Sculpting Hands in Zbrush

hey what's up i'm jay welcome back uh thank you guys for all the interest and support you guys been showing me recently on the channel and the entries been shown in the videos i'm glad you guys are liking it so let's just keep it going today we're going to be doing a little bit of a tutorial we're going to be sculpting a hand so i've been doing hand studies uh you know in and around different projects i've had the question a few times hey can you do a hand sculpting video or tutorial on a sculpt hands so i'm not sure how many of you out there want to learn how to sculpt hands from me but i think this is going to be good if you're interested in sculpting in zbrush and getting better at sculpting in zbrush sculpting hands is the perfect subject uh if you're a little bit comfortable already because you got to use all the fundamentals all of the sculpting techniques and brushes apply it'll really help you just work on your sculpting game like the difficulty level is just right the anatomy and proportions and stuff and then there's a lot of potential for character and personality and we all have hands so it's the perfect subject you can take pictures you can look at your hands so every time i'm sculpting a hand i'm looking at my other hand i actually choose like which i actually choose to do left hands most of the time because then i can just look at my other hand so i think this is going to be a really good thing for you to do if you're interested in learning how to sculpt better so i really hope you enjoy this one i hope you learned something hit that like button if you do subscribe to see more videos like this and let's jump in and sculpt a hand all right so starting out we're going to start with a dynameshed sphere you can start with one of the scenes that come with zbrush if you want in the light box and we're going to start with a really low resolution in this case set to 64. and that just lets us push and pull you know real big make really big changes really quickly so we want to stay as low as we can for as long as we can and only increase the amount of polygons as we need it as we move through like more forms so we're pushing and pulling we're using the move brush and we're just trying to get this sphere into the shape of a palm starting to use damn standard a little bit early and that's just to sketch out these like major wrinkles or major form directions and this stuff isn't meant to stay it's just to give me like places to measure and so i can see what's going on so i'm just marking things in there so drawing a mask now at the end of the palm and then pulling out the arm and then re-dynameshing you want to re-dynamesh every time you're making a really big change because then that remakes the topology remakes the geo uh and it like evenly distributes it so you can push and pull quite a bit and it's okay but uh if you're stretching it too much you need to re dynamesh right away so then starting to do some sculpting here of forms refining forms this is going to be an ongoing process if you can see me now starting to sculpt with the clay buildup brush and that's my brush of choice when it comes to sculpting you can see how i'm laying kind of strips and i'm going to be doing this throughout but already starting to break up the forms and add a little bit more i use the clip brush real quick here just to slice off the top smush it down and flatten the end of the palm that's where i'm going to start pulling out the fingers so i draw a mask for the first finger and then i pull it out then i re-dynamesh again and then i use the clip brush again to just make some quick planes on the finger you know just to flatten out the sides real quick draw a mask for the second finger pull that out again using the clip curve brush to make some quick planes so now with these two fingers i can really start to make sure my overall proportions are okay and measurements so i'm looking at the relationship between those two fingers the middle finger being the longest finger and then making sure that that length of that finger in relation to the palm is good so right now with the arm the palm on these two fingers you kind of have enough to already start to make sure your proportions are getting in the general right zone there so then i draw a mask over on the end of the palm here that's going to be the thumb and i pull out that first knuckle which is not too far out but starting to go from thick to thin here just so i can start to stretch this out i pull out the ring finger you can see i'm kind of jumping around this helps me to kind of work on everything at once and it also helps me like key off different things i'm never like focusing on one area until it's done i am jumping around a lot so i'm trying to be as clear as i can for the sake of this video but in reality i am like kind of jumping around i use the move brush on the tips of the fingers so i'm actually holding alt and then using the move brush to pull out the tips of the fingers to round those tips out and get those shapes kind of working a little bit better so it's not so blunt then i pull out the rest of the thumb to get my next two knuckles start to push and pull that around with move brush too and also as i'm working sometimes i need to make large adjustments and i'm doing that just by masking also i could use the lasso mask however whatever makes sense to make the mask for that particular thing and then i'm just making big movements if i need to readjust proportion if i need to start putting things in into different places or even posing which we're going to start here soon so then i pull out the pinky and now i'm starting to add more detailed forms again using the clay buildup all the time sculpting with clay buildup and then also my own little variation of the standard brush which is just the standard brush with a kind of chiseled tip and i'm using that to lay down things like the tendons on the top of the hand maybe some veins but those two brushes now starting to add more detailed secondary forms now so now that i have all the fingers then i poly group them i can just draw a mask and then group by mask you can also group visible however you want to do it but i want to get poly groups on those fingers each finger so that i can just quickly select them now from now on if i need to work on them and isolate them which we're going to do because we're going to start posing the hand now so i'm posing the hand using those