How to Improve Your Face Sculpting in ZBrush - Real time Sculpting

hi this is henny from flipnormals and in today's video we will go through how we can take this model here which was donated by the rebound on our discord and turn it into this model here this is about an hour and 20 minutes 10 minutes or so of real time sculpting showing you all the steps on how to go from here to here we will cover things like proportion anatomy how to create good shapes and generally a lot of general sculpting techniques so i really hope that you'll enjoy this video and i hope that you can improve your sculpting a lot now before we get into the sculpting and see brush if you're interested in improving your sculpting skills significantly i highly recommend our introduction to sculpting course where we cover basically everything you need to know in order to get properly good at sculpting this is intended for people who are new to sculpting but also people who've been doing this for a while where we go through how to sculpt this dwarf start to finish starting from a sphere ending up with a final result going through a lot of different anatomy and talking about a lot of interesting topics such as compression and stretching gesture both internal and external gesture and going through very common mistakes that you find in a lot of different scopes so i really think that you'll enjoy our introduction to sculpting course now let us jump into zbrush starting off in zbrush we have our model to the right and we have a reference to the left this is very easy to do if you have only two sub tools so i have the model and i have the anatomic model and if you go to transform and then we go down here to split screen and i'm just put this into my interface here so this just becomes really easy this is also why we don't have eyes on the model because that would mess that system up but a pretty nice and simple setup for now really good if you have some kind of scan reference or something like this so we are going to be treating this model in a few different stages the first stage is going to be proportion we are going to go through a lot of universal proportions which you can find in most people it's really useful to have a general sense of proportion before we really get too deep into into anything else if you can take a model up to a decent level with universal proportions everything is going to be so much easier you can of course line your models up to general reference and and of course that's advisable in general but it's a huge benefit to be able to do it without the reference meaning that you can take something up to like some kind of generic level like this without too much reference and then you can use the reference to real like perfect the model instead of using it as a crutch the second step is going to be actually refining the surface shapes because you can see we have quite a lot of rough surface shapes here we just have to unify that and make that look really nice and pretty the third step is going to make it feel nice and anatomical here you can see we have the bony landmarks we have soft tissue we have specific shapes of the eyes and mouth and nose and such so we'll of course get that into the model as well and then the last thing we are going to be doing is we're going to give him more of a design meaning that in this case here we have a pretty refined anatomy model but it's not a good design it's a generic design and we want this to feel more like a person so that's where we're putting in more of a character design into him and making him feel more like a actual person so let's get started with some proportions we are just going to draw proportions on this guy here and now if we imagine that the head is a general cube like so then these are these are general proportions these are not these are not true for every single person but they're true enough they're true to the point that they're useful if you draw this around in half like so this is where you can see the eyes they're around the center mark this is at least for an adult person this is different for children they're also sometimes a little bit above the the halfway point but they're not like up here or anything this is a huge beginner mistake and here you can actually see this on this person here where they're way more if the halfway point is here they're way more up here so we really have to make sure that we um that we put him around in the center and now if we split this again in half like so now the nose is around in the halfway point from here and if we split this in half like this part here and the mouth is between the halfway point and like one third of the point up here and there is a lot of variation here of course but that's generally a fairly true rule now the width of the nose is around the same width of the eye which means the um the corners of the nose here would line up pretty well with the corners of the eye and i found this to be a really handy landmark this just makes it feel a lot more universal and then we have about another width of an eye over here as well so we have around five widths of the eyes so that's one two three four and then five like so if i remove all these proportions now because it's getting a bit messy for the ears as well there is a lot of variation here when it comes to ears but a general rule is around where the uh the eyebrow is to around where the the nose is in this case here for my anatomy model is a little bit smaller but uh and also this does very fair but as well but you can also say from lead the eye as well but it's around this general area meaning that it's not going to be like uh like up here for instance it's not going gonna align with like the i here and it's also not going to be like like this large as well so it's like a pretty good general landmark to have so these are some of the general proportions that we have to get right if you can get some you know general universal proportions in your model that's going to help you so so much so the biggest one here is that the eyes are way too large so we can just move them down like so with the move brush or we can use the pinch brush as well this will just like this is basically just a shrink brush and then we just need to move them down you usually will have to move it further down than you think move it down so it's a little bit uncomfortable and then you move it up as well so eyes in a better spot we'll move the the nose in as well and the only thing i'm concerned about now is the overall proportion of the face i'm not really thinking about anything else i'm just thinking about what just what we covered before going this doing this halfway point halfway point and around like the one third mark it's one width here this goes up here this goes up here and it's around one nose wide so these are some general useful proportions and that's that's how i'm really thinking about this for now we also have to make sure the neck is a lot thicker as well and a general note whenever you're sculpting it's very very easy to just stick to one view like this without thinking about the other views now you know he's starting to look a lot better but if you rotate him you can see that he has all sorts of issues so we really have to make sure that the model in general is is working from all angles you're not doing a drawing from the front view which is might be tempting to do you're doing a sculpt which is fundamentally a three-dimensional object and something that we're missing as well which is really really important to get in i know this is more of a quicker study but ears you have to get in the ears very early on and the reason for that is it you cannot make it look like a person if it's missing the ears it just looks like a really odd character so make sure you get the ears in and the way i prefer to do the ears is to just mask off this area here and then control clicking like so and then using the move brush and just pushing this out like so polycount wise we are around 1 million now and that's what the model was provided as and honestly that's fine and when it comes to the ears i think about the ears as you have a the hole here in the skull and this fits really well with the angle here so it always goes from the angle of the of the jaw and then you get this nice little thing going out like so so it means that this is another you really useful way of thinking about proportion it does not work in a sense that the ear is like over here in the jaws here you don't have any gap between these these are always connected up sometimes a little bit forward sometimes a little bit behind but generally is always at that angle something to consider as well when doing ears is you really have to make sure that you push it in on the back here so just invert in the mask and think about how thin the ears actually are it's very important to