Sculpting Happiness! Back to ZBRUSH

hi so it's been a really really long time since I made a video for you two too long you could say it's been so long that I wasn't even sure what kind of video to make to come back so this is going to be that video since I've been gone the channel when I left the channel had around five thousand subscribers and now we're hovering around 20,000 so that's a really big number you know it's intimidating to be honest I'm sure a lot of it is is like you know BOTS and you know random subscribes but definitely that's indicative that there's a fair amount of people that are interested in that stuff which is exactly why I made this channel to begin with so I made this channel to really first and foremost kind of demystify making digital sculpts and so yeah moving forward I kind of want to do that same thing I want this channel to be about making digital art it's about making 3d models about making characters and that's kind of a big topic but so I wanted divide it in kind of two kinds of videos one's gonna be like the videos I was doing before like time lapses so essentially kind of like making ups you know almost maybe like art vlogs we'll see and the other type of video is gonna be tutorials I've made maybe two tutorials on the channel so far and people like them and they're helpful and that's exactly what I want to do with the channel so so moving forward I'm gonna be making videos where I just make art and I kind of talk about that a little behind the scenes of of making stuff and then more specific videos that are tutorials on how to do something so when it comes to tutorials I kind of need your help I don't know what to make I've got a list of my own I threw something out on Instagram and people send me good ideas so I wrote those down a lot of them are gonna be game art related probably in the future that is what I do professionally but there's plenty of other things in terms of you know making models and making characters that I'd also like to do maybe ZBrush related stuff fibermesh rendering videos on the game industry all that said though I'm trying to come back I guess this is the video where I come back just want to rip the band-aid off so I'm just gonna make something in ZBrush here we go all right so I thought the best thing to do would be to just make something in ZBrush try to make it real low stakes for me to just kind of break the ice on like what do I make and also being outside of work I I do want to make things that take relatively low amounts of time because professionally I do things that take weeks and months so I want to do things in one day sometimes and this is gonna be one of those things and this is also insight into what I actually do well so what we're gonna do today is we're gonna do like a study so I'm gonna sculpt something based on this photograph which I have pinned on my Pinterest page along with a lot of other faces and beautiful people interesting looking people so I'm gonna start with a sphere in ZBrush and I'm gonna dynamesh it and we're gonna start making this face my goal ultimately with this is to create an image primarily that image is gonna be for like you guys in the video and stuff so we want to keep the stakes low it's not about photo realism it's not about making a production level piece I'm also gonna myself try to do some stuff with fibermesh I think that's an interesting part of this image I think that would round out this sculpt and also just give me more kind of hair you know experience and practice so again this this whole point of doing a study like this is within a few hours make something and then you move on you know it's not gonna be the best thing ever made but it's definitely gonna take you through a process you're gonna get to experience the different parts of the workflow at the end you're gonna have something that you're that you made and whether or not it's good you get to move on and make other things so this is about practice is about improving and also it's about just making stuff in ZBrush so let's dive in and do it all right so first thing I'm gonna do with my dynamesh I'm gonna set this real low let's just start at 32 right now this is just a sphere from ZBrush turn on my X symmetry I made it a poly mesh and then we're gonna just start making it so first we're gonna do our basic head shape so in the beginning I'm primarily going to be using the move brush I'm gonna make a basic shape of the bust and then we can move on from there okay so we just have a ball here we're gonna stretch this out skulls a little bit longer I also like doing my transpose line just dynamesh right there so let's pull out the neck - why don't we the goal here is to make your basic shape so not at all concerned about likeness at this point at this point I'm trying to make a female shape after you pull up you know big things like the neck right here gonna have to read dynamesh just stretching something out to make you kind of more of a bust this is a this is really for kind of presentation purposes and when you're doing your own warm-up it's like for your own sanity really like if you want to do a floating head that's fine like neck only switching to my claybuildup right now actually just to fill this in we'll get more into claybuildup in a second just making light indications right now of kind of the skull shape I can I can better see what's going on like where the shapes are and how they're relate to each other kind of think