selections using masks and then just using a little transpose line starting to rotate them rotate from the knuckle to get the hand into the pose that i want and i have this reference up my key reference for this hand up the whole time on my other monitor so really important to know where you're headed or else you're going to spend a lot of time just kind of dancing around iterating and not exactly sure where you're going to go all right then i pull out the nails on the ends of the fingers just draw a quick mask again and then with the move brush i can just yank them out and then we're really going to start defining more forms now in this case the knuckles uh the pads on the palm so same tools now we're just going around with that standard brush clay buildup and damn standard those are really all you need is really make clean forms and we can get into details later but i'm going to be doing this all the time now and i'm also going to be continually refining the posts so continually refining the pose and the sculpture i'll show this example of making the finger move through as you can see like after i pull it out it's simple i start making planes and then i'm kind of starting to break up the forms right we're going from big to small like getting the measurement where's the seams gonna be for the wrinkles for where it bends where's the knuckle gonna be uh where's the skin gonna be where it connects to the hand and then we start laying in like smaller wrinkles uh where the knuckles are and stuff like that so it's getting more detailed as it goes all right so now this is really where the most time is spent the bulk of the work is the sculpting so let's just take a look at this and i'll give some commentary and some thoughts and tips as i see them you can see here just to find that bone at the end of the wrist and again you can also see the brushes i'm using the lower left but i'm just gonna be switching between those main brushes like i said and also dancing around so hopefully it's not too confusing but here we go using inflate two sometimes that's great to do around where um the skin bunches up and like the pads on the inside of the fingers you can see these kind of catching arc shapes i do with the wrinkles too so if i'm drawing a wrinkle in one direction i kind of do the opposite in the other direction and have them make these little zigzag patterns using dam standard again to uh define where the knuckles gonna be the the hard edge around the knuckle and i just used pinch right there that's another cool brush that i use occasionally that's just a really fast way to make like things taper so i don't have i just go to the brush palette to grab that but pinch that's kind of a interesting brush that i'll use occasionally you can see when i build up these forms too that i'm like going against the grain you might say to build up this tube shape and there i am even removing it and i like build up because it gives a little bit of the texture on the uh sculpture and then i just smooth it but if you want you can kind of leave some of that texture sometimes you want direction you can see how i'm building up form now by making these kind of criss-crossy patterns so i just made a quick mask and tweaked the thumb shape so always doing that so we're kind of repeating the same steps from earlier but just continually right and then the sculpting itself is gonna get more detailed as time goes on but again tweaking the shape of the finger and and this because it's an elderly hand too the skin's gonna feel a bit loose at least that's what i'm gonna try to convey especially the skin around the fingers but the hand in general i want it to feel like an older hand and one that's been through some stuff you know has has been moving its whole life so there's a definite quality that i'm going to be trying to maintain and so the wrinkles the major folds and eventually some details are going to help reinforce that and you can see how low with this finger see how low the topology still is this is something that i see a lot of times is people will subdivide or do a high dynamesh a little quickly you know i want to keep it as low as i can there's still so much time the most time spent is in this stage of doing secondary forms the primary forms the main stuff that's what we did in the beginning the like big overall shapes and measurements but this stuff where i'm just like you know detailing things and things are like wrinkles and details are coming online that's the bulk of the time that means most of the time it's going to be kind of low now here you see me building up the finger again doing those little catching arcs like i mentioned and then using that standard brush with the chisel to pull out kind of an edge i'll do that along the fingers too but that way i get kind of a sharp edge that's why i like the brush like that here we go starting to get the wrinkles on the pinky too always always uh putting off the pinky sad sad pinky never getting the love but eventually it'll get there too so here's some of that stretchy like loose skin uh that i mentioned that i want to get in and how it blends into the finger again when you're zooming in you can see how low it is still because once i go up in dynamesh i can always just go over all the form i plan to do that anyway to crisp it up so i don't want to spend too much time the higher like the more dense the mesh the more friction it's going to have to manipulate it i want to be fast and loose here so just keep it low and now even by making the clay build up brush smaller i can do smaller wrinkles i'm also using this as a tool to sketch in where things are going to go before i commit to it or before maybe even before i use damn standard and i can just reinforce stuff you can see how small i can get with wrinkles still even at this resolution and you can see in the upper left my resolution is at 400 now so we're upping it and when i did that might be worth noting that i have blur at zero and i have project on when dynameshing and that's to preserve the shape as much as possible when i dynamesh i don't want it to change right how it looks i just want more polygons and then once that happens i can just go over and smooth stuff to get rid of that faceted look from the lower polygon mesh we just updated so now i can make smaller details and come over and start smoothing things out and then just adding you know smaller more complicated forms and shapes and so we're at a pretty