make sure that you you get the thinness off the ears so cool already now he feels more like a character we also just have to push the ears in a little bit a common mistake as well is to do this where the ears are pushed way way too far forward so we just have to um just have to push them in a little bit if you're from the front view you're probably not going to be seeing all of the like the entire shape of the ears you're not gonna see them like so they're gonna be a little bit obscured by the cheekbones so proportion wise we are in a much much much better spot now so cool uh also i didn't mention this but i was doing this rudely already and talking about it was i was reducing the size of the the body as well okay cool and then let us treat the surface now there are a few different ways we can treat the surface and i'll show you two ways the first one is that you can go over with the clay blood brush without any alphas on it and then we can just go a bit crazy on it just like go over like so and you can see how the shape just softens off right away this is a bit more of an advanced technique because you have to understand how the clay brushes work and while i do really recommend that another technique is to straight up use the smooth brushes but instead of just using the regular smooth check it out we have a smooth stronger brush you can find this if you go to lightbox and then we go to brush and here we should have the smooth brushes which is right here and then we have smooth stronger right here so if you double click on this this is just going to replace the shift key a little pro tip and zebra as well like a lot of people don't know about the shift key isn't actually the smooth brush at all the shift key is just a modifier key for a brush which happens to be mapped to the smooth brush so you can map whatever you want to if you want like this chisel brush brush or the blob brush to the shift key that is totally fine so we are just going to go over this with smooth stronger smooth stronger is fantastic because particularly when we're working on higher poly counts like this it works really well it's really tricky to get good clean shapes with the smooth brush when you have something like a million polygons at least with a regular smooth brush but smooth stronger it just eats it up and we've been talking about in some from some of our earlier videos that you should generally avoid the smaller brush and that's because it destroys the shape and while that is true it and it does destroy the shape it's great if you understand how it works so if you if you're able to control the smooth brush then the smooth brush is fantastic it's a really good brush for quickly unifying a lot of a lot of shapes i just don't want to see you doing this where you just smooth out everything smooth locally the way i'm thinking about it now for instance is that here we have a shape of the nose so i'm kind of in my mind masking it off like so blurring the mask a little bit and like i'm not actually doing this in zbrush i'm just doing it mentally and then i'm just like softening it off so this is how i'm doing when it comes to the mouth for instance i'm trying to preserve the top line of the like the different interior lines of the of the mouth here so that we can just do this and then we preserve the border edges so cool already now it looks a lot better we also will just have to simplify this whole region down because this is quite messy like anatomically doesn't this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense so we just need to simplify this down a crazy amount so it is really important to treat the surface like you really understand how you make good clean shapes so just going over this sculpting is really all about getting clean shapes anatomy is a tool for getting clean shapes is a tool for getting the correct good shapes but you could have perfectly correct anatomy meaning that you could have like all the bustles and the bones and such in the correct spot but if if the model looked like the original model here that we picked up meaning that it it proportion-wise is correct but the surface was as messy as that wouldn't matter it would still be a really rough sculpt so it's really important that you that you understand that sculpting is fundamentally about getting clean shapes so don't just get locked into the oh i have to have perfect anatomy it's really not just about that so now we are in a much better spot so then what we can focus on is we can start to get into the more of the facial anatomy and this is really important to get right like i just mentioned it's not everything but it is a lot it is really important to get this in so what i'm looking at here when it comes to facial anatomy the first thing i'm thinking about is the bones you have to think about the bony structure whenever you're doing anything when it comes to well anything with sculpting so the areas we're concerned about would be like getting in cheekbones getting in like the glabella area here getting in the overall skull basically anything that is directly as shown in the scope these are referred to as bony landmarks you have of course a like a spine underneath all this but that's not really a bony landmark at least not the majority of it because it's not seen directly so it's really important to establish these areas here and it's also really important to establish what's going to be made out of bone and what's going to be made out of flesh because if you if you can if you can define the surface simply by like to find the material of the surface simply by the sculpting technique everything is going to be so much easier the sculpt is going to look so much more natural so what are we looking for here well specifically we have to get in the uh the bony landmarks here so we really have to just make sure that we get in the the cheekbones like so and we have to make sure that we get in the uh the skull up here i mean everything is a skull right but just to make sure we get in these marks here this becomes really important one way you can think about it is that um if you if you were to like touch different parts of your face and like wobble the finger around like if you were to touch like this area here and you try to like wobble it around you feel there's a little bit of skin sliding but it's a firm area same like up here as well like the skin is sliding a little bit because there's always a skin on top and there's muscle on top as well but it's still a really firm area but if you try to like touch like the nose here and wobble that around you can feel how much it actually wobbles side to side you know like this is probably going to do like properly like this well this on top here is going to do a little bit side to side and the reason for that is these areas here are all bone well this here is all cartilage same here as well if you do for lips as well you can just see how much something deforms so that's really really important to understand whenever we are sculpting a realistic person so i'm just going to change the brush here to alpha 06 just with a clay builder brush this is how i tend to work most of the time and then we're just getting in the cheekbones and we will definitely keep revisiting proportion as we're doing this as well it's not like you do proportion and now you're done with proportion and then you do just the anatomy and you're done with the anatomy no it's a non-linear process so everything i'm doing now this is just um this is just getting in the bone just getting in all the the bony landmarks really just making sure that we have these parts in here getting in the chin as well so this part here this is most like a fleshy area and this part here is mostly like a like a bony area and i'm going to work in a pretty planar fashion i'm going to get in quite a lot of actual planes into the face and this just makes it a lot easier meaning you have a lot more structure into like in in your work and um it's a lot easier to to like know exactly where what's going on in that area like don't be shy really just get in there and get the shapes in there and then in this area you just have to carve this end carve this in more than you think you do like so and here's something interesting happens right here we are going from bone to cartilage so this part here is bone and this part here is is all cartilage and that becomes really important because this this changes how like the proportions of the area and it changes really how you treat the whole area and particularly if you start to deform the the skull as well like and you do this you know by by by moving your your face around like you you start to talk you blink all these kind of things it's deforming the face you're breathing like if you're breathing like your nostrils are going to it's going to get bigger and smaller well this area