How you should Sculpt EVERYTHING!

hey i'm jay and let's talk about maybe one of the most important things to think about in sculpting we're going to talk about theory and a mode of thinking that you should be using on everything that you make all right so let's jump into it okay so in today's video uh it's not necessarily a step-by-step tutorial we'll make those videos too but i wanted to make this video because this is probably one of the most important and fundamental uh theories of sculpting and really making art not everybody knows it and if you do know about this stay tuned because i think there's still some nuggets in here probably that you're not fully aware of but this is an important theory and mode of thinking that's gonna help sculpting we're gonna talk about sculpting today and i'm gonna relate it back to zbrush a little bit because that's what i do all the time and that's what we talk about on the channel but honestly you can use this to break down anything complicated in this into something that's more manageable okay so let's jump in what we're talking about today is form hierarchy okay maybe not as exciting as you were hoping for but definitely stick with me here because this is a super key concept that you can use in everything so the three key words today that we're gonna talk about a lot in this video are primary secondary and tertiary forms now this is kind of the classical terminology and you can see here that essentially it just means one two and three okay and so these are gonna be categories that we're going to talk about and discuss but you can think of these as sort of buckets all right to put aspects of the form of something complicated into we're going to talk a little bit about you know the unique aspects but really to put it simple primary the first one most important it's going to be the structure secondary breaks down tertiary breaks that down even more okay so it's just a way to create to pick anything complicated and then separate it into these three categories so you can think about it we can discuss it and you can work on it individually all right so let's put these at the top here and we'll start breaking down some aspects that are unique to each of these terms and categories okay so primary forms simplest forms these are almost primitives they're not but they don't have too much contrast in them the metaphor i like to use when trying to describe it is as if you covered your sculpture in saran wrap or something you know you shrink wrapped it that's the primary forms okay fewest there aren't that many of these again it's gonna be smooth it's the big general foundation as if you melted it and really the essence the most efficient form largest and most important it's really important as we get into it here and as you start thinking about it to realize that each of these categories works on the on top of the foundation of the previous so even though every aspect is important for certain reasons primary forms are the most important thing and i emphasize that because it's very common to overlook it you know it's boring it can be technical it's almost like layout you know secondary more fun getting in to do sculpting pushing and pulling and then tertiary obviously adding like crispy little details is fun but you can't overlook primary forms here and that's what you want to be working on too as you're practicing so important that it's known as the most important thing everything follows this so the stronger your primary forms are then the stronger your work's going to be as you move to secondary forms and then lastly tertiary forms art obviously is a lot more chaotic it's not exactly linear all the time but you can think of this also as one two three in terms of the steps first thing you're doing when you're sculpting is you're you're establishing primary forms once those are established now you're making secondary forms which is breaking up primary forms into smaller more complex ones so primary forms just to put a button on it it's the pose too it's the proportion it's the first part of likeness if primary forms are off of a likeness and you get secondary and tertiary on point doesn't matter you already broke likeness whereas if you have tertiary forms that aren't even the same as your uh model doesn't matter people honestly actually in real life in production will use like photo scans of a 30 year old woman and put it on an alien or an old man tertiary forms are very like you know it's not as important but primary forms if you want to get likeness you have to make sure that they're on point okay secondary forms more complicated definitely more complicated than primary forms we're starting to get more contrast in the shapes you know it's got more going on more organic you might say another way of saying it we're starting to get more thick and thin and they're getting smaller this is more time consuming this is probably the most time-consuming uh step you know that you'll spend a lot of time on primary forms you want to be meticulous you're setting everything up but secondary forms is where you're starting to really flush things out and there's a lot more of them obviously and as i said tertiary forms are kind of trivial in that they're not as important to being accurate but secondary forms are important and they can be you know challenging and time consuming to get right so you'll spend a lot of your time in a sculpt in this phase here and secondary forms are emotive important to realize that now that you have primary forms which is like the solid foundation right the proportions the likeness the pose and now once you're doing secondary forms that's where you're starting to get not only the definition in features but maybe skin is starting to bunch you know on the on the muscles as they're turning maybe the face is starting to scrunch you know we're starting to see the eyelids move we're starting to see eyebrows move okay so secondary forms also you know some trivial things like veins or wrinkles you might think of but it's also the most emotive part and then tertiary is gonna just follow suit and emphasize what's going on on the surface but secondary forms are the emotive forms all right lastly tertiary forms the most complex you can see as we're moving down the line it's getting more complicated so now tertiary forms are the most complex and the most numerous if you compare the primary form of a head which