my skull might be a little too wide there working on the side view again you can see kinda how much time I'm spending it's just a few minutes but another thing is the skull is more wide in the back than the front I'm gonna pull out this nose mass here I'm actually gonna raise this up just a tad now I'm gonna go I guess we can go to 64 so I'm going to double it comes out like this we're gonna rotate it and the rest is right when you start getting other features and you can kind of see how something is too wide I'd say right now we got kind of a man vibe to our our base here so I'm gonna try to like make these features a little more delicate I mean it helps to get the overall form here at the mouth how it protrudes out and then I'm worried about the placement of the lips and stuff really gonna focus on the front view here so not gonna spend too much time in the back of the skull and the ear but you know it is for your own practice I'm trying to kind of set a time limit of a couple hours might have to start speeding up and and leaving things sketchy which is fine but this helps me just find the the base mesh so we've only used a couple brushes so far primarily we've been using the move brush so I just push and pull this like the most common brush I'm using my claybuildup brush right here - that's my favorite brush for sculpting forms you know we can switch the damn standard brush to make lines and that's kind of it right now lots of smooth so lots of move brush lots of smooth brush and then I'll use my clay buildup brush to you know make forms kind of just define how things are flowing and stuff so those are really the main brushes as I do the primary form so you can also use snake hook mixed in with the move brush snake hook is like a much stronger move brush but right now I'm just trying to keep things delicate and precise while I put things in their place so not too crazy in terms of brushes just trying to do it bit by bit alright let's get some eyes in here boom so just a pendant a sphere scale it down and then transparency helps out so that we can see how it relates to this skull trying to get the size of the eye right is pretty useful like is anatomically correct as we can I mean you know we're not doctors right now but we're trying to get it pretty close so if you have to look up some Anatomy reference and scale of eyes go ahead and do that I'm gonna duplicate it right now I'm gonna mirror it so that we have two here so now we got two eyes I'll turn on symmetry that way you know we can position them together it's a lot more natural to see that try to get the depth right maybe like right here the height might be a little low so getting the eye size about right in the depth about right is really really useful because it helps you build the forms around the eye first of all if you get the skull shape right of the cavity then you kind of know where to put the eyeball and then once you have an eyeball you know how to lay down the lids so it just helps with believability actually because it's kind of a natural progression of sculpting kind of one thing after the other in the way that the eye is formed already so kind of a little bit of an Anatomy tip here my masks you can see so if we're looking like right here where the corner of the mouth is if you look at the corner of the mouth that's it's about the tip of the eye so for me I think that means the eye needs go a little deeper because I don't think my brow and my nose are that right but my where my mouth would be here we can kind of make a little mark here just you can see that's probably about where the corner of the mouth would be so you can see they're still my eye might be a little bit too forward okay there we go also might be a little low could be a little far the corner of the mouth right here from the front view lines up to the middle of the eye just about usually on the inside between the pupil and the iris and about the midpoint there so to me that means the eyes are a little wide still why don't we jump into our eyes right here and we will rotate them forward right so now the typologies pointing forward and we can easily make an eye shape or an IRA shape why don't we do a convexed eye so I'll just hit divide one time when up and do that looks like I can go more intense it's about half the width of the eye I might change my focal shift a little bit getting a little nerdy now kind of overdoing it but honestly eyes really help the character so I'm kind of down to do it just gonna hit it with smooth a little bit okay now the thing about eyes one little tip that I'm always sharing with people because it's easy to forget it makes a big difference is if we point the eyes out a little bit like this we need to rotate them outwards you know between four and five degrees or so things so our eyes are actually like a little wall-eyed so that we can see more you know peripheral because we're working on computers a mistake that's super common is people will make eyes point it perfectly straightforward and then the character ends up looking a little cross-eyed and you're not exactly sure why also like I said before having an eyeball in there and in this case we're also putting the cornea lump that's gonna help us get a good highlight when we're checking for likeness but also that bump kind of dictates the eyelid eyelids kind of sit over that cornea bump so we need to rotate it out just a little bit let me just really quickly see if the other thing