up here is not because it's bone so just getting in these parts here and just being pretty firm whenever you're doing anything like this and when you're like you're doing feedback either on somebody else's work or you're doing feedback on your own work just be brutal about it don't care what's been put down just just think about how can you improve this the most and and then you'll deal with like if there's a specific design or something then you know you try to get that in get that in a bit later but first you have to make sure it feels more anatomical so we will have to get this ship here in as well this is the nasolabial fold and this is a shape that is really important to get him everyone will have the nasolabial fold to um to some extent some people for some people it's really clear like it's just like a crazy shape and in some people there's just like a little hint of it a big deciding factor here is your h so i'm just gonna carve this in but a common mistake as well is to carve it right here where the mouth goes you have to leave a little bit of room for it cool so now we carve this in and a way of doing this can be that you straight up draw shapes into it like here where we have some of the facial muscles or some of the facial planes at least and you can you can straight up just draw them in like almost like you're drawing in with a um like um like a pencil on top of the surface like it shouldn't feel like a drawing at the end but it's a good idea to do it in the beginning because that way you make sure that you uh that you you're getting in very specific shapes and then you have to of course make him feel volumetric now a huge huge beginner mistake when it comes to the nose maybe one of the biggest ones is if we were to i'm just gonna move this other way now if you look at the nose here and look at the nose here as a nice little box can help to turn things into boxes and now notice where the where the the lip here on top of the lip actually goes into it it goes in here around like almost like the one third mark this is like the halfway mark it's almost like a one around one third it goes in here in this case it goes at the very end which means there's a lot of volume missing here so we really have to make sure that this is being pushed out so let us do that real quick just straight up just take this entire area and just push it all out but now what you're seeing is we're not just pushing we're just pushing the the whole thing out we're not pushing in the well we just want to push the um really the the insertion point here we don't want to push the the nostril so just make sure you push the nostrils in as well it's really important that the nostrils actually goes properly into the face all right and we'll just keep this loose we'll just keep this loose for now and of course we'll go ahead and define it later on and then here i have to soften this whole area off a little bit and just make this like make this a little bit more volumetric and still same poll account you my general rule for adding more topology is whenever you have run out of resolution meaning that you can't get in the shapes you want because the topology keeps stretching that's a general useful a rule of thumb i can't give you a specific number of the poll count i can't be like well at this stage you need a million at the other station you 200 000 because it depends so heavily what if you're just doing the face obviously you require like one fourth of the topology as you do for the rest and what if you have uh a whole door so you know like it just depends on case the case and also like on on what you're sculpting as well if you're sculpting more like a like a young woman you probably need less topology than you do if you're sculpting like some kind of like gnarly monster or something like that just because there's more shapes to describe the eyes are stupidly important to get right if if you get everything else in the body right but the eyes are not looking correct then it doesn't matter it literally does not matter because it's going to look like a like a bad sculpt get the eyes right and everything else follows but mess up the eyes and you will just have a bad sculpt now we will have to add a sphere to this but i can't do it yet because you know i'm doing my little uh little trick here so if i have more than two subtools uh it's going to mess up a little bit so i'm going to do my best approximation of an eyeball and then we'll uh we'll put an eyeball later on where we rely less on the anatomy model the way i think about the eyeball or the eye is that we have a shape that goes like so we have first we have the the the upper eyelid and that goes like so and notice how it goes over the bottom eyelid it goes like so here there's a plane change and some people this is very clear and some people you barely see it then we have the the bottom eyelid and that has a very clear plane change right here so this goes like so and this goes underneath the uh the upper eyelid also something good to consider here there's a very clear plane change when it comes to the eye really make sure that you get the plane change into your into your scope this is crazy important then we have the corner of the eye as well that's right here this is really important to get right then we have a basically like a ball shape wrapping around the whole thing this just wraps beautifully around the eyeball and then down here as well you see you have a little bit of the skull sticking through and then it goes down like so then it goes up like so and that is how i like to think about the eye so let's just clear this and then let's get started with the eye here so now what i'll do is i'm going to go down here and just i'm going to remove the uh the uh the split screen view and then i'm just going to move the whole thing in then i'll just do a little bit of a sand checking here just so that it fits a little bit better like uh we don't have to like fit it perfectly to the anatomy model it's just nice to do a little bit of sound checking before we get too far along with this but i do recommend that you don't just project something like this from a scan or a model i highly highly highly recommend that you do your very best to make sure that this feels like a uh like a character by yourself and then you can do these kind of sound checks but you can see we're in a pretty good spot so let's just get this back here i just want to do a little bit of sandy check before we got a little bit uh before we got ahead of ourselves so the way i'm going to do the eyes now is first i'm going to make sure that we have you see the curve here really important that we get this curve in curve here as well so just make sure we get this nice nice curve because remember it wraps around an eyeball and an eyeball has the word ball in it which you know should indicate that it's pretty curved but yeah we can't do it properly until we have an actual eyeball in the uh in in like in the cavity here and we'll do that in not too long so cool now we have it uh it's wrapping around a little bit then i'm just going to give a little bit of geometry right here for the corner of the eye this is really important and if you're missing this the eye is going to feel a little bit weird and then i'm just preparing the volume a little bit just preparing the volume for the actual lids the more you prepare it like this the easier it's going to be to sculpt and then with the dam standard brush i just have this set to the hot key one two three and five these are my main brushes so uh here i can just very quickly change between the brushes so with dam standard i just carve in this this is what i was talking about before but it's like you're drawing in the shape you can of course sculpt it in as well with the clay brushes but i find this to be really handy because i get very specific shapes this way and then i'm going to go in here and i'm just going to get this line in here like this is this line here like this one here oops this is this line going around it like so and then we need the highly specific plane change we're talking about like this one here and this will definitely get a lot easier once we have an actual eyeball to wrap this around what i want to make sure that i do is that i make sure that i have a proper plane here and whenever i'm doing planes like this i tend to just you do this with the standard brush you you have so many planar tools in zbrush like the trim dynamic and h h-polish and such and those are of course fantastic but i find it to be more useful to define them first with the um the standard brush and then i'm going in later on to really like make them properly planar using the uh the aforementioned planar tools it's cool now we have some slightly better eyes and i just have to make sure that we move the the cheekbones down a little bit just so