is relatively simple it's large not a lot going on tertiary forms now we're talking about things like skin pores wrinkles details now there's like a lot of them and they're very irregular and they're just all over and you know so you can see the contrasting and just those different buckets and how we're we're separating those kinds of forms right and details and they're obviously the smallest so you can see working down the line here it's getting more complicated it's getting more numerous and it's getting smaller again each category is breaking up the previous category so we're going big to small and tertiary arguably least important we're going to look at some examples here in a second and it depends on what you're doing uh it can be done very quickly nowadays you know it depends on which method you want to do you can do it in a painstaking way and you can do it fast there are lots of assets out there nowadays to facilitate adding tertiary forms because of production you know requirements you can even buy assets like i even have my own skin detailing brushes obviously that you can get and use if you want and you can go to things like texture xyz to buy maps already done and put on so you can get something very photorealistic by using photogrammetry nowadays and get tertiary detail on any sculpt you know in a matter of minutes and then this is important in realism tertiary i would argue again not as important and this is subjective is it important in a in a great work of art not necessarily depends on what you're doing but if you're trying to do realism then we're not just talking about sculpture here if you even look at a pixar movie which is doing realism in terms of materials and lighting you'll notice these tiny realistic little details in things so realism as a goal as a category and as a style of work tertiary details are obviously extremely crucial in that okay so this is my big breakdown and now let's jump in i made a couple of demos uh for you to show you a sculpt and i just kind of worked on something so obviously we're just going to look at some of my work because that's what i have on me before we move on really quickly i want to thank this video sponsor skillshare the first thousand people to click the link down below in the description get a one month free trial so i'm still running through skillshare obviously um it's got so many different videos and all these kinds of topics if you're interested in things like photography and videography like i said i'm interested in making videos youtube videos 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this hand sculpt and this face sculpt that i did somewhat recently that we can take a look at and i've got the models here loaded in zbrush so let's take a look at this as a primary form okay so this would be the first thing now i want to say before going on i did some work here to visualize these now this is something that i'm thinking about as i'm working and when i try to break down other work but does that mean that i'm like rigidly making primary forms before secondary no but i created these three separate models so we can visualize how to separate these kinds of forms okay so here we have the primary form of the hand now you can see it's pretty simple right it feels very doable it should hopefully and if it does great and if not this should be the first thing you're trying to figure out how to do making primary forms of stuff so still you can see we have the pose we have things like this angle you know of the thumb we still have some personality here you can kind of see the joints so again like that example is if it's shrink wrapped or the most like simplest version of the sculpt not that much form contrast relatively smooth but still we get gesture we get pose important things are established here all right so now we're gonna jump to the secondary forms all right so now we're getting more complicated if we jump back and forth now we're getting uh there's more of them right and they're more complicated they're more irregular you know now all of a sudden we've got like this type of stuff going on it's curvy it's like some are small and some are big right so yeah it's getting more complicated now but you can see it's working on top of that primary form you know we're building on that structure and we're starting to add complexity all right so this is the secondary forms of this sculpt of a hand and now if we jump to tertiary all right there we go now i think another thing that's kind of important to realize is that the primary forms lots going on obviously you're starting from nothing you're making these big movements things are big right secondary forms you're adding complexity you're adding more quantity but the things that you are doing the um it's not moving the mesh as far as big and then tertiary forms it's like it barely even breaks the silhouette if we jump back and forth right so this is very superficial tertiary detail is very superficial it's on the surface it helps uh convey material properties in this case you know skin bending and skin as a material in itself so that is how we break down this hand into these three categories all right so let's jump over to a head and see the same thing okay so now here's this model and we'll take a look at breaking this down into the three categories so this is what you could consider the primary forms of this head sculpt okay the teeth super important in this one so here you go it's still separated out but you can see like i don't have eye definition i don't have the ear definition but when i'm thinking about primary forms as i'm sculpting them as i'm making the mesh as i'm manipulating the base mesh this is kind of how i'm thinking of it because still what are we getting like what are we thinking about when we're working on this like the ears like the angle you know like when it starts to bend like where the like what the angle of the jaw is where the nose is and like this um expression how big the mouth is like where the lips are and then the interior of the mouth like the bottom side of the nose what's that look like where are the eyes you know that that type of thing the proportion like how long the neck is like what the base measures so these are all important things that i'm figuring out that i'm working on that i'm thinking about in the early stages of a work and these are all the primary form things i don't need to concern