The Fastest Way to Sculpt Characters in 3D

hey guys henry morton from flip normals here and in today's video we will show you the quickest way we've found to concept up characters we will be starting off using das studio there are some real advantages to using das when it comes to characters what i used as for is really as a the ultimate base mesh tool here you can see we're starting off with the base mesh and i can change the muscularity of him i can change how emaciated it is now i can also pose him up a little bit which is really useful it means that you don't have to start with some generic bass mesh in c brush where you have to post them up using transpose lines you can actually start using a real rig which just speeds up your workflow so much i think the benefit for me with all of this is the fact that i no longer have to create separate polygroups and make sure my masking is good feather the mask properly and then also readjust you know limbs and whatever afterwards because it doesn't respect compression and expansion when you do it in zbrush whereas everything here is properly rigged and you have facial expressions as well just opening the mouth on a base mesh is really tricky then we are using um gauci to bring this into zbrush and the advantage of dance is real that it doesn't take that much time we're not really going to be using das a whole lot in this video we're going to be using a bit at the end and at the beginning but the real advantage is that we get up to this result so quickly if you were to start off with a generic base mesh now first of all you have to post it up and you would have to change how muscular he is and and all of that but at this point we can just get started because we've already done a fair few of the decisions so this is already compared to using a base mesh shaved off quite a lot of time i think one of the cool things about this kind kind of workflow is that normally when we do tutorials and when most people do tutorials right they start from absolute scratch you see like if it's a sculpting tutorial they'll start from a sphere but in a production environment that's never the case maybe if you do some basic concepting in the beginning of a production but then maybe you work for weta or whatever and then it gets sent off to another company to finish it but this is this is how we work you know we use base mesh sometimes we have a simple rig to help us get it into pose as well but this is pretty much the the standard workflow base meshes that are suited to what we need and then we just bring it back into zbrush and start sculpting now the advantage here is that we can keep going back and forth between des and c brush so any adjustments we need to make to the pose the facial expression we can do that even after we start sculpting yeah it's it's incredibly powerful using this workflow this is something we've been talking about in some of our some of our other videos where it depends what you want to get out of the scope if you want to learn how to sculpt from scratch you should start with a sphere because it's so much harder to do that and you really have to think more about the fundamentals of it meaning the shape language and all that but once you reach a point where you don't really care about that anymore meaning you already you already know how to sculpt and you don't have to prove to anyone they know how to sculpt you're now being paid to make cool designs which is really the job of a concept artist then you just have to get there as soon as possible there's no bonus points from doing this from scratch no it's only going to take much longer there's definitely a learning experience and and being able to do everything from scratch right you that's a way to test your your fundamental knowledge of sculpting and character creation but when it comes to getting paid you know the client doesn't really care that you did it from a sphere and or whether you did it from a base mesh they just want the result as fast as possible and i think that's where das really shines is that it can help you get up to that 60 70 percent really really fast and then you finish it off in in zbrush yeah like if i were to do this from a sphere as an exercise i could definitely get to the same result but it would probably take me about a whole week of working on that and one of the reasons is stuff like fingers and toes yeah they take up but in the same one time even making like the teeth and the tongue and the ear and all that that's something you were getting for free if you were using a base like this and then particularly if you want to iterate on top meaning you want to change some things like the pose or some general proportions that's just much much harder to do and now we have perfectly workable topology the topology here is actually really solid and the textures which comes along with as well is also really solid which means that you can use it as a base now if i were to take this as a make this into a full production character at the end you would definitely have to re-topologize it at the end because we're doing a lot of stretching and all that and you would have to retexture it you would have to split it up into multiple udems and all that but it means that you have one hell of a base to get started with yeah and i think when it comes to daz you know there's what we used here was uh it was like a mix or yeah it was a mix between uh between like uh a character we uh we got from from last and one other generic ones which ships along with it and you know there's there's definitely something to be said i mean you can you can jump into das with the free tools and and the free base mesh and just get started and that's i mean probably that's gonna work like 95 of your cases uh but if you wanted to do