we have a bit more space in here so just pushing this in and doing like so and then i'm just going to simplify this volume into like one nice and clean shape like so cool and uh just adding a bit more volume to the shape like so something to think about as well when it comes to sculpting eyes is like you can draw like one point here and then you can draw one point here at either end of the corner in this case here we're doing pretty generic guys so this line is pretty straight but in some people this line goes like this and this so like they have really like like they have eyes which goes at this angle and some people have eyes that go at a different angle like they go have way more of like slanted eyes like this and this can change to look drastically and it's a really interesting way of sculpting when you're just you're just aware of these two points instead of trying to like move stuff up and down you're just like oh this point here goes down this point here goes up it just changes the look very very quickly on your characters a note as well which is really easy to forget is there's actually a fair bit of volume in here when it comes to a quick discussion regarding this actually why there is volume here when it comes to general muscles in the body you know you have pretty big muscles on your chest and in your arms and such and the reason for that is not because you need to lift up your hand like your bicep will lift up your hand for sure so do you know you can grab an apple and eat or something but it's not because the hand is inherently really heavy it's because you you're lifting something heavy in your hand you're holding something really heavy in your hand you have to lift that up and that is why you have big muscles hopefully in your arm because the thing you're holding might be like 50 kilos in the face though that doesn't really work the same way like we have some muscles you know going from like here and down like so and you know all these kind of things going like so and that's like to move the lips around but only the lips like it's not what you have in your lips it's not like it's the lips plus like 30 kilos of something it's just moving this flesh up here to here which means that the facial muscles are tiny and you can basically only see them when you get old or in facial expressions like if you're pulling something like some very specific facial expressions you normally can't actually see too many of the actual of the facial muscles directly the the face is mostly bone fat and then skin and facial expression or facial muscles become more important once you're dealing with facial expressions uh some exceptions to this is where you do have to actually have legitimate force in your body is if you're chewing you know the jaw goes from here to up because you know you need to properly chew something you might have like something like a nut or some something really hard to chew and in order to do this you need some some pretty strong muscles and you have one muscle that goes from here to here then you have one muscle that goes from like up here and this is one a lot of people don't know about and it goes down like so and this becomes really important because that means there is a fair bit of volume in these areas because you can see this right there's a fair bit of volume and if this was just to bring jaw open it would just be like a tiny little thing but it's not so that's pretty important and that was a very long way of saying that up here there's a fair bit of volume so just make sure that we get this volume in another interesting point is if you look at the cheekbone as well the widest point of the cheekbone is here so that's important as well we will just have to make sure that's the widest point and one day i will learn how to draw arrows that's going to be a very nice day but that day is not today my friends and now you can see that he he gets a very strong jaw here i'm just going to soften off the jaw and i'm just going to push in a lot of these cheekbones here it's just so it becomes a little bit more balanced as well so cool you know he's starting to look like a person and then we have to get in some of the uh the muscles as well and neck we have some general muscles we have to get in we have this guy here which is the sternocleidomastoid which is a mouthful but it really just means goes from sternum to the clavicle to the mastoid process which is a guy up here so we just have to get it down here and what we're missing now is we're missing the clavicles so we just have to make sure we have the clavicles and then we also have the trapezius that goes like so so if you don't have the bones it's really hard to actually properly sculpt so i'm going to simplify this whole thing down like so and same thing with the uh with the neck as well just simplify the whole thing i i like to think about the neck as like fundamentally a uh a cylinder that that simplifies a lot for me because there's so much stuff going on in neck but if you can just make it into a cylinder like so it's basically a cylinder that inserts itself like diagonal like so that that is that is like a pretty good way for me to think about it so i'm just gonna move this in a little bit and uh just simplifying this down a little bit more still have some of the messiness from the original sculpt and then from here i'm going to get in and just draw in some clavicles and the clavicles will have to get curved because if these were to be straight and you would like shrug you would like kill yourself because then if this was straight and you were to like do this you would completely strangle yourself so think about like this think about it as a uh as a shape that has a lot of curve in it like so but yeah this is not a neck tutorial i want to focus mostly on the face but now we have that that means we can get the um the trapezius muscles going which i'm just gonna really really quick get some quick stuff in here this goes from the back from back of the head here and then goes in here and it goes into the clavicles and then i'm going to get in the sternocleidomastoid as well muscle names are wacky some names are based on the origin and insertion points some are like this sternocleidomastoid some are based on the shape it makes like the trapezius which is torpedoid and some are just like some random greek things like who knows when it comes to it so anatomy names are pretty tricky if only there was like a nice system for this that would have been realized like a unified anatomy name system but alas there is not there is only memorization cool then we have to work a little bit on the lips as well and the way i like to think about the lips is we have a line going through here and this is broken up by a few different shapes so we have a balloon which goes like here then we have balloon that goes here we have a balloon that goes here and this will look something like this this and this then on the bottom just removing this now we have a balloon that goes here and a balloon that goes here and there's also like a sheet here connecting those two balloons so this looks you can see here the sheet but it looks like so like so and you have a nice little sheet here only on the bottom lip so the way i'm going to do this is i'm going to simply just sculpt this in with the um or rather draw them in using the the damn standard brush and then just really making sure we have a nice separation here then in the corner of the mouth like so it's really important that we properly just like push this corner in this is a really big beginner mistake where you don't properly push this volume in and then i'm going to get this little like sheet here in and this is going to just look like this and i'm going to make it a bit more square as well i find that the lips are a bit more square than you think and just pushing this in a little bit or continuing this whole thing and then unifying it and then we'll do the uh the two balloons so like this and this is like a symbol meaning that this is not true it's a simplification of it but it's a useful simplification and then i'm going to just draw on top like so just draw this line in and well i'm just going to draw in this and it's really important that these two meet at the corner if they don't meet at the corner you will have some weird looking looking lips and then we just have to simplify this down like soft and off in this case with the smooth brush cool starting to get there then for lips as well we have a shape going over like so this is essentially a connection of a lot of different muscles going around here and they all go into like one point basically so this is like a node just going on top here and this goes over and we just have to make sure this goes underneath as well so there's a shape tucking over it and there's a shape tucking in underneath it like so