't want subtlety in a big brood monster who is three meters tall now we wanted to mess you up basically that's pretty we want him to look scary and you want to look intimidating and you know sort of what's gonna what's going to reflect that the best is shapes that look more aggressive they're not like not round forms sort of more spiky forms and more aggressive forms and also to note that this video here is is in real time right now some later videos are sped up but at this stage here we just wanted to show it in in real time yeah it is really important to get this stage right this stage defines everything yeah it's kind of like you know building a house out of mud yeah these just at one point it's just gonna fall apart where is you build a house at a concrete and steel it's gonna last forever yeah um that's basically what this is and you want to get a solid foundation and you have a solid foundation the rest I'm not going to say the rest is easy but it becomes a lot easier it is because then then your problems later on aren't design related the design is then working about point then those problems are more where you put your details exactly how many wrinkles how many wrinkles are always scarce how many scars you can pick any knee amount because one of us is really into scars maybe it's me but that's okay that's okay thank you and this edge we're enabling the the floor or the the grid plane just on the right side of the a of the interface and this is just so we make sure making sure that the model is can stand on the ground like the arms aren't shorter or longer than the defeat yeah and that's just yeah it's just a nice way of doing it you can you can enable it if if you're too lazy to move your mouse over to the right hand side of the UI you can enable it with shift P yeah really handy really also we for certain types we disabled perspective as well like if you want to if you want to review your model from the cider epital from the side you don't want perspective on because then then the arms on yeah it's gonna it's gonna interfere with how you perceive the model yeah that being said though do not ever for long periods of time sculpt without perspective on yeah especially when you're doing faces oh dear that's gonna be weird as soon as you if you realize that you haven't been sculpting with respecting perspective and you enable it it's just gonna be all messed up yeah so just be sure to like you know check that perspective for the most time is turned on it's gonna be like having a photograph with somebody with a read-along lens yeah and people just look really weird like super weird so yeah keep perspective on particularly for faces but also for like characters like this a lot of people's prefer to take their model at certain stages in Tamiya MMSE broish perspective isn't necessarily 100% accurate no one really knows how it works you know is there is a little bit of magic involved in that which we're not entirely sure how it works so a lot of people will bring it into Maya just so you can have an accurate representation of your focal length yeah and you know exactly what you're looking at or intermodal like literally any other 3d program I think see which is like this pseudo fake 3d perspective thing yeah and I'm not yeah it's it's a kind of bizarre yeah just know that what you're seeing might not be what you're actually yeah well seen and at this stage we're also going over like more more Bond landmarks again we just saw some pushing pulling some more on on the elbow that that's also foreign to break this silhouette a little bit now if if you want to have a dynamic design you want shapes to break the silhouette it's so important yeah and you're never done like no even though we start out with proportions and bony landmarks that's something that we'll be checking and improving throughout the entire sculpting process because it's so important yeah we're not gonna say art Anatomy check not done and now wrinkles Jackie done yeah it's a constant it's a we constantly re-evaluating everything and the design is like constantly evolving yeah and and you just have to like have to keep up with that and we also have videos later on with Sandy checking just making sure our model is where we wanted to be yeah it's like often times when especially yeah because we did our you know you're doing like you're you're you're contacting in ZBrush you jump into Photoshop a little bit to like test how your design is working as soon as you jump out of 3d into 2d 2d changes are so much easier to make but can sometimes be a little hard to translate to 3d and but yeah just like making those two work together can be really powerful and really really good for your design yeah yeah those are real nice - dude concept in 3d images 2d yeah even if you're amazing at drawing in 2d it's just extremely hard to to translate a 2d drawing into 3d perfectly yeah you can just be damn sure that it's not going to work properly like you're gonna have some perspective issues and some things you haven't thought about so so but so doing it this way here doing it first in three getting the main shapes down and pushing more and to do afterwards you're really really getting the best of both worlds yeah they have a feasible assign which which you know will work you know that he can actually move his arms