Sculpting Star Guardian Lux (Zbrush and Blender)

hi in this video i'm going to give you an overview how i turned a little grey sphere into star guardian looks from league of legends i'll talk about gathering references sculpting the head and body cheating at retopology modelling clothes and accessories creating hair and a little bit of rigging and pausing since i know you'll ask the software i use was zbrush blender and photoshop stick around because it helps me earn more from ad revenue stick around because later in the video i've got an important announcement to make about an art contest involving some really fancy prizes can i enter oh there's nobody there i just let's get to work before you start sculpting you want to find references now the most important reference is the thing you're going to sculpt and you have two choices for this you can either draw one yourself or ask a 2d artist if you can use one of theirs now the advantage of asking gratuity artists is that they will almost certainly have better character design skills than you if you're referencing a subpar design your result will most likely suffer of course the downside to this is that you won't own the copyright to your work so do bear this in mind if you don't intend to make money from it and just use it for your portfolio there's unlikely to be any problems now of course in my case i'm making a fan out of the popular character looks from league of legends so there's an abundance of references out there i didn't follow any one reference because i wanted to put my own style into it but all the design elements remained intact in the final piece and i actually got really lucky with this piece because there's a website that has all of the league of legend characters in 3d so i could actually reference her design from all angles and it even has the pauses too which is super useful i gathered as many references as i can and compiled them into a great app called pureref if you've never used it before i'd recommend checking it out because it's the most useful tool i've found for gathering and arranging references and they even offer it for free now let's get on with the fun part it all begins with a simple sphere in zbrush in case there's anyone new to this you can think of this sphere like a ball of clay because this part of the process is known as digital sculpting you don't have to start with a ball roll some people might start with a pre-built character known as a bass mesh and there's different opinions on doing this my personal opinion is that if you're in a situation where you want to save as much time as possible such as work for a client then a base mesh is a great idea if it's for a personal piece though then i think starting from scratch is a good exercise towards helping you better understand the forms you're trying to recreate so what i'm doing here is blocking out the most basic shapes of the character if you've seen some of my recent videos you'll know that i turn these into a series of shapes that i sell on gumroad and art station for you to learn from but given this character is owned by riot i can't provide the meshes for this character if you want to know more about the step-by-step meshes i've created from previous characters and learn how to create characters like this one make sure you check the link at the top of the description so what i'm doing here is making marks on the head to start indicating where the eyes nose chin and cheeks will go notice i'm also making marks for the sides of the head and the forehead too before adding in some eyeballs to start building the eyelids around them i want you to notice that i'm keeping things really rough and low resolution at this stage of the sculpt when you start a piece like this you want to be thinking about the overall forms that sit beneath the details and gradually work toward adding finer and finer details as you progress i find that adding pair on the eyeballs to indicate the iris and pupils goes a long way to helping you properly position those eyelids after adding a bit of resolution to the sculpt i start on those lips and notice i'm using the method that i taught in my last video on sculpting lips which i'll drop a link to down below and in the corner of the screen now i then decide to add a bit of paint to those eyes just to help me visualize where the pupils will sit i'll replace these eyes with the blender plug-in later next i'll move on to a process known as retopology which many find difficult and tedious but i use the shortcut method in this case a previous character i made already has good topology so to avoid the long process of redoing the whole thing i'm simply repurposing the old mesh onto the new one by wrapping it in zbrush with a plugin called zera i'll do the same thing for the rest of the body later if you want to learn more about what retopology is and see a step-by-step tutorial again you'll find a link in the description i start working on the body and the process is the same finding the big overall forms first i do approach this a little differently though by separating the major forms into their own objects i will eventually merge these objects but having them separate at the beginning i can easily modify them without affecting nearby forms if you're used to finding proportions using head measurements feel free to duplicate and stack heads like this i usually aim for around six and a half to seven heads for my stylized characters when i'm happy with the primary forms again i start merging the objects and making marks to indicate anatomical landmarks the snuggle pups are two spheres that sit on the rib cage and pull towards the clavicles and you want to take note of how they sit on the ribs i believe you can find reference for this somewhere on the internet now believe it or not i actually started this foot from scratch which is so rough that i don't really have a technique for it i just added a cube and started hacking shapes out of it keeping an eye on my reference image at all times i didn't bother with the tools though because they won't be seen and i cheat later anyway by attaching a pre-med foot i start making more marks at the top of the arm but i really struggle to work with the forearm without a hand in place so i'll move on to making that next i start the hand by finding the basic shapes of the pan there's a lot of interesting curves and rhythms to the hand but they are quite tricky to get right remember to find as much reference as you can but don't forget you have reference right in front of you too then i add a finger and place it in the middle to subtly address the haters that are watching this now i will duplicate this finger to make others so i want it to look half decent if you take this approach remember that the thumb has one less