Sculpting a Dragon in ZBrush - Improve Your Sculpting

hey guys any important front-flip normals here and in this video we are going to be looking into how you can improve your dragon sculpt this was there was a character artist who was sent her over to meet Lauren baser and she just asked for some quick feedback on a model and I figured business a really good model to actually do something cool sculpting over hmm the original stuff here is pretty pretty awesome there were just some things which I would just like to refine a bit yeah you know this is kind of back to the series that we've done a couple times before and people have been requesting to do more sculpt overs so we thought why not we have it dragon yeah you can't really get cooler than that the first thing I would I would say when it comes to this skull yeah there are some anatomical things here and there but it sounds it looks like there's not a whole lot of reference used for different parts so what I'm the first thing I'm starting off with is just getting reference for things for for the face here i'm i'm using i'm using a crocodile so it looks like lauren has been using has been looking at snakes for this like there are some some evidence of this from based on the tongue and and the mouth and maybe the nose as well but i'm switching this more over to crocodile just because I know and that's that's a really cool reference yeah I mean it's like whenever you're doing any sort of creatures like these references just it's it's key because otherwise you'll start to make up anatomy that just just doesn't exist I mean obviously it's a dragon so it doesn't exist for whatever it's like you can't just you can't base it off of what you think an enemy will look like because it has to be grounded in something otherwise it looks a little bit off and also Nature has already done all the designing for you there is no reason to design anything from scratch here if you want to do a dragon you know you maybe you start off with the proportions off I don't know maybe a lion and then you mix some Komodo dragon into it and then you put some you put a snake head and then you need to do some some crocodile things like you really don't have to invent anything because Nature has done the job for you it's like what we talked about in a Q&A video about doing concept art it's like you can do your own concept art from scratch but it's never going to be as good as some who does only concern our it's the same with the anatomy and nature like painting says nature has done the work for you so you know make sure to use it yeah and 16 million years of evolution is pretty functional good that's pretty good I'm using it using a goat horn for reference for the horns as well and just trying to integrate the horns more into it because it looks like they were just a bit on top yeah right now they're kind of there's no structure around the horns no you know horns like these especially ones that are so close to the to the bone you would kind of almost assume that they they grow out of the skull like they're connected to the skull somehow yeah exactly you can you can look at at like deers and and all these district animals with antlers you're actually seeing a really awesome connection points you you you might not see it as much with goats because they have more fur going along or fur growing of the horns but the ghost is still really awesome for reference for the horns themselves they have some crazy stuff going on there one thing I looked at was well when sculpting this was that the face looked a bit weak and I don't mean to design once I just mean purely in like if it were to bite something I think it would actually break parts of it face so one of the first things I did was straight up just introducing more thickness to it removing some of the fragility to it and just really adding more mass to it yeah the lips were quite thin everything around the jaw exactly it was kind of like it had teeth in its skull but they weren't really teeth they were just kind of like edgy things there which I don't really think work that well so I'm just going straight up for like a a simpler and more a crocodile design yeah and like the way that Lauren's done it here with having the lips and the outside of the face be one soft tool and then the inside being a certain sub tool I think it's a easier way to handle this like technically yeah everything kind of flows into one but if you haven't separate out of subtools it's a lot easier to work with the gums and keep it separated from from the lips there it is this is one of the main things well I see in a lot a lot of sculpt is like the sternocleidomastoid is really we'll just get that in there this is is one of these switch you just needed to turn your head it's the power muscle it really the pharmacy and you know the bigger the head is or you know the bigger you want this muscle because there's a lot of power here to actually marinate I'm most trying to think of like it's a dragon so you can definitely breathe fire because you know it's a dragon so I'm trying to think of like this is like pouch between its between between Dalek under its neck kinda like the fatty deposit I'll kind of think like maybe there is some fire stuff going on there fire yeah fire pouch it's kind of like I think a komodo dragon will probably be good reference for that because they have that like super loose skin right underneath their neck yeah good argue that that maybe that was a fire thing or something also just going over the deltoids here before doing deltoids I went though went over and did like added more and more defined clavicles because everything is kind of attached there this is a bit tricky a tricky area to get right and I'm struggling a little bit but what I do whenever I'm struggling is get in the scapula you get the scalpel in the clavicles in there then this area is is not resolving itself is still tricky but if you don't have it then you're in trouble yeah it's it's like the connection point from the clavicle back to the scapula is always