and from a perspective and from a technical perspective point of view he will work yeah it's not like I'm like an Escher sketch which is which would be kind of fortunate so we're just blocking down some some mass snow in the legs just just thinking about how the bones working in but also like basic anatomy and nothing fancy at this point yeah the tibia sort of like it can be a very strong shape and it's you look at the shin of people you know it's a very defined plane you have the inside plane the medial plane facing inwards and and I could be a very interesting plane to play around then you have this sort of sharp edge you see like especially with like Muay Thai fighters they'll use their shins a lot because you have that hard edge to like you know keep people with and that can be really interesting to play around with this is a from a technical perspective technical Super's note here is that if you right-click sometimes or if you right-click by default you get up a menu which is it's annoying it's at least it's extremely annoying and when we started a story we want to have a default ZBrush interface so we just reset ZBrush to be complete default but doing that it also it also enabled right-click menu again which is like the bane of our existence yeah and it's extremely long like you right click and then suddenly you get up this menu which you were accidentally change the focal shift draw size intensity or somewhere and for like the brush here you don't necessarily know what what focal shift to using so you can't really get back the brush at least you have to you have to experiment with the full moon shift and the way you remove that is by going under your preferences into interface navigation and erase a little Buckner's which says something like disable or right-click menu or right-click pop-up and just disable that is going to make your life so much so much better in every aspect of your life yeah and like it's literally gonna make your life better yeah it is oh and at this stage um you can see it's really sort of this the the collarbone the collarbone has has been sort of suppressed for a little while and hasn't really been detailed that much and it's really important because like the collarbone attaches up to the shoulder where you have the acromion process the acromion process on the shoulder is a is a really important landmark it's a flat part of your shoulder and this is sort of where the entire thing with the shoulder Anatomy attaches to and it really you know defines the the look of the shoulder yeah so try to like look into that and see how how it attaches to each other get your clavicle clavicle done right and your life is also going to be easier and at this stage we we have to define some spikes on the back hmm kind of just playing around a little bit but it's like checking out the silhouette what can we do to change it up yeah because it the back is a little boring at this point and just having spikes and it's a monster I mean this kind of mandatory to give me some spikes on his back it's almost expected of us so your creature doesn't have spikes here please that's preposterous so the way we're doing this is simply by masking it out and and then just right inverting mask in this dragging out deforms yeah and you get this way you get a really crisp edge yeah and it's really like if you would like sculpt this out it would be a lot more cleanup for you by this way you serve you draw the shape onto the onto the mesh just extract it and then you just remesh it afterwards and everything is great and you get business like minutes worth of work let's just bottoming out so fast yeah and the way just we do it if you're not familiar with masking esters hold our control key to mask ctrl-click epoxide canvas to invert the mask and then you're striking it out yeah and dragging outside the model while only control key will clear the mask yeah and which is also a little confusing because control dragging outside the mesh we also dynamesh it yeah it just depends on if you have a mask enabled or not um but that's something you probably get used to and then after a clear Damascus well we we also re meshing it using dynamesh by again control dragging outside a model yeah and and you know this is kind of like it's the same thing as trying to find the proportions in the beginning you know we have the proportions the general also breakup of silhouette from the spikes now you go in you trim it down a little bit just try to like refine the shape and you can see how it really it's it's made the silhouette a lot more interesting already like before I mean the curve is nice you know the curve of the body but we still preserve the curve but visually it's just a lot more interesting your your face or if your eyes sort of like drawn to it a little more now yeah and there's more timing in a design in a way like you can it just it's just more interesting yeah and then we adding some do some more spikes because why not a dinosaur yeah i but just notice that these spikes here are are smaller and they're they're not they're kind they're not overlapping no they're like secondary spike yeah exactly and in terms of this size they were not the dominant one so we have we have some domination and design here meaning that domination spikes so so it means that we we have like the main