knuckle once i'm reasonably happy with it i merge the fingers with the hand and place it with the rest of the body i can then start working on the forearm and making sure the proportions look okay before merging the arms into the body this usually requires a bit of cleanup and now seems like a good time to give everything a once or over when i'm happy with it i set about wrapping my clean topology as i did earlier only this time i didn't use the z-wrap plug-in i just roughly place the mesh around it and use the project all button in zbrush to project the sculpt onto the clean topology i usually have to push these buttons a few times and tweak the results but it's still much faster than manual retopology i avoided projecting the hands and feet and just replaced them with the clean versions instead i could have just done this from the start and saved a bunch of time but it's always good to get some practicing now i'll make a start on the clubs i start the first piece by masking and extracting i then pull out these shapes from the bottom but i'll let her separate these into their own objects i do the same again for the next item of clothing and i'm keeping things pretty rough at this stage i'm basically trying to progress the sculpts as quickly as possible so i have a better idea of how all the elements are working together later i'll give this stuff clean topology and tidy it all up same thing for the skirt i'm really just trying to progress the piece quickly so i grabbed one that i made earlier but i do model a more accurate skirt from scratch later next i move on to the hair which again i start by masking and extracting now we'll eventually create strands using blender but it's much easier to find those big primary forms using zbrush first and again it helps me to progress the piece the reason i'm putting emphasis on progressing the piece by the way is that i find that if i hang around in any one area for too long especially early on i start to lose motivation if i can see that things are visually progressing it retains my confidence and keeps the fire burning if that makes sense as you approach the end of the piece the visual progression naturally becomes less and less noticeable and this is where a lot of personal projects fall off a cliff so you really want to avoid the situation for as long as possible when it came to modelling the skirt from scratch i jumped into blender to experiment with the techniques now as you can see i added a circle and started shaping out the bottom of it i then extruded this edge up and reshaped the top to give it the pleated look i then sent it back to zbrush and added a bit of variation to the pleats to make it look less procedural this was made easier by separating the inside of the pleats from the outside using polygroups this way i can tweak each pleat individually without affecting the rest of the object i give everything another once over and start sending it into a fresh scene in blender here i add a camera and set each of the materials to display vertex colours which reveals the colours we had in zbrush next i add a hdr lighting as well as a light at the front of our model this isn't meant to be the final lighting setup but something nice while we shared the character i replaced the eyes using the eye designer plugin which allows you to pop these nice pre-built eyes at the touch of a button you can then tweak a bunch of different settings to get the what you're going for you'll find a link to it in the description and i'd highly recommend picking it up but i'm biased because i created it so now i move on to the hair strands which are built in the same way i teach in a previous tutorial which again you'll find i think you know where it's linked by now placing strands like this can be quite time consuming but the results are usually worth it in the end after this i realized there's still parts of the clothing yet to model so i quickly fix that here in blender i'm fairly happy with how everything is looking though so i move on to rigging the character with a plugin called auto rig pro this lets you set key points on the character and then the plugin automatically builds a skeleton inside it so you can start pausing you might have to tweak the placement of some bones and you will need to tweak the weighting of the bonds but this is much faster than doing it from scratch now with that done i can start pausing my character and the pause i went for is lux's recall pause in league of legends again this 3d viewer was super handy for referencing this pausing the character is always a lot of fun because your static character finally starts coming to life and once i'm happy with the pause i now send a copy of the mesh back to zbrush for clean up now i could have avoided this by taking more time to rig the character thoroughly and getting the deformations to work better but since she's only going to be in this one pause it's much faster to do it this way and then i repeat this for any claws that need a fix up too next i'd decide to paint a glossiness map for the skin which i prefer to do in zbrush now if you haven't seen this before basically anywhere that's painted white will look shiny and then anywhere that's painted black will look matte then i export it out and plug it in back in blender and finally i decided to improve some of the materials in substance but i must admit by this point i was getting a little careless with the recording because all i wanted to do was push this over the finish line so after much tweaking now before we see the final result at the start of the video i did promise you an art contest and i'm talking about the msi creator awards 2021 which is running right now and i'm a judge the contest is open to graphic design film and of course 3d creation and the theme is tech meets aesthetics it's up to you to interpret this as you see fit for a chance to win some really nice prizes such as a brand spanking new desktop pc a laptop graphics card and other sexy stuff you'd expect from msi i created my own piece on this theme and there will be a stream where i run through how i did that available from msi soon so make sure you watch out for that you can create something specifically for the contest or submit anything you've created within the past 12 months provided it fits the theme of course you've got until midnight on may the 31st to get your entry in so check the link in the description for more information but before you do that let's have a look at how looks [Music] finally [Music] [Music] you [Music] shaking every time you get into my mind [Music] take me

Channel: Danny Mac 3D

Views: 217,829

Keywords: pixologic, zbrush, blender, sculpt, disney, dreamworks, pixar, stylized, b3d

Id: hwdmSc-x43Q

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021