and if you get this right you will get really nice and natural looking looking lips here as well you can see a bit of a mistake which is a pure shape mistake if you look at look at it here you see it goes in out like so and it goes up it just looks a bit wobbly so i just have to make sure that i unify this whole shape it's really important at this level at this stage of the model that we have really good and clean shapes all right cool i'll just simplify the nasolabial fold down a little bit and in some people you can really really see this whole thing and some people it just kind of disappears around here all right it's getting somewhere and here's a line i prefer to get in as well this is a line going around like so to sew and you can do this as a pretty straight line this essentially gives you the plate change off the nose so this means we have a nice clean plane change like so so just get this shape in here cool just going to move the eyes out a little bit like so and then i'm going to go over a lot of this and i'll unify it so now in general we we have a pretty decent anatomical sculpt it's not perfect but it feels more like a credible person or rather you know it could exist uh it feels way too anatomical though in the sense that it feels like somebody's looked at an anatomy book and they've just replicated what they've been seeing instead of looking at a person in the street and trying to recreate that person so that's really important to do now before we get into to that we still have a few things to to define one of them being the ears and one of them being the nose because the nose hasn't got any love whatsoever so the way well it's got a little bit of love it needs a bit more the way i like to think about it is as a like triangular shape where we just make this into a nice little triangle like so and now we can push the the tip down a little bit and then i'm just going to push in the nostrils it's really important to get the nostrils into the nose and now we are reaching the point where this mood stronger might be doing us a disservice because now you can see it just destroys everything here so we want to be a little bit careful with that we can always switch back to the regular smooth brush and here you can see how i like to think about the nose in terms of the plane changes it's really handy to simplify the nose because there's so much stuff going on in the nose so here this is this is old bone so whatever is up here is bone then here we have cartilage so this is all cartilage and you can simplify it down like so and here we have some specific shapes going in like so you can see this as well if you were to google something like nose drawing diagram and then you can see essentially what's going on here but i want to have this shape here go in like so i want to have a nice little plane change here then i want to have this thing here go a go across like so and then it should go in and tuck in here and then we have this shape here going up like so and then we have the plane changes here so that's how i'm thinking about it now like the reason i'm doing this draw over is because yes it's useful to just see the sculpt but it's much much much more useful if you understand how i'm thinking because otherwise you you won't be able to recreate it yourself this is not a sculpting demo this is hopefully a tutorial for teaching you how to sculpt more natural looking faces so i'm just getting in these plane changes here and the cool thing is most people will have these exact plane changes they're just bigger or smaller or a proportion wise they're a bit different but once you understand these plane changes or rather not just understanding them but memorizing them once you've done this a fair few times it's going to get much much much easier to sculpt noses because then what you can do you can just keep on moving these different plane changes around and you can get you're going to get a completely different noses so just moving this up so now this is where you can see right like this part here is not going to change a whole lot uh due to it being bone but now what you can do you can if you just were to move this you can like move the cartilage around like you can make this cartilage look much bigger you can make it look much smaller you can make this shape here go here here here you can do so much with the actual cartilage that's one of the reasons this is really useful to know what something is made out of and then we have the philtrum the philtrum is this little guy here that's still a little bit in from the original model and that's cool so the philtrum is just a specific shape on the top here and everyone will have the philtrum 2 to some extent all right cool and then we have the ears as well and then we almost have a consistent sculpt now some stuff we have to consider here is the ears will have the same the same building blocks basically every single ear will have the same building blocks and one of them is this shape going around like so so we just have to make sure this shape is here and then we have this little cartilage then we have this which is more like fat which goes down like so and then we have you can simplify this basically into a few different shapes we have one shape going here and then we have a essentially one shape that goes in like so and this becomes pretty important to memorize because you can't just do random shapes for the ears you have to be quite specific when it comes to the ears and like we mentioned in the beginning one of the biggest beginner mistakes is that the ears are way too thick this is one of those cases where you should just touch your ears and you should just start to feel how incredibly delicate they actually are so i prefer to like go around here and just really carve this stuff here and like so and then we can just start to draw these shapes into it like so and then we can straighten this like hollow it out here i'm just drawing like in a circular fashion like this like it's like i'm doing this so just hollowing this whole thing out and this is where you would have the hole for the this goes into the brain right like this is where you actually perceive sounds so this is really important to get right so just hollow this whole thing out and then we will start to get in these shapes and then we have these shapes going on this is the anti-helix which is the opposite of the helix this is gent helix and this is helix and then we go up like so and you can see i haven't dynamesh it's still the same polygon even though it's getting a little stretched here because of uh you know we're adding a whole new feature like we're adding the ears so the cool thing is really that like the ears are quite unique so there's you can probably identify a person by the ears but it's the proportion of these different parts it's not like one person is just going to have like an extra like helix or something it's the same thing with like the face right like everyone will have the same general building blocks but then they have uh the proportion is different the skin type is a bit different all these kind of things will just affect the final result but um if you understand this it becomes so much easier because then you can instead of just going oh crap i don't know how to sculpt this guy's ear and you're trying to look at all the different like drawing charts online you're just like alright cool i know how to i know what to look for cool so we're in okay spot now and i'm just gonna make the ear a little bit bigger and some people the antihelix this shape here breaks the silhouette so it goes out like so and in some people it doesn't and the the frustrating thing about sculpting ears is you're sculpting like you're googling like air and you're trying to sculpt like a generic ear because you assume every ear is kind of the same and you scroll one ear and then you you need you need it from a different angle as well and you're like ah man this doesn't look at all like the first one did and now you're you're trying to sculpt just one nice cohesive ear but you just end up with amalgamation of like three four completely different ears so cool now we have an ear which is an okay spot just gonna push it in and out a little bit like so all right cool so that means that we essentially have anatomically every single feature down so now we have to make sure the character feels more designed now i'm not gonna make this like completely change the design i'm still gonna gener generally work with what we have but i'm gonna give it a little bit more character so what i'll do is i'm gonna change the split screen down here and then i'm just gonna hide the planes and then we can append and then we can append a sphere and here we have a nice little sphere just see where this is in space if this happens and stuff is just completely weird in space then what