spikes on the back the big ones they were due to dominant ones yeah then we have some secular ones which are there just to help the design out yeah this just sort of they're like tiny helper spikes yeah I like when when the big spikes get all lonely like the tiny spikes come in to help exactly do you see like it just looks more interesting already but don't do too many spikes because things can be weird you're gonna have like a spike a demon I got mean I guess if you're doing like mega spike a team and I'd be fine but you know try to keep it to like yeah - like unacceptable I don't know what's an acceptable level of spikes I have no idea and you really have to be careful there it really depends on your design so just don't push rock yes you never know like one more spike oh you're done yeah but that is something like we have to build it careful there because um let's just say the Morton are not too fond off the generic ZBrush human creature you see post law all of the internet you want to go and do you want to keep it functional like you don't just don't want to think let's just add spikes for the sake of spikes like here there is actually like I'm the sign point of view the first of it breaks up the silhouette but also we're thinking from in the environment is living in like if somebody were to attacking from behind they were like being paled yeah that was really one of the things because we were discussing we were doing the design we were discussing things like this and we're like oh you know be cool had spikes but but y-yeah justified it yeah it's like why did why does it need spikes like why would you have that much bone sticking out of this like from revolutionary point of view why why would he involve all this bone sticking out of his back oh yeah this means that he at some point he at this point or at some point in history he had a predator who was very determined to kill him and have monster first for dinner I'm just gonna have someone had monster for dinner yeah so so by having spikes in it it allowed him to to not be made dinner yeah and it's like you looking at this creature like holy while this big that's a big creature um and it's like well there's always going to be a bigger creature out there yeah so and also right now we're doing some genitalia front like you have a lot of the distance stuff going on in movies today that that monster or creatures don't have some kind of genitalia or reproduction organ it looks a little bit way there's some dirt like there's something missing like if you look at animals in like pg-13 films they literally will not have a butthole no because it's just I don't know it's not deemed acceptable and that's because we want to be 13 or kids that we add in little penis area so it just adds more credibility to the sign is the name Leo it's it's like anything we said disagree it's it's a it's a male creature he's going to have a penis he's gonna have a penis that's just it yeah so it's not a big penis cuz obviously he's taking a lot of steroids to get to where he is which is fine which which is completely like yeah it's not like we're not saying that you should spend all your detail on on the genetic doing like a hyper detail penis yeah no we're not saying that we just it just just keep it realistic yeah and what it's actually like I mean you know you look at a movie like like Watchmen we have dr. Manhattan I mean he's just walking around as penis is just there and it's there all the time but and from like a silhouette and a design point of view it actually impacts the design and the same thing with this you know this will break up the silhouette to some extent less of an extent because you know his penis is very tiny yeah so anyway enough penis talk for now so at this point you can see we're checking the silhouette you do this just by hitting the V key yeah this just flips the colors yeah and this is really handy you should check your silhouette often as we said before if your silhouette doesn't work your your design won't work so you can always just think about the civil facially without actually making you black but the moment you make it pure black you're forced to evaluate the silhouette you can't look at the internal shape you can't look at wrinkles and left now like everything else just goes away yeah exactly so we will do this way more later on but we do that every stage as well you see what we'll have to work at every stage of tomorrow hmm so you can see we're using the the move brush a little bit just to and do some bigger changes just pushing the the deltoids in a little bit just pushing the shoulders and deltas and just to make the design more interesting yeah kind of getting this like a little bit of tapering from top to bottom yeah just to make them a little more stable you know sort of making this like triangle shape and the triangle shape is kind of an interesting one in design there's this like this is like test that some design teachers will use like what you want to sit on it whether you use like three basic shapes we have like you have a bowl and a cube and a triangle triangle obviously you don't want to sit on you definitely don't want to sit on triangle that's gonna be painful and you know this again that sort of plays into the spiciness of him and like you know aggressive shapes and things like