once I use this gizmo if I hit this button right here it goes to the mesh center which is what I want to rotate it from the center and then when I wrote rotate out I can actually see the degrees so why don't we go like three degrees and then I'm gonna get my transpose line back because that I like my transpose line so I'm a G like that alright so now we got this funny-looking eye and the depth we're gonna need to do again there we go now what's happening here is like when I scale you see how it's going to the middle point I can hit this little local symmetry button that lets me scale you know just to the object like a little bit right there and then I guess we need to go up a little bit okay cool so now before we leave the eye I'm gonna put on the toy plastic material so I'm gonna put the toy plastic material on I will just fill that then I can turn off Mr GB and I can go back to my basic material then we can jump back over to this so this way you can see because I have a mound the highlight on the eye is a little bit more predictable we're getting that dot where we think we're gonna get it alright so now before I go up to high you know we're still relatively low it's getting a little bit dense and you know the more dense we make something the more resistance there's gonna be for more info and dynamesh zremesher codes buddy and then i want to work on the face expression and we're gonna finish the sculpt in that context that's part of this kind of exercise is that we want to break away from the OL from the traditional boring face and and we're gonna work a little bit on the expression that lets us get a little more familiar with with character and emotion that way and it lets us improve our sculpting skills because we have a little bit more of a challenge more forms to deal with and overall we get to learn more about the human face and it's a little bit more interesting so instead of making a face and then pushing it into position we already made kind of our base and now we're gonna start to make that expression and refine the sculpt from there looking over at my reference why don't we get some lines to help us the upper lid the upper lip I know it's gonna raise just a little bit let's start speeding things up a little bit here we'll uh we'll do a quick little time-lapse just to show things you know blocking more things out with clay tubes plenty of move brush did some inflate for the nose and the mouth so just helping things take shape so we're definitely on our way to a happy Hobbit you know but that's not what we're going for so you have to keep working on this so just making progress slowly but surely smoothing things out in this stage can be a lot of dynamesh after I make big changes refining the form of the nose here trying to find that peak and you can see my area of focus kind of bouncing around that helps me from becoming bored and it also just helps me move the face kind of forward at once instead of focusing too long on one part you see me heavy handedly laying down kind of Anatomy and landmarks - with clay tubes and damn standard that I can refine more later okay so this smile is really coming up all the way in here - coming up underneath the eye a lot of scrunching actually here I'm drawing kind of a harsh line here like what are you doing but um you go you'll see it'll it'll quickly wash away I want to speed this up once again kind of wrap up the initial layin of all these forms so hopefully you can tell a lot of heavy-handedness at this stage so I'm using a lot of clay tubes that's that's my main tool for doing forms and after I lay in you know generally where I think form transitions are gonna be then then I'll spend some time you know working on the volume and then lots of smooth brush too so try to keep it loose you know trying to just make those changes and and not keep anything too precious right now I'm also kind of aware that I'm going to be doing a lot of tweaking so that's I think that's just natural especially when it comes to faces so I think it's it's more important to lay down all the elements all the forms all the landmarks and and just keep refining that's going to be most of my time spent is just refining everything that I've already laid in also you know in this in this case I'm trying to find that expression I think pretty early on we're gonna we're gonna figure out if it feels like a smiling girl like a genuine happy smile kind of a laugh or or if it's just feeling you know stilted doing a little bit of wrinkles - not necessarily final stuff though you can see just by laying down the strip's with clay tubes I can kind of get a sense of where wrinkles would be and where the skin would be bunching up all right how are we looking here pretty good kind of in the zone for a little bit the idea here is that we're just making stuff right we're not not trying to be too perfect trying to learn a thing or two trying to get some practice all right now I'm gonna go dig around and try to get my teeth model that I made for the Frankenstein always good to save your little model bits and stuff like that so I think it's gonna help me finish up the mouth - is to grab those teeth and then so we'll just import them into the scene and kind of work them into position and and then I think we're getting pretty close I'm wrapping up the sculpt I think you know polishing the forms adding little lines those finishing touches are going to be fun but those are generally like less challenging