something more specific there's always more dance characters that you can that you can find and then you can start mixing and matching those to get even more unique results just just for concepting even where you're not sure exactly the type of character that you're going for i think desk can also help speed up that part yeah it's not about limiting year two to the characters it's more they will serve as a starting point because this character here would look identical if i were to start with the most generic bass mesh or with a sphere or anything like that it just means that right now i would probably like around an hour or 45 minutes into the actual scope and the face at least at least reads what uh what you wanted to read then we're taking quickly into blender and we're making some kind of skirt for our nice little white walker character and this is also a real powerful workflow where you you can make exactly what you want and use all the different software you want we are only using dashier as a as a starting point this is an anti-demonetization piece of cloth right there exactly blender is also really powerful for this i just block something out quickly then take it into c brush and just keep on working with it it's not the cleanest sculpt in the world or cleanest piece there but it works i think it's important to also note this is something that henny and i have been talking about a lot you know if you told us a couple of years ago that now we would be working with das and blender we would have been like no no that's that's not that's not gonna happen but you know you gotta you gotta keep up with the times and das is sort of it's a weird software das has flown under the radar especially of professionals for so many years and i think it's it's partly because it's had like an image problem but also because it it hasn't really i don't know it's never really appealed that much to the professional market because there's so much focus on building everything from scratch right the same thing with blender blender was so obscure a couple years ago yeah and then they made a lot of improvements the same thing with desk now they have all their bridges that go into maya unreal c brush so the tools have just become really solid and actually useful for professionals and that's why we started using them yeah this just means that i can get up to a certain level much much faster same as you saw in the very beginning of the video as well where you see the final presentation that's just the whole thing just decimated and just thrown into blender as well just for some quick rendering just use whatever tools are are available for you it's also really cool with with this suite here the only paid software in this entire video is actually zbrush all the dance is free blender is free so it means you can really quickly get up to a certain level without really paying too much i mean all the sculpting you can even do in in blender as well if you really want to yeah that's true i mean my hope is really that people start to think about these tools for what they can actually be used for not necessarily what they have been used for you know we we made fun a lot of blender in the beginning we did not but it was it was kind of shitty you know there was a reason we didn't use it they improved the tools the tools became increasingly more awesome to use and then we started using them and the same thing with des you know it's it's des has been on a long journey it's like 20 years old i think and i remember death when i first got into 3d i was like oh dance okay some characters you have to pose or something and whatever i'll just not use that but nowadays man it's getting it's getting really powerful one of my i love the fact that you can combine different base meshes with their genesis 8 figures where they're all compatible with each other like we mentioned earlier where you can really quickly concept something up whether it's something creature-like because they also have that creature library or if it's more human-based it really just you know it's just another tool in your tool bag that can signif significantly speed up your workflow well with all that said we of course you have to be able to learn how to sculpt and that's what we're focusing on here as well like this is this entire thing is is really a manual sculpt there is a generic base mesh but you could turn that base mesh into literally anything now you are turning them into a white walker but you could turn this into anything and you very much still need proper sculpting fundamentals for all this but even when you have all the proper sculpting fundamentals what's hard for me when i'm sculpting is still getting the base shape down just getting the general proportions that that will always just be a challenge and then doing like all the stuff on top here like all the way or patterning and all that that that's really the easy part that it looks fancy but that is literally just labor you're just going over it and going over the muscles and just adding some weird striation using the dam standard and the clay billet brush it's nothing really fancy here all the fanciness all the everything that makes the model look good is really the main proportions and they really haven't changed that much from the beginning which is also the main point of where we made the bass mesh that it wasn't like a crazy muscular bass we used we deliberately made it emaciated and slightly muscular at the same time so he looks like somebody with a low body fat percentage but also still quite muscular yeah i mean i've worked with professional artists that for the life of them they wouldn't be able to create this character from scratch like they just wouldn't they didn't have the eye they were these were professional