that again so let's say you have you have a sway we want to sit in that yeah sure it's definitely so it's definitely on this foot and it's as comfortable as round would you sit on cube well you know it's it's harsher it's more stable um but it you probably still sit on at first it's around I would not sit on triangle so that's we're trying to do here you we're trying to deliberately use spiky shapes like you looked as head hair spiky the end of his head is is very spiky yeah that's his face is a triangle yeah you definitely don't seem this face so you definitely don't be very bad I don't eat or earn is back or or or any any part of them yeah it's just like you can also think about like how would it feel to touch him like if you if you stroking your your hand over like a soft faces a lot it's very comfortable just stroking a hand over this creature here it's gonna hurt and also he's probably gonna eat you he's also he's also definitely gonna eat you so please please don't yeah so just more definition out in on the hind legs here just blocking in giving him an treat three toes here and yeah keeping it very very loose still it's kind like duck feet yeah it is kind like duck feet it's kind of like like Dino dinosaur duck feet dinosaur this thing like that like ducks kind of like their feet can like remind me of dinosaur yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah exactly like that she's actually that weren't Gracie what that's for the diamonds were sounds like and just going over in value in evaluating the model again just rotating around a little bit adding some more definition here and there just just going over it not getting stuck in one area constantly re-evaluating the forms yeah making sure they're working because this is a design tutorial this is not let's wrinkle - drop the turtle and it's not like we don't really want you to look at this tutorial and be like ah I can't I can't follow this stage of the tutorial um I mean it's great if you want to follow along and you want to sit down and sculpt yourself please do but just also try to like listen and just pay attention to like the design parts that we're talking about because that's really what we want you to take away from this don't you we don't want you just call this creature here and this is the only thing you can sculpt we want you to be able to sculpt a thousand creatures like this with different design different proportion different universes like we wanted to be universal knowledge you gain from this basically it's not this tutorial isn't just like sculpt this monster tutorial yes it's how to apply this basic design knowledge to the rest of your work whether it be characters its props yeah building lights which I don't know like like all we're talking for a bit like the set test with the set around triangle it's valid if you're doing fashion design or or whatever you're doing yeah you can also now see that we're doing with working heavily with the silhouette here and just hiding different parts so you can more easily see it with a lot a lot easier to work with like trying to get it to the legs yeah versus this part here we realize that the the knees for facing too much inwards which made him look a little weak and insecure and design but if we were moving the DNI's outputs it seems more confident and gets more stable yeah you can just think about that like yourself like if you're if you're standing if you're standing straight up but your knees are facing inwards yeah like you look more insecure you see the feet now you know you have this classic sort of like cute Japanese girl kind of thing you know with their feet sort of facing inwards it is very you know it just looks cute we're not going for cute Japanese girl here definitely not going for cute we're hopefully going as far away from that as possible yeah probably yeah that's so one of the things you can do is well when you're doing this kind of is just go into the posture yourself like how how do you feel powerful what makes you feel powerful what makes you feel fragile if you're doing a fragile character going to a fragile pose and and actually when we were doing this Henning was a brave enough and kind enough to pretend to be a 3-meter told scary monster so he was actually posing on the floor we're trying to like how would the anatomy kind of work and what would be like a unnatural pose for him to be in I no shame no shame and you know if you have no one around you to like help you with that you know get get a camera just try to like take a photo of yourself like what would the pose be yeah because chances are it's gonna be a little hard sometimes to find the correct reference you want online yeah that is I mean Google is great but sometimes you can't find the specific thing you really want ya see we definitely used live reference of this I would much more sculpting sometimes anyways he would use like my body for reference just standing there like stylin stretching out arm or something yeah and it's it's so useful like live reference is really the best way of doing it because tag then you can you can observe it a real time you can like you can touch it briefly and it just you have it you just have so much more information like which part is soft which part is is firmer it just helps so much to have like a live model even