myself with things like you know the inside of a nostril or the ear or something because i can add that on afterwards that follows this so let's just let's do that let's jump to the secondary forms so now a lot more is going on right but again the amount of of form diff difference isn't that much we can see these big forms then they're getting a little bit more going on right getting a little bit more complicated you're spending a lot of time in the secondary forms you know trying to get all these like little angles right you know like this little contrast here this this type of like brow furrow and you know where the eyelid line is the size of the eyelids and it's an important step but it does follow suit from the primary step secondary forms now let's take a look at tertiary forms boom uh i did i did visualizer jewelry it's kind of a weird example but i just wanted to like put it in there that again i was thinking about size and position you know detail is trivial and it comes in at the end i'm not sculpting something like a blurry jewelry obviously and adding detail like you would if you're doing like marble or something but this helps visualize that that mode of thinking that detail's gonna follow sued but the most important thing is the size and position of the thing in the sculpt and then tertiary detail obviously starting to add all the little lines the scrunchy nose the lines on the lips the hair getting a little bit of suggested hair in there some eyebrow hairs the skin compressing so you know we're getting like some little compression lines here we're getting these thin lines here so this is that tertiary detail even the uh little earring has like these little like diamond cuts okay so how does this apply to sculpting in zbrush in particular so this helps in all kinds of sculpting obviously i'm thinking about this sort of thing as i work and throughout the process like in the beginning stages i'm starting with primitives i'm pushing and pulling and i'm really focusing on those primary forms to establish something that i can build off of so i'm starting simple and large and getting more complicated as time goes on now i'm also kind of jumping up and down in zbrush as i'm working with these subdivision levels so if we go to the head for instance we can drop down you see it has six subdivision levels here at the top and if i drop down to something very low you'll see it's actually i'm actually incapable of adding details so this is a way for me to restrict myself to primary forms or in that general neighborhood at least so you can see the way i arrange my ui even is to start with dynamesh which is what i use to make meshes and do loose sculpting like a digital clay that's very rough so that would be my primary forms the start of my projects i use z-remesher next to make a base mesh and you see as the base mesh i made for this one i try to make it as low as possible that then i can divide up and as i divide up i start to add more detail so actually my workflow in zbrush is trying to stay on track with that general progression of going from big to small and i'm limiting myself with topology so that i'm kind of forcing myself to refine the sculpture and the forms without too much extra topology and if at any time i want to change proportions i just drop down and i start to like move things around then i can make these big general changes so maybe the first couple are for primary forms the second two for secondary and the last for tertiary and that's just general that's not like an actual rule but definitely you know the last few subdivisions are there purely for doing tertiary forms you know when it's high enough where you can actually just draw stuff on the sculpt which you can't do as i drop down now we're in secondary forms land so that's how i use zbrush to help control this stay on track and obviously i'm thinking about this sort of thing just throughout as i make anything okay cool so there's a couple recent sculpts and uh how this would apply to my scopes okay now i want to break down some other work right some work that's not mine and that's much better because i really want to hammer the point home here that primary secondary tertiary this 123 is a way also of establishing the hierarchy of importance i think one of the greatest examples of this is masterworks in marble because obviously with that medium you're not doing skin pores you're not doing hairs so the amount of tertiary detail is extremely low and they're doing a lot with primary and secondary and obviously they're masters so let's take a look at some masterworks right now all right so first guy up obviously david from michelangelo the legend um i picked this for a bunch of reasons it's a great piece i love it and everyone knows it right so i think this is a great first thing to break down here now looking at it after what we just said is there a lot of tertiary detail no um if i were to you know guess or single out some things you know the lying around the eyes is interesting them even doing the highlight in the eye which is cool there's even a little bit of a a thin line on the lips interesting again the neck wrinkle look at that and then a couple wrinkles here and then obviously the hair has a little bit of a little bit of pizzazz you know but again very um in this case they have to be very um subjective with the hair because they're limited with their medium so those are some things that i might consider you know here's some other things like there's some little wrinkles on the knuckles cool i like that there's a little extra line around the thumb which is cool and then uh some wrinkles here you can see if you look closely there's some fine lines here so that's pretty cool and i would argue the reason why those are there are for that realism for that believability even though it's marble they can't make marble look exactly like flesh but just like the veins are doing these little lines are helping the illusion that this stone is someone's hand so i think these are creative choices made they're obviously very fine lines and these fine lines aren't everywhere but they're in these key spots and they are helping convey this believable person okay and then we have obviously the primary and secondary forms that would be what i think of obviously as proportion and as the pose and so this is this first you know um example of contraposti they say this standing on one leg