Sculpting a Dragon's Head - Tutorial

hello and welcome to gabit media i'm grant abbott and today we're making a dragon's head we'll be using a sculpting workflow and i'm using a graphics tablet for this and that will certainly help you find out more about those in the description this will be more for the beginner intermediate students out there i won't be talking about all the basic controls but i do go into detail with the more complex things and the sculpting workflow do check out the links in the description and my website and the playlist on my channel for more free courses also if you like what i do then you can check out my new character course it takes you right from nothing through to making a great game character okay so i start off in the sculpting workspace and i select the snake hook tool and i'm changing the dime topo to constant detail and putting it to 20 then i'm just sort of pulling the shape around i find constant detail easier for beginners to understand as it gives a constant detail on your brush so you're always going to be at 20 or 30 or whatever you set it at relative detail if you zoom in it will change the amount of detail your brush gives and by detail i mean the polygon count so just getting the very basic shape that's the most important thing don't rush going into the details make sure you get that basic shape right and that you're fairly happy with it you can make minor changes as you go along but generally speaking we're trying to flesh out the shape block it out as they say so we don't have to make any drastic changes once we've added any fine detail it gets really awkward to do that later on so make sure you get the shape right now these sort of horn bits look like details but they are still the basic shape at the moment but having said that make sure you are happy with the head shape before you move on to the horns and you can see now i'm just fleshing out the actual features now so the eyebrow ridge and some of those sort of nostril areas and things all the time making sure i'm zooming around my object making sure the shape is working from every single angle now i change across the draw brush and start adding in sort of bones and protrusions and obviously digging in by holding down control to make the brush become its reverse and that's the same for all brushes hold down control to do the kind of reverse so with the draw brush that's to dig in and now you can see i go over to the crease brush and that's when i start adding a bit more detail as if i'm drawing a sketch at this point so when you're sketching you are sort of sketching in the details and the shading and you're doing the same with the crease brush in this case remember you can hold down control with this brush as well to create a sort of sharp point that sticks out i'm also going around the horns to give them some sort of separation from the head the crease brush also helps to make any sort of protrusions deeper if you go around them and next to them so i've created sort of ridges along the nose and ridges across the base as well and you can see it sort of adds a bit of character and a bit of shape and form to the dragon's head i am kind of making this up a bit as i go along i've got reference images off the screen but just having some fun experimenting with different shapes and form now here i go across the layout mode so i can add some eyes so i add a uv sphere make sure it's out to the side and then i use the mirror modifier to mirror it across the other side i also make sure that the top of the sphere where the uvs kind of match and meet in a pole i like to make sure that that's the pupil and iris and then it looks like an eyeball and i can kind of see which direction the character's looking in make sure you click on the dragon before you go back into sculpt mode otherwise you'll be sculpting the eyeball and you'll get confused do make sure that you're happy with the size of the eye and go back into object mode to scale it and move it if you need to i prefer to do that in layout mode like i say so i've upped my resolution in the diane topo settings to 50 now so i can do a bit more detail and you can see i just sort of sculpt on the eyelid like this so it's nice and simple nothing complicated always smoothing out but i'm using the draw brush and then smoothing out draw brush smooth out holding down shift to smooth obviously i thought i'd give it a more of a aggressive expression by pointing the eyebrows down as if it's frowning and then doing the bottom eyelid here again just draw in smooth out and you get a reasonably okay looking eyelid here i'm fleshing out some parts where some teeth might go so i'm thinking there'll be teeth on the bottom and teeth on the top coming down and overlapping his lips so i've created some areas for those just having a good look around making sure i'm happy with the shape still before i go into any more detail so here i've gone back to the snake tool just to make sure that i'm happy with the shape before going into that finer detail still doing a bit of experimenting but not too much movement or drastic movement of big areas so moving around these small areas i think is okay because i haven't actually added any detail to them every time i move them though i've got my dyn toppo set to 50 on constant detail so it is upping the resolution of these objects and adding that bit of detail so you have to be a bit careful if you smooth out and one part's got your new resolution one part's got your old resolution because you'll get sort of lumpiness you can do a constant detail fill but i didn't see the necessity of doing that i'm quite comfortable with the way it's going at the moment so adding in some lips making sure they protrude enough and there's areas for some teeth to go and this is just with the draw brush digging in where necessary back to layout mode now making sure my eyes are mirrored by using the mirror object as the dragon's head which is called quad sphere at the moment because i haven't labeled it and now i'm adding in another ico sphere here upping the resolution not that makes that much difference and then scaling it down and then just sculpt it into a tooth shape so this is a separate object in the new version of blender apparently it's going to be the button d to switch between objects but it didn't make too much difference for me most of the sculpting was going to take place