even a human when you're doing a three meter tall monster yeah because any other of their aspects of it that are abstract is from from human anatomy and that that is that's implemented into this creature and what most of the anatomy here is stone directly from humor anatomy yeah it's pretty much only like the proportion which is different from a human here like he has pretty much all the same muscles as a human and exactly the same muscles actually yeah very much exactly the same I don't deviating too much here no I mean we're cheating a little bit here in simplifying here and there but like it's very much based on humor Anatomy yeah and you know like we talked about earlier even though it's important to want to apply correct Anatomy you will have to deviate because we're not we're not doing something that actually exists you know we're doing something and but but I don't want you to like use that as an excuse to like skip over Anatomy like it still needs to be there because you're still doing something that's based in real life and can't just excuse it away with like this is a creature so that's why this is different a lot of people seem to do that like that I know I don't need good Anatomy because it doesn't exist nobody you're still basing off of something which already exists yeah we used gorillas embarrass us reference with this and look at like skeletons of gorillas in Paris and this is going to help you also Henning was a good reference so and he definitely exists so I'm pretty sure I do maybe I'm just a really good like ventriloquist I'm not I'm not hinting just exists thank God again now we're back to the acromion process and you know you see that sort of like dip in there because there is just no muscle up there it's the chrome process is as Martin said before it's just a little square part at the end of your clavicles and it's almost like regardless of how muscular you are it's just going to be it's just going to be flat so it's a great landmark to just just keep in mind yeah and that's also where you're you get a lot of shape from the deltoid from so again just going over various parts defining the findings draw a little bit more mmm I know it's a little a little Herpa derpa in my face it's a little over to me but that's that's hopefully gonna change yeah I love his like tiny stuff pants it's like so cute they're totally not supposed to be cute no no that'll change they'll totally change but this is only like 45 minutes or so in tubes into the sculpt he's supposed to be isn't supposed to be perfect at this stage no no but again like you know most of the most of the proportions are are there now we have solid base solid foundation to work from yeah and as this edge here is working it's going to be so much easier later on because then our problem is going to be more where is where what's this specific Anatomy go we what what is the specific not to me where specifically does this muscle end and begin yes like how okay how does the lats how do they attach to the hip and like what's the relationship between that and the weight of the skin and asymmetry and all that stuff and is very important but we don't have to worry about the overall design once we're doing that yeah you could you like you could try to imagine now if we were to subdivide this up to a couple million and we're like all right this is just this is the best thing I've ever done now I'm just gonna detail it as much as I can wrinkles everywhere it wouldn't work no because you know the rest of your skull wouldn't be able to support that kind of level of detail yet when I'm working I like to split into primary a secondary and tertiary shapes I mean the first one the primary shapes that's something like muscle or big shapes like muscle bones and overall silhouette work no detail whatsoever and secondary you're dealing with smaller wrinkles or smaller than the biggest ones more silhouette breaking wrinkles and more muscle definition and most sculptures would actually be fine with that if you look at something like the David sculpture for Michelangelo he pretty much has this there is no you he doesn't have pores or wrinkles I don't like any still works it is an awesome sculpture yeah it's it's alright then if you if you want realism full-on realism not just like it feels like a believable figure but actually feels like it exists then you need the third stage as well which is like small veins it's tiny wrinkles tiny pores yeah and that was you know that's you look at the old Renaissance sort of like in terms of painting in terms of sculpting and stuff like that that's what that was never the target with their sculptures it it is a stylized representation of you know real life um whereas you know this is some we want this to sort of like we wanted this to feel like it could exist in real life you see like now there was this big pit between the armpit and the chest and you know the way he's facing forward he'd kind of be flexing his his his pectorals his chest muscles um so you get this string where the the chest inserts on on the shoulder so you you want to like try to incorporate that like try to pull this forward a little bit you're gonna see this point here the the model met apology wasn't really helping us because you just fill in a pretty big big area when you with with the cleaner or with