which is considered extremely natural and revolutionary at the time that like a statue would stand naturally his hand very naturally uh relaxed even though it's holding something great to study these please do if you're new to these concepts of form hierarchy i think through that lens you can look at all kinds of other work and anything really try to as an exercise break those things down and you can really separate out those kinds of forms and shapes and you can better kind of understand what the artists might have been doing or what they were thinking and that would help you in your own work too okay so let's move on from michelangelo here we're gonna go to boom the legend the rape of persephone by bernini so this is this is probably the most epic marble sculpture of all time i think every sculptor loves this and uh we're gonna briefly talk a little bit why we're just gonna do a tiny bit of art history right here okay tiny bit stay with me um but again i think this helps in understanding form and sculpture permit me to be a little bit nerdy right here but we're gonna talk about it so rape and persephone let's really quick do a little breakdown of this image here this is the most famous part of this sculpture and what i love about this is that it's you know effing rad and not a lot of tertiary detail here maybe this type of stuff maybe but jude really not much going on i mean those those little lines we saw before not there a lot of just just legendary primary and secondary forms and so without much detail at all we're seeing a level of naturalism with the compression of flesh and the contortion of the bodies in a way that people had never seen before in marble this uh this guy bernini and these sculpts changed the game really it seems like it topped out honestly when you look at art history it just he broke he crushed it he was the michael jordan of sculpting and marvel he came out he came after michelangelo and i think just growing up in a world that michelangelo paved the way this guy just took it to another level before we get into it let's look at at his david okay we just looked at michelangelo's david this is bernini's david so some things that are different um that we can see immediately here is that david is depicted much younger here also not as hercule herculean her ki herculean her not his buff this guy's not his buff he's a little bit slight obviously still athletic but younger looking and uh more like a guy of that time probably right he actually has the slingshot with the rock here about to about to pwn goliath headshot and in michelangelo's he had the sling over his shoulder he had the rock kind of in his hand a little bit you know again not a lot of detail in this one overall a lot more dynamic right and so what are the differences here it's a lot more quote unquote realistic it's a lot more naturalistic because this is like what david would look like that's what's exciting about this and what's the big difference in the face let's take a closer look the face a lot more detail no not a lot more detail so why why was this considered a masterpiece also why do people think this is moving the bar maybe this artist specifically made david because michelangelo's david was famous it was instantly regarded as a masterpiece it still is a masterpiece obviously both of these are but he like took his take on it this is bernini's take on the same subject and what you get is a lot more dynamic action pose in the moment of the famous encounter depicting a model that could look a lot more like maybe what he looked like which is exciting right to viewers and then what is his face doing his face has an emotion if we compare it to michelangelo's look at this emotion he's eyeballing goliath he's about to throw this rock and there's not more detail there's not more forms it's the choices okay and i think that's an important thing and why i wanted to talk about it so we have a little bit of stuff here again very subtle secondary form type stuff not a lot of little tertiary things obviously both of these time is a factor who knows what it looked like at the time i just think it's really cool to look at it from a sculptor's point of view from a from a forms point of view without detail at all what made this exciting what progressed sculpture in the rape of persephone and in this david what we have is an expression of emotion with a limited amount of forms and i i think that's awesome i think that's inspiring and that's something that i wanted to share for sculptors out there these trends by the way are still going on today right that what's exciting about seeing movies like when you go see a christopher nolan movie or a new movie out here it's like you want to feel that it's real you want the characters to be more believable you want you want the backdrops and the setting to feel more believable you you want that emotion to be more rich and here we're seeing it in sculptures hundreds of years ago that an artist is trying to make it feel more like david and make the viewer feel more like they're seeing someone alive but in marble so what can form hierarchy do for you it can help you organize chaos a little bit help you take things that are complicated and make them a little bit simpler it can help you organize your sculpture and your work your thinking as you work on something and as you break something down to help figure out you know how to recreate something or maybe how an artist made it themselves so practice primary and secondary forms the better you get at them the better all your work will be and don't neglect how much you can do with primary forms the the age the proportion the pose the idea the story if if at all possible to add more emotion and meaning into something that you do then the better so keep on keeping on make some cool and i'll catch you in the next video thank you for watching

Channel: J Hill

Views: 117,897

Keywords: how to, learning zbrush, fine art, how to sculpt, sculpting hands, hyper realism, lifelike art, realistic art, learn to sculpt, sculpting for beginners, sculpting tutorials, 3d art, learning 3d, 3d tutorial, sculpting forms, form hierarchy, michelangelo david, bernini, classical sculpting, primary forms, secondary forms, tertiary forms, sculpting detail, sculpting a face, zbrush, digital sculpting, jhill, sculpt

Id: zwn7EZczPjY

Length: 27min 4sec (1624 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021