tricky and especially when you're sculpting something that's kind of in a pose that's not neutral and you kind of have to figure out okay how would how the clavicle have moved into that position yeah exactly I also found that um yeah the insertion point for for the pecs were orbit to be too close to to the center of the body I would like them more like further down further down the the humerus because you can't really get too much power with this the further down there is the more power you can get yeah the insertion point for the for the pecs isn't up by the delts it's right down at the bottom of the deltoid right on the humerus there so you can actually feel it if you like feel on your on your humerus yourself there's like a tiny notch where everything kind of connects now we'll all the people watching are just touching your ass so whenever I'm doing this I'm not really too focused on what's already there if something isn't working I will just go over and just sculpt over it and be merciless that's the hard part when it's your own sculpt is like maybe you've put in a lot of hours and then either you realize yourself or someone gives you feedback or something and you're like you figure out okay I need to actually change this going over and removing a lot of the detail that can be really awesome but it's also why it's important to get it right the first time just because then you know all the details that you have it's it's gonna be fine also the first thing this is up we keep talking about all time but they're one of the first things you got to do is you got to get your skeleton right if you don't if your skeleton isn't right from the beginning then you know nothing is going to work yeah that is gonna be like a floating sack of meat hopefully none define think there's gonna be like mince meat with skin on top you can see we're turning all on and off the layer there is that the insertion point especially for the for the pecs there how much is actually moved but it looks a lot better now and that's the thing about this sculpt it's like it's not that there was a lot of stuff or like oh hey this is bad or this is completely wrong it's more of a this is a solid sculpt that just needs to be not just in the right direction exactly one of the things which which does need which it doesn't really have is when this is something like a lot of people like they don't think about is skin people just assume that oh you know you have muscle and then you have nothing yeah so on top of everything we're gonna do skin passed later on like actually just sculpting like trying to get some nice folds in there and just kind of it's not you're smoothing out the muscles but you just need you just need skin on top yeah yeah and especially for let's call it a lizard with wings like again like if you take a look at a komodo dragon for example like the amount of loose skin and skin detail that they have is incredible yeah so there's really good reference for something like that and it's plus it's called a dragon yeah we're gonna get in trouble for this stuff is growing a drag because I think it's that wiring yeah we've had a few times now yeah actually no it's a dragon shut up but I love this whole like coming up with fantasy thing it's not that we're talking about oh it's a lion no it's actually a tiger no it's like oh no it's a different fantasy thing which some some people have just agreed that this random thing of imagination so what I don't actually remember what's the difference between it is there something about the if they have wings or yeah exactly because this this guy's wings is is attached to his arms yes so some are I think a dragon would be like if you have a lion and you just put some wings on it the wiring is but it's totally dragon you know first to make keep it easy yeah somebody if this were to attack your village and you were like a dragon they would be like actually no you're like you know what you know what it was a fine thing from the sky coming down in this fire on you the waivers are attacking I kind of like the teeth though of this character because that's that's clearly inspired by snakes you kind of have that with with the basilisks basilisk from Harry Potter so cool that's pretty cool obviously that's just a big snake but I don't know like big snakes just kind of tend to look like dragons a little yeah what are you going to keep in mind as well when designing something like this which can fly is its god I just have a giant pecs and giant muscle on the back because it needs to just propel itself it's like it's like you know how if you can do a lot of push-ups you probably have kind of big a big chest this is this is like if you if you you flying with those muscles and also it's just like just looking at this I think just in terms of pure proportions I probably go in for like a final design or something and just give it a bigger wingspan mm-hmm just because it's like when you look at a bird like so much of its body is the length of the wings and obviously it's like hollow bones and all that kind of stuff so it can actually fly or as a drag is probably gonna weigh a couple tons and no problem so just like you have to like give it massive massive wings in order for it to be able to fantasy fly one of the few designs I've actually seen this is the dragons not dragons from water drinks the Wonder Dark Riders are little slugs yeah exactly which it's totally not dragons cuz there is that all yeah I think somebody totally dragon but regardless those they actually have really like they have such huge wingspan yeah but that kinda leads to a problem when it comes to like the film because well if you're gonna frame the shots because you can never really frame the entire thing because it's so so giant but it's but it just looks awesome that's one of the coolest dragon designs I've ever seen I think your mother Thrones is also doing an alright job there they have like a massive massive wingspan yes I think it's awesome dragging it there they really really are for this I was looking at a crocodile