ZBrush play with ZBrush play as it's commonly referred to as we just had to read dynamesh it just to just sort of topology wouldn't I work against us but one thing that's also you know you have to consider is like when you look at a person you look at a bodybuilder you know you'd have a you'd have a very very big chest very big shoulders that sort of like what keeps him upright that's what like is the most protruding but this creature is hunched over the way he propels themselves is with his his arms so his chest is actually very small even though it's defined it's very small compared to say his forearms which is what carries most of his weight and his later on his lats yeah if you want to if you want to move those big arms and they're your massive like you don't get hit by this guy he's gonna mess you up and that's that's his lats on his back yeah they help to like pull him forward yeah you know and mr. pieces as well so he can really lift his arms up yeah so if first a giving him big lats isn't just to make him look like the Hulk or make you look strong it actually has a feature yeah that it has a function to it at the moment it's like everything is symmetrical obviously we're sculpting symmetrically because we can its it speeds up your workflow so much I'd say by a hundred percent I mean I'm I don't know accidentally I don't know math but yeah consummately so everything is going to look symmetrical this is something that you know later on again when we get to more refining shape your detailing this is something that will change you know yeah you definitely don't want your creature to be completely symmetrical what I often times do you wanna sculpt is that I keep this called symmetrical except for the central lights it's really that it's really efficient way of working ideally you want your entire creature to be asymmetrical but in on a time budget that's oftentimes simply not possible and if your arms are symmetrical it's not a huge issue at this stage we're also just changing math caps around but a couple months a couple of customers we have here the reason is that some of your mat caps aren't displaying the model in a correct manner no sometime are displaying or making all the cavities and wrinkles really returned and some are really good for the big shapes so if you want to if you want to actually see the model the way in the model actually if you just have to switch around with map caps and right now we're using the clay brush to to sculpt with and you know all these brushes clay tubes claybuildup clay brush they all have this very nice so like went out without an alpha they really add a nice so it's a nice I wouldn't call it a textural feel but especially like when you're doing a creature like this where is like very muscular it really adds like a nice level of detail to him yeah also one thing when scope along this is it's really nice to use the the clay brushes like going across the form to really get some nice texture going you see this is done a lot here and just it just feels it just feels natural yeah yeah that's the thing it really it gives a very natural look and feel yeah to it you get more texture and an interest in the sculpt yeah and it's not like no it's not like unrealistic texture I'd say it yeah it's really nice it's organic also one thing you might have noticed so far is that we hardly use the smooth brush at all like when we're smoothing out like this it's it's mostly internal dynamic or it's using declare brushes the Clippers are realized for necessary smoothing it out but just defining the shape rather or breaking the shape down into simple planes well seven simultaneous and giving texture yeah like a great way you can a great way for you to like try out some other kind of smoothing is to simply just inverse your brush you know holding down alt yeah subtract because this way instead of smoothing what you like you lose a lot of detail you subtract parts of your mesh you know kind of like give you to sculpt in real life you know you take parts of the clay off yeah instead of you know D smoothing using the smoothing brush it's kind of like using turpentine on like a real clay sculpture and to like smooth it out and that's something you do at the end of your end of your sculpting yeah yeah you really don't want to end up in like a smooth this would blow up a sweet potato or something odd you don't want that you want texture in in your model you want you want big shapes you want brave shapes at this stage here is I would also argue that it's it's better to keep the shapes bold and keep the shapes strong and then smooth it out later on because it's primers every stage after this stage you're gonna smooth it out yeah and it's kind of like it's the same thing with like production you know the further you go down the pipeline you know you're not going to have full control over whatever you have and it's just going to be boiled down and it's going to lose a lot of detail like you're doing this stage here and then when you're doing wrinkles on top somebody is the shapes are going to be softened out well when you do two wrinkles on top and then you do textures on top and the wrinkles can disappear again and then you do the shading on top and or you bring everything to in tamiya and it's going to be softened again yeah and you take it into