you can do you can select the primitive you can go down to tool deformation and then unify now this should pop up in this in space somewhere so this is like a little trick if if you get completely lost so what i'm doing now is i'm moving this to the screen left side not character right side and i'm just gonna make sure this is in the center hold on to control and shift to snap it i will assume you know how to do this because this is just literally moving a sphere the size of an eyeball is around two and a half centimeters which is pretty much bang on one inch in freedom units for those people watching so um we will just put them in like so and then i'm just gonna use mirror and weld you can find mirror and weld as well under tool geometry modify topology and then we have miren weld right here and you can see i was actually in a pretty good spot you know it's not terrible and it's a bit of tweaking but eyeballing it actually worked pretty well and that was not a deliberate pun as well i'm sorry so just pushing this in and what's really important is that it actually wraps around the eyeball so i'm going from a few different angles now and just really trying to make sure it wraps around and then i'm going to go to lightbox at the comma key go to brush and actually i'm not going to use this i'm just going to hold down the shift key and then i'm just going to go to the smooth brush and just find this blue brush which is right here so this just means i can now use a smooth brush without my mesh being reduced to absolute rubble and then i'm just going to soften off some of these areas just to simplify them down a little bit and that's a bit too much this is what i was talking about when it comes to the smooth rush being the destroyer worlds like it actually removes way too much sometimes so i just want to make sure that i go in here and i control it a bit more so what i need to do now is i need to unify this because obviously now this looks like an anatomical person and we don't want an anatomical person we want a person so that means we can have to go over the whole thing and just soften things off and the way i like to think about this is not like just go over and smooth the whole thing but you go over this with the um the clay builder brush reduce the intensity down to between like two and ten depending on the pole account and then we just go over this and we just start to to uh work up the shapes we just go over and we just refine this is not a destruction pass we're not destroying the form we are refining the form and again i'm just going over the shape meaning if the shape goes like this i'm working like this this gives me a really nice and clean surface so i'm unifying everything and i'm trying to make the shape stronger wherever i'm going over now i'm trying to make that area look better so this is in no way just a destruction pass so you can't you can't substitute going in here and refine the shape just with the smooth brush same here as well we definitely want to see some plane changes but you don't want to see like all the plane changes off the face like off the skull rather and some people as well you can barely even see the supporting landmarks and in some people it's so apparent so this is why you need a real world reference whenever you're sculpting a a realistic human well if you're sculpting anything really but you just you can't just make a generic human from scratch because the amount of variation between people is insane same here as well just getting rid of this plane change you still want a little bit of it here but we just want to really like soften it off and no smooth brush here just good old clay build up with alpha o6 and a low intensity and just working up the lips a little bit and we'll definitely need more resolution at some point because we can't we can't take a a full character up from like at a million polys we probably need one more resolution which would make it around four million the reason you know that is because subdivision adds four times it doesn't double it which is pretty easy to assume that when you subdivide you increase it by twice but each polygon goes from being like this to being like this just a little quick side note here so just going over and refining the shape and here as well we have a we have a fat pad here which is really important to get to get right because in young people you won't really see too much here but in old people or aging people i guess everyone's aging to some degree but then this here will really go down so some people you can really see this thing just being all the way down like so and you can barely even see their top eyelets in this guy here we aren't really going to do too much of that we're just going to add a little bit but uh it's really important to understand these general plane changes and that's what we're doing in like this right with the anatomy model just getting this shape inherent and then i'm just going to carve this in a little bit further and then for the the eyes i want to carve in a bit of a like an iris here the iris is the colored part off of the eye and then you have the pupil that is the black part of the eye and the pupil is basically nothing like meaning it's literally black because of the lack of of anything there and now he looks pretty creepy so let's just move this a little out to the side and move a bit up like so and now you can see he looks a bit more like a person right away if you were to do a quick render as well he's hopefully gonna look a little bit more like a person as well it's pretty important to think about the real world whenever you're sculpting people have pupils people have eyeballs these kind of things are just really important because it's so easy to sculpt something and then it just doesn't look right and you cannot for life of it figure out why it doesn't look right well maybe the whole thing doesn't look right because the size of the pupils is far too large and you know you have the the best shapes in the world like it's it's a michelangelo skull but he looks high as a kite because his pupils are like absolutely massive right so you just have to consider these things really really small and subtle things can have huge ramifications on your sculpt all right just making this a little bit wider and moving these out just a little bit one thing we have to address about a bit as well is the corner of the eye as well that was not really properly done i just kind of threw in some polygons here i really want to make sure that that's working and just you know get in this shape here and then just getting in this shape here where the corner of the eye is and this is not going to be absolutely perfect you know this is going to be a pretty quick sculpt you know this is just me sculpting real time but probably about an hour or so in total so um hour 10 maybe so uh it's more to for you to get an idea how i would fix a sculpt like the beginning scope instead of really knowing how to sculpt every single thing to perfection here though i want to make sure this is more even like i said get the eyes right you really really don't want to rush the eyes and the eyes look strangely feminine now and the reason for that is that they look like this they just have a nice curve to them and i want to make them a bit more like classical like a bit more like my glandular like so i'm going to give it a plane change right there so i'm just doing a bit like this and a bit of a plane change like so and just making the eye a little bit larger as well or the actual eyelid as well a little larger all right cool so then i'm going to get a few wrinkles in the forehead and because right now this is just pure bone so uh i want to get in some of these wrinkles and the way i'm going to do this is i'm going to simply just carve them in now i'm going to use symmetry for this right in the beginning this week and like block them in and then i'll work on top without symmetry and trying to integrate the wrinkles a bit as well and just making sure these shapes here continue like so i'll just move this down a little bit as well i do as much work as i possibly can with symmetry and then i'll remove symmetry uh later on to to to break it up and then i do i can do a fair bit of sculpting without any symmetry on top at all but uh i prefer just to do as much as you can and the reason is is purely the fact that it's twice as fast the result tends actually to look better if you work without symmetry so if that's your goal then it's a good idea to work without um to work without symmetry at least you know do some studies of it but uh definitely the first stages should be done with some dream all right and just unifying some of these shapes here and i just want to push this in a little bit as well up here because this usually goes a bit more like up and then a bit inwards if you look at