Isis one hmm just really getting like that do they do they have that extra lid yeah exactly it's it's really cool it's it's called like a liquidating membrane I think yeah and it's like most animals have so many animals cats have it their cats haven't it's it's super cool because it like allows you to well for some animals it's transparent so like camels have it so they can see they can see during and you're like snow store like with snowstorm a sandstorm I guess snowstorm as well but yeah it allows you to have your eyes open during journey of those areas but isn't it something like like camels came from like a super cold climate or something yeah so one of the theories about now it kind of goes back to but it was an animal school in video one one day theories about the Kansas at the originated in North America and there's a lot of evidence for that yeah and the fact that they're they're going there well they were doing well in in Sahara or in in deserts is because I mean it's very the skills you need for to survive heat is very similar to what you need to survive in the cold oh yeah that when you if your creature artists I recommend watching as much as many talks and all this kind of stuff on on animals yeah cuz this this kind of stuff matters if you're gonna design something and you know you know the history of channels so the disc stuff might matter to your design or even know you know there's no that it you're gonna use that directly now because a camel migrate exactly how it might it might it might that knowledge might give you a more diverse knowledge of where to look for information yeah camels have feet that are this big so they didn't fall through the snow and then I closed them insane yes if you were to design something which needs to work for needs to work for a snowy environment you're not gonna redesign it you might just look for camels as a starting point that's kind of much like the eighty 80s from Star Wars they have like almost camel's feet yeah yeah we really building up a lot of volumes here just like getting deserves a lot of there are a lot of areas on the face and and there and the rest of the body that has like these really smooth areas where the surface is just like you see there's like some kind of surface but it's not really defined so going in and just giving that some love can help it can help out a lot and even if you are going for for a snake character and you know maybe you're gonna do like a proper snakes getting top afterwards I would still add this like underlying undulation for it it just really helps to to make the skin read like I could have gone over in this character and and the only thing I would change would be like this undulation posture sculpting over it with clay build up and and that would still would have improved the character because it just makes it feel a lot more natural yeah there for me it's kind of like this sporadic pass where I just have epilepsy our most most but it's like to build up some fat deposits and and some loose skin I didn't obviously go over like refine it a little bit so it's not pure randomness but if you like going over with the clay build up there really really helps yeah it really does I'm sculpting most of us like most of everything I'm sculpting is where they Klebold up and some standard and some damn standard but light but anything what's the secret pressure using that's brush thirty-two and we're not showing that in the video but uh that's really the best one so those are like yeah go to our website when you sign up for this for some dreams no but like I don't know for me the the longer I've been doing this in the morph and sculpting the less and less brushes I've been using yeah it's just really I really don't use a lot anymore and you know you're interested in that whole thing about tools and stuff we have topics about that yeah exactly thank you yeah also like if you were watching some for sculpting videos and you can't really by listening to it you can't really tell which one it is because it's on the same that's because sculpting is the same I mean if you're doing little Hobbit or you're doing a crazy dragon or you know a little mouse for animated movie that the concepts are exactly the same yeah you start off with big broad shapes you know you get your skeleton there you muscle you're fine in your skin and this just kind of varies based on the character you know if you have it's kind of like you have a slider where you you make the bones really long or really really long and and strong or small and shallow and that the difference there is between a mouse and like an elephant and then how much muscle doesn't have and how much fat doesn't have like you think about again a mouse versus maybe like a hippo like the fat opposed it's just like the other end of a slider yeah so it really is all the same tools and now you can see that you know there's a lot of scheme that's been added on top before it it might have looked a little extreme in the beginning because just blocking in the muscles just makes it look like it's on steroids but if you if you block in the muscles in that way that that makes it a lot easier for you to figure out okay where do I want my skin on my fat deposits to be because then you've got like this clear outline of everything you need to start to cover it up so knowing your Anatomy also your creature Anatomy here this is definitely gonna come in handy you know exactly and if you if you want to learn how to sculpt these kind of characters like you should you I would recommend you start with human anatomy human figure sculpting because everything is kind of based on that like it's not just the anatomy but it's also a theory of scoped and getting good clean shapes if you can make good clean shapes for human if you make good clean shapes for an animal it's just that stuff is slightly offset you know you have slightly different muscles here and they're different proportions but particular if you were to look at a skeleton or for human versus like even even an elephant or force you know it's