rendering and a lot of stuff can be softened more lighting and take it it capacity and it's going to be blurred to make it more realistic yeah so by keeping the shapes strong here at least you can't you can't really save it completely but at least it's gonna can make it stronger yeah and that's actually one thing that a lot of the time I mean we do it to like we're sculpting it's often you you underestimate how much detail there actually exists in real life you know if you take a really nice face scan of someone's face it's like they're going to be a lot more pore detail and a lot more imperfections that you that you would think of so just try to like push it a little bit more and just just just make a little more you know like the intensity of the detail could could probably go up a little bit more it's always easier to take something away than to add it later on you can always you know like let's say you're doing pores or something on a character it's always easier to to take away the portion to add pores yeah but now most of the most of the anatomy most of the muscles are are in place you know we've got got a nice forearm sort of like going across we got the triceps and the deltoids checking the silhouette to see how do the spikes really relate to the rest of the body do they work um it maybe it's maybe not let's go away let's go over with your brush and let's refine it aside a little bit and like you know the move brush never gets old it's you know later stages in your sculpting process it can become a little heavy yeah if you like you view it work especially when you're working with like a dynamesh creature that dynamesh mesh it's it can be very heavy to move things around but when you and is in the beginning of this process whether there isn't do too much detail it's like just never like ignore the move brush it really is your best friend and the new brush will be used throughout a project like as you said this is sound this is a concept material if we will constantly keep altering to the sign yeah the design is never finished until you know the last sculpting part is done yeah you know the design like it's constantly evolving and that's very important don't be too much in love with your design be willing to change something yeah if not if even at this point here I mean this is just after about 50 something mental sculpting if if the hind legs aren't working we're just gonna cut them off and and that's fine you I oftentimes feel is way better to to remove something and we do it from scratch than to try to fix it because if fixing something is then you already have a structure for it yeah you have sort of like all remnants of stuff that already didn't work exactly trying to work you're trying to work within a broken framework yeah instead of instead of having a completely clean slate and usually it takes less time to do it from scratch because then you you've already done it you already done it and you know how it's supposed to be I mean it's annoying but um yeah your your sculpt sand designs anything really will be better for it yeah doing everything anything twice it's always like a bit of a pain yeah but guaranteed the second time you do it it's always going to look better you still another when you're under a deadline pressure yeah or you know when you're recording a tutorial and all those in it decides to crash you have to do it again which might might not have happened a couple times during the course of this video so we're finishing it up right now and did this video here we're just doing very we do you do move brush tweaks now it's very minut things i mean you know there are some silhouette changes but they're very small because overall the design is is for this part of the stage it's where we want it to be and in the next study we're going to look more into design stuff because at this stage here I mean this sign is it's working all right but we want it to be stronger and you know we're we're kind of limited in in 3d a little bit yeah we feel like and it's a like we talked about earlier in the video combining 3d and 2d elements it's really a good way especially when you're designing and concept in yeah and getting feedback a lot of people as well is very important you know so the model here will change based on based on feedback from other people based on feet are from based on Mort and I evaluating it and yeah we just keep an open mind about and trying to make the design as strong as possible and trying to make it fit original vision yeah and then don't try to like get too attached yeah don't get too attached to things it's like yeah if you can critically evaluate your own stuff it'll it'll be better for it yeah it really will

Channel: ArtStation

Views: 369,746

Keywords: flippednormals, ZBrush, Sculpting, MODO, Photoshop

Id: 6BrpCrBhK3Q

Length: 57min 32sec (3452 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Feynt]

Not entirely a furry thing, but the video goes over a lot of anatomy discussion in the creation of the monster that's sculpted. If you know your base anatomy for any creature, you can translate it to others very easily. This monster makes use of a lot of human anatomy (like furries), but it's a very inhuman creature. Still, once you know it, you can distort it however you like and make something unique but believable.