than trying to get the overall forms the primary shapes secondary shapes and the kind of likeness again we're not going for pinpoint accuracy but you know we're trying to make it look like a smiling girl that's the whole point right so I'm gonna go get those teeth now all right so back over here I just loaded in my teeth Z tool and then I'm gonna append it okay let's see this [Music] maybe we rotate it a little bit and the scale I think we can go a little bit bigger blunt these teeth a little bit a little bit of an underbite little bit open alright so you can kind of see already now that we put that in there that the front view looking okay and the side view is looking a little bit weird right so now we're gonna try to get these lips to wrap around the teeth somewhat so as with the eyes and kind of any major major facial feature but in this case with the teeth in the mouth I think some things become immediately evident that they are wrong so trying to find where the teeth would be sitting in the skull and and what kind of shape that would make the mouth take you know by checking your reference you can just kind of see how much of the teeth that you're seeing you know where they sit and overall it just really gives you all the cues you need to refine the lip shape it's gonna be almost impossible to make perfect lips without anything in there because as you can kind of see with my expression some parts of the lips are kind of Smashing and wrapping around around the front of the teeth and then the sides of the mouth are being pulled by the facial muscles so it just helps having the teeth in there also trying to get the teeth size is is important so in general it's just really is kind of a creepy Joker smile right there but in general it just helps get the shape right so we're at a point now where I'm getting ready to refine and in some cases I even want to make big changes instead of keeping this dynamesh the whole time we're gonna I'm gonna call a little bit of an audible here I'm gonna show you a technique that I use all the time I don't know if this is worth a separate video or not but I'm just gonna go in and do it real quick so this is what I would normally do I'm gonna use zremesher to create a new mesh and I'm going to project the mesh I have right now onto it so that what I end with is a mesh that has a nice flow to it it has subdivision levels and it looks exactly like my dynamesh version that I have right now I want that nice clean mesh so that I can smooth and start to do details and also I want to be able to work with subdivision levels so I can go up and down and kind of manipulate the face that type of freedom I don't have exactly what dynamesh but I'm gonna do a little bit of a process now where I duplicate and I reproject so I'm just gonna do it right now again I don't want to over complicate things so I'm just gonna do it real quick but you'll see how in the end by remesh Inge it's gonna give us so much more freedom and overall a nicer mesh I'll just turn off these other measures right now so we'll just have the one that we're dealing with I'm just gonna simplify the inside of the mouth we're gonna need all this detail I'm gonna have solo on so that we can watch this the whole time I'll just fullscreen this so you can kind of see so you'll see in my sub tool palette here I'm gonna duplicate now so got to still have solo on so we're only looking at one then I'm gonna use zremesher I'm gonna keep symmetry on because that will make it a symmetrical topology which is what I want I'll start out with one and we'll see what this gets us boom it gets us a sad clown Oh sad clown so this is what we get okay I think I'm gonna try to see what we get with that okay so we've got a little bit more detailed sad clown alright I'm gonna try this so if I turn off poly frames is our new mesh right if I hit divide I'm at subdivision level for now and now remember the only thing visible is my original mesh so if I come into project I turn off blur cuz I wanted to be identical and I hit project boom it just projects the other one so now since I have solo on you'll see if I if I click different things in the sub soil palette that's what we see right so this is our new mesh and this is our old mesh you can't even tell a difference which is exactly what we wanted and now we have subdivisions so I can drop down I can go up and I can go even higher and I smooth this out now and I can make I can drop this downright sanam on subdivision level 1 and I can make these big changes and then I go back up it looks the same right so now we have a lot more freedom so this rematching process is hugely important to me I do it all the time and I strongly recommend you get familiar with it if if you're not already usually when I show it to people it looks confusing the first time but use do it a couple of times and you get it being able to drop in the lower subdivision level and work on the big overall volume without losing detail is huge that's why I love sculpting with subdivisions so I'm gonna do that for a little bit I'm gonna just refine the overall shape and then I think then we'll move to fiber mesh do some hair alright so now that we have subdivisions where I'm just gonna be refining over all the forms that we already did so you're gonna see I'm gonna jump around a lot lots of move brush lots of clay brush still and and yeah I'm just gonna work on each area because I really want to refine the shapes that we