it's it's basically the same it's basically the same some muscles some bones are fused together maybe all the toes or fingers of use into one giant bone but it's it's essentially the exact same thing like for a horse a horse doesn't need pecs you know so they're quite useless they're the giant triceps exactly whereas for people we're really relying on the pecs the triceps are a lot smaller so it's just about you know figuring out okay what what's the difference there so once you look as a master human anatomy but get quite comfortable with you in that human anatomy then the creature or animal Anatomy becomes a lot more sort of second nature because then you're not trying to solve sculpting then you're trying to solve a specific problem which is this creature here has some very specific anatomy but but all the sculpting is kind of now gone into your subconscious like when I'm sculpting this I'm not thinking oh how do I what's my sculpting meat it's it just means you cannot focus purely on the specifics of this cult now this part here inside of the mouth kind of thing we're transitions to snake alligator stuff that's written I really I really dislike that areas just because it's kind of tricky to get right yeah because there's upper jaw lower jaw the sort of membrane in between yeah you have that if reliance as well like a lot of these feline animals they have that sort of membrane in there as well can get quite it's quite tricky to get right so I really love that membrane and that was one thing we added for the sculpt in the beginning you could tell there wasn't anything there and yeah in order to make you look for more realistic we just added that's this nice membrane and that comes to observation that is one to one from a crocodile such a badass animal too curious yeah like it's just one evolution it's been here for you know unchanged for 70 million years they've nailed that yeah one thing to keep mine is well in general when you're skulking is you really want your teeth to be separate separate sub tools you you don't want your teeth to be merged or like just to protrude from the gums you really want them to be separate do yourself a favor yeah it's it's gonna make sculpting a lot easier it's the same thing with the gums really it's like it obviously depends on the character but those areas that are really close together that pop out like that you can help yourself like a lot by by separating that into separate sub tools yeah if you're into pain then I would recommend the merging gums but like merging the gums with with the body is it's just so painful you gotta go in then you got to do it properly as well and it just becomes such a mess yeah going over every single like claw tooth as well now everything every single chord because if you have a if you have a skull which has a lot of variation and then you have then you have a really smooth claws like this was a smooth horns then it's good just go look a bit weird yeah and what you're noticing here is that it's it's not like a crazy level of detail that's getting put into the horns on the spikes it's just a little bit it's just to break up the form slightly so that the level of detail sort of matches the the face more more closely yeah yeah it really is just like sculpting some some very very simple things here yeah but also when doing this I'm looking at reference as well like I'm looking at a goat or we're doing this isn't it just like oh we just gonna sculpt the pressure before it's Colton this dragon it's better on 20 minutes just finding references yeah I'm just trying to you know evaluate the design because there's no point in you guys looking at a see verse just rotating for like 20 minutes so it is pre digesting some stuff there yes when looking when doing these kind of scope or is there is definition stuff it just pops out right away but then they're also things you just gotta you just gotta evaluate it just takes time you have to look over it and just like yeah maybe sculpt a little bit first I did like a 20 minute sculpting pass just a few days ago as well just trying out trying out a little sculpting on it just to just to make sure it would work see now this quite a bit of improvement that's been done I mean a lot of it is really you know the work had already been done before it's just kind of filling in the blanks because like the base was solid there was it was just like it just needed a little bit of a nudge yeah now we come here and take all the credit yeah no it did the model the model was pretty decent just some do some slight underlying things yeah just comparing before and after he just looks it just looks like it's a bit stronger now yeah and then we're going to look into a little teaser for our upcoming product this is called the flick on one skin kit originally made for skin exactly so this is this is a lot of predefined skin we've already done so if you need if you need to just block out some skin very quickly we've already sculpted a bunch of these by hand so if you need to get this leathery skin on top you really shouldn't sculpt this this is like alpha word they were just really high quality alphas but unlike some of the other ones which are out there which are like 15 years old or something these are almost then like most of them these are all sculpted properly so you don't need like 200 alphas you really just need a few of them yeah so we were definitely talking more about this kit in the future when it's when it's properly ready but it's it's essentially something made where you can take any kind of creature any kind of character and just really improve it no no the nice thing about these offices that they're pretty you know I'm pretty easy to use it's not like crazy crazy Maps for the most realistic high-end we effects or anything but we think that this is probably gonna be a little more accessible to people yeah exactly they're they're not gonna yeah like they're not based on stands of crazy reptilians we've hunted in the Amazon forest they're there there's their use they're made for sculptors yeah