our not model you can see what happened here you see it goes up and then in and then out in and then out so i just want to have a bit more of that and it's very dangerous to assume that you're just sculpting a generic person and like you have a skull and this is just a generic skull and all skulls look like this and obviously that's not true because you can look at going out into the street and you can see so many people that look completely different and that's one of the reasons is because their skull shape is completely different i'm just going to make the eyes a little bit bigger as well because they're a little bit small to me and that means i'll have to go in and i'll just have to go in and scale up the eyes as well like the actual eyeballs and just pushing a little bit closer all right cool and then i'm just going to i'm just going to age them up a little bit so i'm just going to add a few more wrinkles around here some of these wrinkles here will just follow through like so some more wrinkles here and uh let's just wrinkle up his ellipse as well like you'll have to wrinkle up this lip anyway simply because there aren't really any there's really any variation in these slips so far and we can just soften this off a little bit as well cool and then here i'm just going to add a lot of volume because we're missing a lot of volume in here right now so i'm just going to soften off the jaw a little bit and just adding volume to this whole region so you can see the the vast majority of the changes to the model will happen in like you know something like the first 20 30 minutes and then the important or the changes from here is of course important but it becomes a little bit more like incremental where instead of going from like one minute to the next huge changes it's more like from uh it becomes like 10 minutes and then there's you change huge changes and then you have like an hour to an hour and then like a day to a day where you know you can see visible changes once you've been working on a model like this for a few days you you can barely see differences from day to day though it's definitely there it just becomes a little bit less all right cool i'm gonna subdivide that just means ctrl d and just straight up subdivide the model and this gives me a lot more resolution it gives me exactly four times and that means we have almost four million polygons and this means that i have a bit more resolution to refine the model with like some stuff i want to do is i want to go in here and i want to unify the notes a little bit because i could talk about you don't necessarily see all of these different shapes they're there but they're often always covered by skin you know everything is covered by skin when you say bony landmarks and in this case here cartilage there's still skin on top of it so you just have to make sure you can you really take that seriously i'm just going over the model as well like going over the nostrils here just trying to make the skin feel a little bit less elastic trying to make it feel a little bit heavier and here as well you can break up the skin under the mouth just by well straight up just breaking it up and just reducing this shape here a little bit it's there but it's less prominent like you always want to exaggerate stuff whenever you're you're blocking things in and then you'll you'll unify it it's much easier to to reduce something like something that was too strong there is to make something that was too weak stronger so i tend to just be a bit more brutal be a bit less subtle and then we can always unify this and move the ears up a little bit and you can see how much you how much damage you can definitely scoff like how much you can actually how much you can do in the sculpt just with the um the damn standard or with the the clipbuilder brushes so just evaluating the model from [Music] all different angles it's really important to evaluate the model from from different angles there are so many things that you're going to be able to see if you if you look at the model from a few different angles for instance here the cheekbones are too strong so i'm just going to unify them a little bit and i want to to round off this ship here a little bit as well and just push these out a little bit and push them in and just round off the face here or the skull here as well here's a little quick tip as well for how you can consider the the skull to be whenever a big mistake is that you make everything too square like you do this and then you like do this and this is such a common beginner mistake that we have to just address it the way you can think about it is it's almost like a helmet like we that's kind of what the skull is right you have a little brain in here and then the skull is there to protect the brain so think about it as an actual helmet like a motorcycle helmet imagine if you get hit here in the back and here it's nice and curved if you get hit here and like you fall on a motorcycle or something and this is now the force is now going to be distributed across the whole thing and that's that's really helpful because that means instead of this force which is you know this force being equal to one going to one point it's being distributed in like ten different points so it's at point one and point one and that means that you don't break your skull on the other hand over here if you were to be hit here all this force all the force would be absorbed into one point and that means if you get hit here you die because now it just cracks open like a watermelon so that's um bad so the way you can think about this is whenever you're designing anything try to think about making something that you know trying to make the characters survive a motorcycle crash that means you know you try to make everything nice and round and uh trying to make just you know properly unified try to avoid big areas like this try to avoid like rough corners like this sure they're definitely going to be some that are a bit uh a bit more square than others but just just try to think about that and that that's as it's gonna have two two effects here first off it's going to look better the sculpt is gonna feel a lot more natural but second off the design is going to is going to feel more realistic as well so just trying to make this feel a little bit more natural just going over this with a very low intensity and then we can just soften off some of these shapes as well like the thing is you don't want brush strokes in the end you want nice clean shapes and brush strokes can look nice you know they can they can work as like a texture thing if you want something a bit more stylized but end of the day you're using the clay brushes because they're fantastic for adding volume not because they're they're giving you the texture and the reason for that is that at least early on when you're sculpting it's so easy to get caught up in the brush stroke frenzy where you just you just tend to make everything brush stroke instead of trying to make good shapes so that therefore it can be a good idea to to properly like do a smoothing pass at the end and then of course once you become a bit more advanced then you can go in and you can go crazy with brush strokes you know brush strokes can really look super nice in the sculpt they can add a lot of texture just be aware that the most important thing is not the the sculptural texture it is the underlying shapes so cool now i'm going to go in here and i'm just going to add break up the sim tray a little and go up a subdivision level as well and now i'm just going to end with the clay blab and just getting in some of these and then we'll add some more diagonal shapes as well some people have almost like pure like vertical or diagonal lines like this and some people have uh almost it's almost like a 100 horizontal and then i'm just going in here and the way i think about wrinkles is like this it's like it goes oops not like that it goes like this then up and like this and that gives you very nice and organic wrinkles and it also means to continue a fair bit down here as well and sometimes they don't really connect but they kind of connect up with the eye wrinkles so just adding a bit more of this into it all right cool now our guy feels a lot more natural already and we have a nice uh we have more we have more resolution here so that's that's really nice because it allows us to add more more details into it and this is a definitely a good time to add more resolution because now we can see that we can squeeze out some more juice out of our sculpt but just don't add it like early on like it's really easy to add very way way way too much resolution early way too early on and here as well i find that there is often like a nice little texture or like a texture break up like a skin break up right here where the the the the uh the skin goes