sculptors and character modelers but as soon as you give them a base mesh you give them some guidance then they're able to create this so you know it's not an excuse if you can't do this you still i would always advocate for you know having a solid skill set in the beginning and then starting to jump on to this but it just means that if you are further ahead you're more intermediate you you've got the sculpting fundamentals down this is just going to speed up your workflow yeah it really boils down to if you want good results yeah yeah then then you should do this if you want to learn how to do it then if you're if you're in the learning mode purely in learning mode you're not breaking your portfolio then then you need to just focus on on getting good but once you are at that point where you're actually making your portfolio then just go ahead i don't really see a whole advantage a whole lot of advantage to keeping your characters and your portfolio all sculpted from sears that's like morgan was saying in the beginning this is how you actually work professionally get used to working professionally if you're if you're showing a character like this like like the white walker hearing portfolio and you're like this took me three weeks to do but but why did it take you so long we need to actually be efficient here we need to know that you can actually work using not even like cheats but not even shortcuts just the way it's done yeah and i think that's what we alluded to in the beginning of this video as well i think it's kind of a misunderstanding of a lot of tutorials that sometimes the workflow that's shown isn't actually that helpful i mean it's helpful if you want to start from scratch but it's not actually very indicative of what it's like to be a working professional oh particularly for constantly no no not at all if you were to be a concept artist for this i wouldn't even take the character up this far now what's really cool about this is that now we have sculpted them up to a pretty decent level and now we can change the pose directly in in dash itself and this is what i mean by that's kind of being like an ultimate bass mesh tool now i know right now we can change the pose of the hands we can make him making into a fist or make the fingers go our splay out we can also control the pose with quite a lot of detail here this is a this is a full full body rig and a full face rig this is not some kind of cheap discount ring this is as good as the rigs i've been working with in vfx it has corrective shapes it has all sorts of features so you can basically turn into whatever you want you can also see i'm using the gui but on the left here but you can also just drag around on the character directly without really ever having to use a single controller so it's very intuitive then once you're done with your posting you can just bring this directly back into zbrush using the go see bridge like this would be a absolute nightmare to do in sea brush just just coming up with the ideas like posing in seabirds is it is just painful posing in seabirds is like you commit to the pose you can't play around with it even if you were to make your own rig using cease first which is probably the most intuitive way it's not a it's not a rig and now we we brought the model back into uh into zbrush and now you can see the new poses there and the only thing you have to do now is you can you just have to fit the other parts like the hair and the skirt and i want to change the post a little bit back again and then we just bring it back in and there you go now you have iterated on the pose because i didn't i realized it didn't work so well in certain angles so it really like one of the main advantages is really what we were doing now it is you are able to bring something back and forth between a post version and a non-post version you can update the posing that is is really tricky to do that it is like what morgan was saying before where if you post something in cbrush it does not respect the compression and stretching of something so it's so easy to just break the volumes of your model when you do anything posing once in zebras now we're just going over and just adding refinement to all different areas so actually sculpting without symmetry now just to make this a bit more interesting the cool thing is though that with posable symmetry enabled you could pose it asymmetrically and still have symmetrical sculpting so even if you do something crazy with your character and you don't want to do the double work of sculpting each side uniquely you know that's that's also an option yeah it's really the best of both worlds you could even do this from the beginning where you post your character in quite an extreme pose in in bass or whatever you're using if you're using a rig and then you can just post it up like if you're doing some kind of classical sculpture where the pose is so important and now we're really just doing final tweaks and just going back and forth on the different areas working up the silhouette a little bit and just working up the different shapes just doing a quick render for it and just really looking into the different shapes here but yeah that's how that's one of the most effective ways we know of making characters is using using dash along with zbrush using the go see bridge so thank you so much for watching and i hope you enjoyed this video let me know what you think about this workflow in the comments and we'll see you in the next one see you guys

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 95,490

Keywords: 3d, tutorial, flippednormals, henning sanden, morten jaeger, art, art school, art tutorials, learning 3d, cube brush, blender guru, cgi, b3d

Id: Oab3268dGC8

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021