and it's just it's just a nice way to really add a lot of detail to your sculpt it's it's not that we've ever really been against using alphas but we haven't showing off a lot of alpha stuff in the past that's just because we're so focused on trying to get some of the mid-frequency detail down first just because if you have good meat mid-frequency detail then an alpha just enhances that if you don't then you know it's it's kind of like it's a bit of a waste to use alphas before your mid frequency is really there you know exactly and after you after we've done this process well there's definitely like some sculpting on top which has to be done because this is this is still missing some mid frequency but you know you can always do an initial pass of alphas yeah then you know just you just you try it out and then you can do a sculpting pass on top of that the nice thing about trying out alphas like this not necessarily ours with just alphas in general is that it gives you a base where you could then start to detail from like here you could go in and then you could start adding some irregularity like this kind of scaly skin then go in the clay build up and sculpt a little bit of that like this just add a little bit more variation to it exactly we were this is of course what's going to be available for like there these aren't ZBrush maps they are really good and sivir's but they're also going to be working perfectly well in in Mari and substance painter as well it's kind of the same approach that we would do if we had like super high-res maps will you texture it in in Mari and get maybe like a bump map or something into ZBrush and then sculpt the underline texture there exactly like they can totally be used for fully high-end production I used a very similar technique for Pacific Rim and that was used in in the final movie but it also means do constable as well you don't like if you're going to use it in paint or Mari you need you need proper proper UVs in topology and all that jazz well this here is obviously a concept called I really liked this stage one of detailing where you have like a passive alphas and it's just it's not hard anymore now it's it's just you know go over and refine everything or you can just really amp up the the skin which has been plastered down mm-hmm because that's that's really audiobook podcast land for me everything before this is really hard because then you have to think about how does everything connect up you got to think about design but now it's more the labor part of it and you can see like sure the danger of going too crazy with alphas is that it tends to intends to wash out a lot of your underlying detail if it's not solid enough yeah and here it's just about you know like I think this is just it is a it is a concept sculpt and if we had more time with obviously going and refined that the mid-frequency detail more but you can always go in and then like boost it a little bit afterwards to to create some more contrast and this one here would also be good enough to to show a client because in it just has to read a certain kind of skin because let's say you were to you were to do this for for a film or game or whatever and you've done the the wrinkles are perfect all the skin is perfect and he going like yeah that's cool but can I have like scaly skin instead oh this is a dragon clearly you know it has a snake skin and you're like oh man that was a waste yeah so we're doing like a work-in-progress passing this can actually be really good there's no again get feedback on it one thing I also like to do here is is if I'm using alphas like this is obviously have it on a separate layer in the store store morph target is then you can always plaster it with alphas and then in some areas maybe you want the skin to vary a little bit you're going with your morphe brush and then you just sort of erase it exactly it's really powerful the cool thing is also by doing cycle that but doing a layer you can now extract only that information you can make a displacement map with only what you sculpted so it's incredibly clean and nice because if you were to extract a displacement book all of this you would get like the clavicle the scapula all this kind of stuff into it when in reality you only want the super high frequency that was always a problem in production when an acid went between a for artist and some dude had hit merge all layers they called layers and you're like oh man my world is now in vain just a quick tip right here at the end you can see we're using the standard brush and the nice thing about the standard brush is that you can actually go over the surface and to preserve your details whereas if you go over it with the claybuildup brush it'll sort of it'll just erase everything that's underneath yeah exactly so I'm actually using the clear brittle brush to do exactly that because I didn't storm or charged I'm probably using it to like - to smooth some stuff out here very last thing is just sculpting a little crappie I fried just giving some personality to it so I mean yeah that's essentially the whole thing thank you thank you so much for watching here and if you will have more suggestions of different videos to do in the future we are more than happy to hear that so make sure to LIKE comment and subscribe and hit a little notification button as well to get notifications on when we have any videos out you

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 45,852

Keywords: 3d, sculpting, zbrush, concept, maya, tutorial, autodesk, film, vfx, animation, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, creature, character, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, education, foundry, pixologic, nuke, art, fundamentals, art fundamentals, art school, art tutorials, blender, flipped normals, 3d tutorial, learning 3d, learning ZBrush, 3ds max, cubebrush, cube brush, gumroad, marvelous designer, photoshop, mari, blender guru, free tutorial, cgi, cg, computer graphics

Id: 1MuULofGBrA

Length: 29min 52sec (1792 seconds)

Published: Mon May 13 2019