over the uh the cheekbones and it gives you this nice little texture feel which also means that you have a bit like a bit of like a triangle shape right here so like right here you often have a bit of a triangular shape where this goes into the nasolabial fold and this goes up here like so depends from person to person of course so just aging up a little bit just making sure this fat pad here feels a little heavier a quick way of of aging somebody is just to make their skin feel heavier basically you can try to you can try to just put the emphasis on the skin on the bottom meaning that if we have a cross section of like this shape here right now it's going like this but if you were to make it older you can make it like this you can just really like droop the skin of course based on gravity i'm just simplifying this a little bit i want to just uh remove the little bit of a line here on on the lips as well but not really remove it just like uh make it a bit more subtle some people have really really really apparent lines here and other people have barely anything so this again depends on individual variation something to note as well that kind of just happened automatically on the scope but sometimes there's a real struggle is there is a line here or like the um like the order of how the top and the bottom lip works is this is on top and then this is quite a bit below it so there's almost like there's a line here like a diagonal line like so a common beginner mistake is to make these like even like so and yes this does happen in nature for sure you know by nature i mean with people but more often not it looks more like this and here's a fun little thing as well if you were to draw a uh like a rule of thumb like one of those proportion ones is if you draw a line here and then like a line here or dot there often this is one straight line so from the tip of the of the nose it goes down and it touches this angle and it goes down and touches this angle so that can work quite well and also here as well when we're doing this i'm also observing that we have to make sure that this feels a little bit more natural and this is a little bit cartoony so we just have to soften these things out so it's a really good idea to to go in and start to analyze the model i usually do this like i just start to draw over my models from different angles like this because this this just forces me to evaluate what's actually going on one of the best forms of reference you can actually have when it comes to sculpting is a scan reference the reason scan reference is so darn good is because it's it's not open for any kind of interpretation at least if you know this gives a good clean scan the problem with them with with a lot of like images or like anatomical charts and such is that like the images will have way way too much hidden in shadow and maybe they have makeup on and all sorts of stuff and the problem with anatomical charts is it's just some person who's interpreted reality and maybe they did like 200 years ago and then nobody questioned it and now it just becomes gospel so scans scans they don't care at all about any of that like if some dude made a chart 200 years ago the scan doesn't care the scan is just objective truth so particularly when i'm doing like mentorships with my students i always tend to use scans at least in the beginning because then we have some common truth to talk about it's a huge problem is if you're using vague reference because then you're not speaking the same language you're not understanding the same shapes and you can find a lot of good scans simply by just by going to sketchfab and searching for like human scans or like portrait scans or face scans and that kind of stuff and yeah i'm sure you can buy them there uh but you can also just like look at them in the in the browser and then you can take screenshots of them and then it can really incorporate that into your into your art i also just want to do a quick little thing here when it comes to the uh the upper parts of the torso i'm not really gonna explain too much what i'm doing here more than the fact that like now i'm doing the pex the package connect connects up to the clavicles and they connect up to the sternum it's just important to have a little bit of volume like so and i'm just gonna soften off this as well a little bit alright cool so you know we're in a pretty good spot now compared to where we were in the beginning this is a model that i can see myself taking a lot further by spending a you know fair bit more time on it refining and all that giving it some hair and that kind of stuff but um you know it's it's in a pretty decent spot right now something to consider as well is you have to give people eyelashes and eyebrows if you want to somebody to feel like who they're supposed to be you know if you're doing a proper likeness study it's really hard to make somebody feel like a like a like a regular person if you don't give them that so i'm just going to quickly go in and in this region here just like you know sculpting some quick eyebrows not really going to do eyelashes it's a bit more of a mission to do so i'm just going to put these in here and it starts to feel a bit more natural right away whenever i'm doing kind of kind of hair like this i think about it not just as individual strands but i think about as like a mass like hair has volume and you know particularly if you look at scans and some of off like hair you can really see how much volume there is in in hair or like eyebrows as well or eyelashes it's one of the problems with when you're scanning things if you look at like human scans i'm sure if you go for the sketchfab and check them out you're going to be able to see that there is like around the eyes sometimes stuff looks really weird because they've just been cleaning up some some bad scans for this bad scan data in that area rather so just giving them a little bit of some like hair in this region here so that is the end of this sculpting video now i um i want to just quickly sum up what different stages are the first one was we had to fix the proportion it doesn't matter if you get in all the most beautiful anatomy in the world if the proportions are not working and i recommend you go back to the beginning of the video to if you need to have a refresher on the general rules of proportion but i really really recommend that you internalize those rules to the point that you can sculpt basically a person from a sphere where those rules are like they come as a second nature to you the reason for that is it's of course useful to have reference but you shouldn't rely on reference reference should be there to help your art really be taken to the next level it shouldn't be something that you require in order to even get started so for instance if you were to like line stuff up like you know we did in the beginning we landed up a little bit but not like a lot we didn't really line this up to any any like crazy photos and it still looks you know pretty pretty naturalistic second stage is make sure you have good clean shapes without that you have nothing end of day everything is sculpting is down to good clean shapes then third we have to make sure that we get in the anatomy this is to make sure that it feels like a credible living thing we have to get in the fleshy parts in all the bony parts and we you should be able to see what parts are bony and what parts are fleshy just from looking at it without any kind of texture subsurface or anything like that and then the last part is making sure he feels like you know a more of a specific person more more of a designed one where you get in the eyes getting the eyebrows ideally you know we break up a bit more symmetry and all that and then you just keep keep working on it and you keep going back to the proportions and the anatomy and and getting into personality traits the design phase and you stop whenever you are at a good spot sculpting is not a linear stage where you go from step one to step four no you're gonna keep tweaking things by adding the anatomical parts you're gonna see that oh yeah actually i have to move the eyes up or down a little bit so everything is really connected up so yeah that's it for this sculpting video i would love to hear what you think about it in the comments if there was anything particularly you thought was was fascinating if you picked something specific up would love to hear that as well and let me know what kind of sculpting videos you you'd want to see in the future as well and don't forget to subscribe and click that little notification bell as well and we'll see you in the future

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 85,598

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: Sbj-SSdaA_Y

Length: 79min 50sec (4790 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022