on the dragon's head and i did some very basic teeth really that's something i probably ought to go back to and tidy up a bit maybe later on so the current way of switching between objects is to go up to edit and lock object mode make sure that's unticked and then alt middle click to switch between your objects but in the new version of blender the experimental builds this is you just have to press d which i think is a really good addition so really basic tooth shape there and it's digging into the chin and things are not really too fast i could sort that out later but it's kind of more about what looks good at the moment and if you were to 3d print it you would want it to overlap and you would want to join the objects together afterwards so i'm just duplicating that one tooth and moving around the place and again i do this in layout mode i find it much easier and i've added the mirror modifier so that when i duplicate the teeth it will have a mirror to the other side for each of them suppose i should point out that most of this video is at 200 so it's two times speed uh this teeth organizing bit i've put to 400 because it's a bit dull just sort of moving these around but you get the idea of the speed that i'm going at i think the whole sculpt took about 40 to 45 minutes at the end of all this organizing i do go around my shape quite a lot making sure that i'm happy with the position of the teeth and just check the other side as well to make sure nothing's off in terms of the mirror you can always re-mirror your object under the remesh tools so back to the drawer brush at this point making sure that i'm happy with the sort of skull and the shape of the face adding a few more details to the shape i thought it lacked a little bit of character so i thought i'd put a few more dents in and maybe this sort of some strange ear canal here and the skull goes around the edge there just gives it a bit more character and i decided to use the flattened brush it's just a basic brush for sort of flattening off the edges and i thought that helped to give it a bit more sharpness rather than roundness so the flattened brush you can also use the scrape brush as well there's lots of great settings there but the flattened brush with this basic settings just sort of brings the whole sculpt level now i'm going across to the clay strips tool again that's to add more sort of bulk to it rather than the draw tool which gives sort of roundedness the clay strips will give it that sort of structure and form so it's a better option than the round brush if you want sort of more pointy features now here i'd made a mistake i realized that i turned the mirror off for the teeth so i've had to go in and do a sort of remesh and re-mirror that's under the mirror tools i did say earlier that it was under the remesh tools but it's actually under the mirror tools so don't panic if you turned mirror off and you still want mirror on you can go to the symmetry tools in the drop down menu there and there's mirror options there so here i'm just making sure my teeth kind of fit in with the lips so pulling out and digging in where necessary and giving some sort of gum slash lips areas being fairly rough really and then just zooming out every now and again making sure it's working and it seems to be okay using the clay strips tool where necessary to add a bit of bulk but also that structure that the drawer tool doesn't give so rather than the roundness it's got a sort of squared style to it still smoothing out regularly whilst doing that but that structure seems to help with that sort of more pointiness of the dragon's head again back to the clay strips tool here to give it that sort of bone-like structure across the face if necessary you go into the crease tool and you can crease those edges up make it look a bit sharper and more detailed here you can see i'm using that reverse crease option so holding down control whilst using the crease brush not really sure what this bit is it's just sort of maybe an ear canal or something but i just thought it added that bit of interest and intrigue to the general shape of the head okay so i've moved up to 500 now just because i'm adding in general details and experimenting around with shape and form using the same brushes that i've already used so nothing different or special here separating the head out very slightly to give it a bit more shape and structure but like i say nothing too major going on here just adding a few details sharpening things up and smoothing things out i could have done a detailed flood fill that might have helped when smoothing things out but most of the mesh seems to have that resolution anyway the resolution of 50 that i set in the first place now i'm just messing around with some of the horns making sure they're nice and smooth in a sense of their shape and they haven't got any sort of lumpy bits on them and editing the chin slightly because i didn't want to give them a huge underbite that can look a bit cartoony so just making sure i was happy with all the shape okay so i'm back to real time now so this is normal speed and i've decided that i'm going to remesh it with quite a low voxel size and this is to make it ready so i can add the texture detail onto it so what i'm going to use is alpha brushes so i can just simply paint on scales and bumps and things like that it makes things much easier to add those fine details there's a bit of a pause when i press the remesh button it does struggle a little bit to do the remesh initially and it might be the case if you've got a slow computer that you'll have to just leave the scope there because this actually takes quite a lot of computer processing power just to remesh it and then if you're working on top of that it can take even more i decided to show the statistics there as well just for my benefit actually that way i could see how far i was going with the remesh and whether my computer was going to be happy hacking that sort of level of detail it seems to have kept its detail okay so i'm happy with that so remember you have to turn dyne toppo off before you can remesh and i won't be using dime toppo anymore from now on and now i'm adding a multi-resolution modifier i do go into this in much more detail in how to use alpha brushes and stencils for sculpting so make sure you check that video out if you need to what the multi-resolution modifier does is