good place now feeling pretty good a little longer and then we should be ready to start doing detail and again i'm just going to be refining going over and over again another little thing i did on the nails is i'll use trim dynamic as you see right here and i just go over the tips of the nails and just start making like planes and i can go up and down and just kind of make it look like a it's a nail with a little bit of uh faceting on it so i actually just duplicated this arm and i z remeshed it so i'm turning this first hand that we just made into the base mesh so i can make a second hand because in this i'm actually doing a composition with two hands we're gonna kind of breeze by this part but i just wanted to throw it in there to show you that's part of this process and how you can turn a sculpt into a base mesh so i'm poly grouping these fingers so is this is this as good as a production hand no but by doing something with dynamesh that doesn't mean that we have to stay in dynamesh and the reason why i made this a bass mesh was i was gonna change up the hand i'm gonna do a younger hand so i didn't want to have to manipulate that dynamesh so much right so i thought i'll just make it a base mesh and then i can resculpt it so i get the form of the hand i get all that work we did in the beginning but then i'll resculpt it so i'm just bending this arm now this is part of the uh composition i'm realizing i need the hand to look more like it's uh relaxed and bent and now i'm going to be trying to put this second hand into position so i spend a lot of time sculpting the second hand too we won't spend as much time on that since we're focusing on this first one but the steps are the same it's just different different subject slightly still a hand but just a little bit different kind of character to it so really trying to get this hand right i actually ended up just going to my bathroom and taking pictures of my own hand to get the pose right i spent too much time going back and forth and i still am going to play a lot with like uh all the little finger poses the angle um because i'm also trying to work out the final composition like the final like shot and like whether or not the fingers touch and so you know this is kind of the art part of it or the um the feeling so i that kind of stuff is more personal but you see like the steps are the same right masking rotating and something a little bit different in this workflow you can see while i'm working on this hand is because it's a base mesh it's the it's done with the subdivision method as you can see at the top of my subdivision level four and so you'll see the resolution change because part of sculpting in zbrush is going up and down in resolution that way i can make bigger changes by dropping down and then i can go back up where it's really high and i can work on those details like crisp things up whereas dynamesh is just you know us a stagnant state you just go up in polygons and then while you're working you don't go up and down i could turn this into a mesh and reproject though but it's not necessary this is just a sculpting exercise so i'm just keeping it dynamesh and here we go now i'm using the clay brush different than clay buildup as you can see it doesn't have that toothy uh kind of detail and another feature of it is it well it builds up form with a little bit of a softer fall off it's it's a little more round and also it's do it's doing a smooth as you sculpt so we're getting a little bit closer look here so you can see it helps me build these rounder forms and as you cross in and out with your strokes it'll blend them together because like i say it's doing kind of a smooth while you're doing a stroke so this is a softer kind of sculpting brush and i'm using it primarily here to lay in all of the smaller skin folds and wrinkles and it helps me blend you know i can just be a lot more delicate and it's not going to be as noisy as the clay build up would be so it kind of depends on the subject matter you know what you're doing but this helps right because it's it's making these rounded forms so in this case it made sense for me to use the clay brush but use whatever you want that's what's cool buzzy brush there's a lot of brushes in there everyone's got a favorite and there's always a brush for a certain job damn standard though everybody loves damn standard you know i'm using that again here to do the the finer things the sharper things i also have my own fine line brush which i'll use for really small fine wrinkles it's fun to do this right here where i'm crisscrossing i always love doing that when i'm sculpting skin you can see like just making the lines uh intersect with each other a little bit just coming in at at varying angles so they create like little y's and little x's and stuff and also i'm varying my hand like i'm not doing a straight line you know i'm trying to do flowy lines kind of s shapes and in different ways so this is fun i enjoy this part and it also has help helps to bring your sculpture to life a little bit more feels more organic uh feels more in this case human and uh and it's just fun to see this kind of illusion happening you see i'm also pillowing out the shapes now as they cross uh it creates not like sub shapes little pads that i can inflate or use the clay brush to add more volume and then that breaks it up too so i just used my standard brush again to make these veins another fun detail is to add veins these wrinkles on the wrist are the clay brush so again softer but i can just straight up use it for wrinkles which is awesome and then if i need to do something sharp that'd be damn standard again i can always use inflate i can use standard to bring things out so you can see same brushes i kind of feel like my mouth is saying the same words over and over again but hopefully just by seeing it in action you can see how much mileage you can get uh and that's that's something i guess that might be obvious but it's just it's not about the brushes right it's just about uh manipulating the form and sometimes honestly i don't even remember like as i'm watching this video i'm i'm remembering brushes i used so i think it's really key to be doing things like this and doing studies so that you can learn what brushes you like just experiment and then you'll get a better idea of how it manipulates the form oh here i am using my fine wrinkles brush for my skin my skin brushes pack actually and again doing the