already have so it's gonna be about doing things a little bit more slowly a little bit more meticulous because the changes that we're making is smaller now I mean make some of the teeth a symmetrical real quick too so that it looks a little bit more natural and you saw me do a quick render just so I could see the face with some shadows a little bit more natural to look at so I could kind of judge you know how it's looking so even doing huge changes right now you know big proportion changes that's another beauty of subdivisions that I can go all the way down to low levels and make big big changes to the primary forms primary shapes and then I can bounce all the way back up and I can clean up some wrinkles just like be sure not to go too crazy though because you know I don't know sometimes you feel a little bit insane the fact that you can change anything at any time you know he definitely want to be trying to move forward so I'm always trying to be conscious of that and and trying to commit when I can but if I do see a problem or I think I could make a quick improvement to the overall shapes and I'll do that here you see not only the clay tubes brush but dam standard which I'm going to be using a lot and you know classic brush for doing fine lines and wrinkles and it's a way for me to you know really create nice clean form transitions in some of these wrinkles also you know trying to improve the form I'm hoping you know towards the end of these stages I'm improving proportion and likeness and then I'm hope hopefully also making everything less muddy you know I want the forms to be smooth and clean and you can see now in parts like the cheek and everything still a little bit of the lumpiness a little bit of the muddiness and and that's just because I haven't fully committed to the shapes yet but now I'm laying in the what will become wrinkles for the squint and again using damn standard for that so just a way for me to quickly place it in similar to the wrinkles on the mouth I start real harsh to try to get the position and then we can work on the forms around it and we can always wash it out if we think it's too too sharp too deep you see how much I jump around made a big change to the nose now - and not only jumping around the areas that I'm working on but moving the camera so as I'm sure you've seen all the times it can be a little bit disorienting when we're fast like this you know this is probably like 8 times the speed so it's definitely not this chaotic but probably still chaotic if you were just watching you know the sculpt so I'm gonna work on this for a bit and then I'm gonna go off-script right now here we go so now it's asymmetrical you know especially with these fine lines you don't want to make this two perfectly symmetrical cuz it'll it'll just be so obvious that'll be some kind of a butterfly effect so I'm starting to break symmetry now and make slightly different characteristics in the wrinkles and the squint so hoping that that will also add to my believability just the naturalism but also you know saving a ton time by using symmetry alright so now we're just kind of we're coming up on my time that I set aside for myself so we're gonna have to kind of speed round it why don't I start by doing a little bit of like some render settings for the angle let's do 20 and the Rays will do 40 so it's just gonna make the shadow a little bit nicer it's gonna take a little bit longer to render but there we go so I think this is gonna have to be good enough for now you know not perfect not perfect but I think it's gonna be good enough good enough right okay let's do some fiber mesh all right so we're gonna pause that right there we're gonna pick this up in the next video which I'll drop later this week this is the bulk of the sculpting part though just a little recap we drop in this is where we're at right now so this is just the sculpt I'd say it's like 85 to 90% there this is where I'm gonna start making the hair which is kind of a lot more new topics so I thought there'd be a natural break here where the next video we're gonna cover a lot of five in hair and then we'll do our final polish pass on the sculpt itself and then we'll make an image so I hope you enjoyed the video you know the first part of this new project definitely got away from me I'm trying to make these smaller but I asked social media you know all the people that follow me you know what do you want to see do you want to see a longer form video and most of the people that follow me want to see longer form videos which is cool so I think moving forward those kinds of videos I'll make long ones I'll make short ones this is gonna be two videos that are probably around 30 minutes but anyways let me know what you think about the video did you like you know the extra cutting and stuff was that more entertaining would you prefer me going back to the old way where it's just sped up and I talked over it you know just give me some insight and what you liked and didn't like so I can hopefully make better content and if you liked the video give me a thumbs up subscribe if you're not subscribed already stay tuned for the next video and I'll catch the next one peace [Music]

Channel: J Hill

Views: 36,121

Rating: 4.97262 out of 5

Keywords: Zbrush, how to sculpt, sculpting, girl smiling, jhill, speedsculpt, speed sculpt, sculpting tutorial

Id: kkpcXELa6ZM

Length: 28min 34sec (1714 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2019