like the subdivision surface modifier it adds topology but it's really great because you can sculpt on the higher levels and you can actually go back to the lower levels if you want to do any big shape and movement the more important reason why i'm using this is that it works really well with stencil brushes and is very good on performance so for this i'll use my drawer brush and i'm going to create a new brush and i call this texture draw it's just easier having two different brushes in case you want to go to the stencils or back to the draw brush once i've done this i can go down to the texture area and click new i also change from tiled to random that way my brush doesn't tile all over the place there's one other setting that i find is very helpful and that's under the brush or stroke settings and change it to anchored it's a different way of brushing but it's much easier then i have to go across the texture slot here to add in my new texture under the texture settings i can open up one of my alphas i just show them on the side here by turning on thumbnails i've got these different alphas that i've picked for the dragon check out my video on lists of sites with great alpha textures if you want to be able to get some of these and then because i've got anchored on i can click and drag and it sort of brings out these shapes so that's the anchored option under the stroke method now it's really nice and easy just to go around having fun adding in these different textures there seems to be a slight glitch at the moment which is an undo glitch when i do this it's absolutely fine it just takes a while to undo now initially i didn't change my brush strength so it's about 0.5 at the moment but generally speaking i like to have it at 0.2 but i actually forgot to do that at this point so i think i'll go back in a little bit later and do some of these and change the brush strength so it's just something to be aware of your resolution will also make a difference with this so your remesh level or even your multi-resolution level and with the multi-resolution you can subdivide several times now if you want to add a new texture you need to just add a new texture in your brush settings and then go to the texture slots and find another alpha so add a new texture in the brush first and then go to the textures to add the new image and then you can click and drag and pull them out again i probably got the strength a little bit too high for this not that it matters too much but i think 0.2 would have been better rather than having too much lumpiness at the bottom here and again you can subdivide with your multi-resolution as many times your computer can handle if you want more detail and that's in the modifiers try and vary the detail across your shape as well so add different larger details to some areas smaller details to others and you can see there is a slight glitch there as well where it tries to load up a new texture and it does take a little bit of time but generally speaking this is performing very well so this time i choose the sort of scales and you can see the brush strength is coming out a bit too strong so i have to undo that and there's that undo glitch again and this where i think i really ought to be saving my work so do make sure with this you are saving regularly because you are likely to come across crashes and glitches as you can see there at this point i start realizing i've got my brush strength a bit too high so i change it to that 0.2 value and that gives that nice sort of more subtle effect which works really nicely for these scales or whatever they might be okay so i'm back up to 500 now so this is five times the speed that i'm normally going because basically i'm just adding those texture brushes going around adding some detail don't just slap these textures on randomly do think about the structure and what it's doing to your object one thing that i should have done more of is looked at more reference images of actual animals and see how their scales and hides actually look whereas i was just sort of randomly going from memory i think it would have ended up looking a bit better if i'd used those reference images and really given it some more thought kind of just experimenting looking at the new tools in blender 2.9 and seeing how things were going so the most important things would be the anchor brush because that's when you can click and drag and create a brush stroke and of course the multi-resolution modifier you can't do this in diamond toppo it really doesn't work it just lags really badly this is trying to create new topology on a really fine detail so you must remesh your object and then add a multi-resolution modifier but do look at my triangle count there it's up to four million so it is fairly high really and you do need a decent computer for this i would say also if you're doing this sort of thing then try the most up-to-date version of blender in terms of some of the alpha builds as well because performance increases are being added all the time to the sculpting section here you can see for the horns i've got some sort of scrape brush which i found and i think it's a really nice one for those horn details i go in and use the crease brush a little bit later on as well just to add some more detail to some areas to give it a finer look and i actually use the draw sharp tool as well not the crease brush here but the draw sharp which is very slightly different sort of indents into the shape it's like the draw tool but it's much finer so there we go this finished dragon's head let me know if you want to see a texturing video maybe a retopology video and how i go about doing those sort of things with slightly more complex models like this also please let me know if you prefer this format where i'm doing a time lapse and talking over the top or you'd rather the follow along where i go a lot slower so as usual thanks for watching and i will see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 76,166

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, sculpting, sculptor, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, follow along, follow, simple, basic, beginner, 3dart, speed sculpt, 3d modeling, Blender 2.9 tutorial, blender 2.9, magic, mushroom, nodes, textures, dragon, wyvern, fantasy, fantasy art, mythical creatures

Id: KOSdRdeS5oM

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020