crisscrossing thing which is super fun so i'm like going in one direction and then going in the opposite direction and then that creates this like checker pattern of organic shapes and then once that happens i'm kind of using those shapes that that just happen those happy accidents to come in and form other shapes again fun stuff and i'm not following this reference that much at this point i'm just adding detail uh i mean i'm following a little bit but i'm not like making myself really stick to it by doing exercises like this by sculpting you learn how you can get shapes that's kind of what happens right is if you're going to do a study it forces you to figure out how to make a form you might not know how to do it and so by using different brushes experimenting eventually you'll create something that creates that effect that you're after and then that becomes a tool in your toolkit you want to get to the place where you're not thinking about the brushes anymore you just know you need to make a particular kind of shape and then your hands just kind of do it you know you just you just you get your normal go-to bag of tricks eventually the more you do these so i'm not i'm definitely not thinking about well what brush now i'm just thinking about like i need to make this look like this i need to make this look like this and then i'm just doing it all right so with this other hand i'm going to be sculpting it uh and getting it ready to go too again we're going to breeze by it but i'm going to be refining the the pose a lot like i said i took some extra reference and i just want to get that right this is going to be a younger hand so it's not going to have as many wrinkles um but same process you know i'm using uh clay to build up the forms clay buildup clay for wrinkles damp standard for the creases these poly groups make it easy to select the fingers and uh it's nice to have subdivisions subdivision levels because i can go up and down i'm comfortable working that way and so you have a lot more freedom and you have a lot more control over the forms you're making by doing that workflow so you can see here kind of going through the same workflow uh again kind of the most satisfying part here you know towards the end the main forms are there the main problems are solved and then i'm getting to kind of um break up the forms more more detailed stuff more like anatomy trying to get this wrist bone and the wrinkles on the inside of the palm here this is also pointing towards camera so i'm aware of that and i'm focusing time here with just damn standard in my standard brush just making it nice and crispy so then yeah when we're at the end then we have this composition uh i'm happy with it lots of iteration this one was a little bit of a struggle uh i thought oh i'll make two hands and uh it turned out to be more work than two hands i think because i just wasn't super clear i had a clear idea when i started that i wanted um this young hand kind of reaching out to an older hand from the perspective of the viewer it took a while to get the poses and the angle you know to a spot that i was happy with but we got there i'm happy with how it came out so here is the finished models now i'm going to send this over to maya so the way i do that is you know these are just sculpts these are supposed to be smaller projects so i'm not gonna go through the whole the whole thing i'm just gonna use um decimation master so i can get these out of here i'm even gonna do that with the subdivision hand you know i'm not gonna make uvs and and make a displacement map and all that i'm just using the the high poly models and then i'm decimating it so that they look the same but their topology is all janky because it's really crunched down which is okay it's just to make it lighter for me to save export and import into maya and then i'm going to use tri planar nodes in maya that let me project textures with no uvs so i don't care about uvs right now i'm just going to move it to maya to make a presentation to make an image that's more appealing with nice lighting so once i'm in maya i import the models i made this scene this is a scene that i've already set up so i have to reset it up and i just get it in the camera at the right angle i move the light around to a spot that i think works best for the composition in this case i thought a top-down light made the most sense so that's what i did and then i applied the shader that i made which is also in here and i also made sure that the like the tiling and the size of the detail is fine i made these maps in uh substance alchemists and then tweaked them and stuff so this video is not really about the presentation and rendering and arnold i'm gonna make a video for that though i've gotten several questions on my instagram about this so i thought that'd be another good subject for a video like this so we'll do a little bit more of a longer deeper dive and demo into how i do this like presentation with my sculpts in maya if you want to do something like that too so once i have it positioned and i have the shot set up and i have the shader applied all that's left is to render it at a high resolution and then several minutes later we have a nice pretty picture that arnold rendered out of the hands that we just made all right that does it for today's video i hope you found it informative or entertaining in some way if you did please do hit that like button and coming up i've got a couple other videos planned maybe the next one is going to be that rendering and arnold video uh how to do nice presentations of your sculpts and it'll be a good kind of uh gateway into some arnold techniques and rendering stuff so maybe that'll be next i also have some art projects cooking in the background so we're just gonna try to keep this ball rolling um i'll catch you guys in the next video thanks for watching peace out [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: J Hill

Views: 36,661

Rating: 4.9834862 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush tutorial, digital sculpting, how to, 3d modeling, zbrush sculpting, zbrush beginner tutorial, digital sculpting tutorial, hands, sculpting hands, how to sculpt hands, jhill, digital sculpting timelapse, digital sculpting software, digital sculpting zbrush, digital sculpting basics, digital sculpting tips, zbrush, zbrush tutorial beginner

Id: _HPmy28SdOc

Length: 25min 26sec (1526 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 11 2021