The Ultimate Intro to Stylized Sculpting - Tips & Tricks for Beginners

[Music] if you want to learn how to make ghibli style textures in substance painter the latest course from the 3d coloring book was made for you this beginner friendly course will show you just how easy it is to make drag and drop anime style smart materials that you can use in any project i'll leave a link in the description if you want to consider getting the course now let's get into this week's video hi everyone my name is patrick metzler and today i'm going to share with you an environment piece called the skull pedestal this is mostly going to be a mix between a breakdown with tips and tricks that could be useful and showing off exactly what steps i follow throughout this video i'm also going to show you some useful tutorials or reading material that expand on topics too dense for this breakdown i hope you enjoy for this project the software includes zbrush for sculpting the rock and the skull maya for the block out re-toppling and unwrapping photoshop for the concepting and the alpha design and substance designer and substance painter for texturing for starters i'd like to say the inspiration for this piece came from fannie v and her stylized skull i wanted to challenge myself to see if i could recreate her work but in my own way collecting reference is one of the biggest parts of getting started on a project the pedestal was also inspired by world of warcraft tears of the storm and darksiders now let's jump into zbrush before we begin sculpting like to mention some of the brushes i used for the majority of the video the flattened brush the trim dynamic brush the trim smooth border brush or flattened edge or clay tubes or cracks or pinch clay tubes slash clay buildup dam standard and shane olsen's 3d fill brush for the purpose of this breakdown i'm using the finished skull as a reference usually it's best to have reference always up within eyesight the way i work while sculpting is starting with low geometry and getting a general base i start with the closest shape to the object which i decided would be a sphere i used two brushes during this phase the move brush and the clay tubes brush the move brush is for large editing and the clay tubes brush is to build up or take away bits to make a proper shape ready for more detail i dynamesh the object at a higher resolution that way the skull will hold the shapes i sculpted when i need a sharp edge or to achieve a smoother surface i will use the flattened brush don't be afraid to move things around or rebuild you'll see me dig into the eyebrow and build the shape back up now i'm going to show you a technique that i use a lot for detailing using the dam standard brush alongside the clay tubes can help create the wrinkle we are looking for i use the dam stainer brush then i pinch those lines with the orb pinch brush those lines are a guide for my clay buildup smoothing and rebuilding over and over again i will also use this technique where i want a change in surface defining the change between the brow and the wrinkle will help the readability from far away here's another example let's make the brow shape again then get the dam standard out or pinch and smooth next is another option to use if you want to carve into something but being more precise paint a mask by holding the control key to invert the mask hold ctrl and click away from the model it's very important to store the morph target of the object this saves what you have currently now we can get the clay tubes and carbon now we take our morph brush this is a way of mixing what we had before we stored the morph and what we have now turn down the intensity and blend we'll get rid of the bump with the flattened brush also flatten the edges to make them slope more we can even use the dam standard technique here too we follow that process with the lower jaw too it's best to break these things up into separate objects same goes for the teeth to make the teeth i start with a box dynamesh it then use flatten to shave down the edges and that's a brief overview of the skull i'm gonna be honest and say there's a lot more that goes into creating stylized skulls but to be transparent this is my first time making one i think instead i can give you some general tips and point you towards some great resources i use to really get into organic objects you should really practice a lot stylized art is based on realism just exaggerated using real world skulls will actually help you practice for the stylized ones books like anatomy of facial expressions and anatomy for sculptors has a lot of good reference for the human body not just for skulls my teacher carey also has video series on how to do a human skull another person i look for is shane olsen there are hours upon hours of footage from streams of him sculpting stylized characters you can sometimes catch him streaming and ask him questions about it now we can move on to the stone here we'll see an outer ring of individual stones with one inner full ring i made a quick block out in maya by chopping up a cylinder for the individual stones and another cylinder with a hole in the center for the ring grab one stone and dynamesh it don't worry about how the edges look because we're going to trim them later before we go further let's jump into making stone alphas we can use these alphas on any stone that we need to quicken the process sure we could start from scratch every time but doing stone repeatedly gets a little tedious for me after a while i would like to point out a great tutorial that i learned from that goes in depth about this topic this can be found in one of the vertex articles specifically the second one we're going to be using the part written by fannie she shows step by step how to create stones from world of warcraft all the articles are free and they're filled with professional knowledge a quick side tip that i wanted to include while i was setting this up you'll notice i have a lot of sub tools and they're all visible but i only want the two cubes showing i could scroll through and turn them all off individually but that's kind of a pain instead let's go up to the top and hit the arrow next to the top subtool we then click the eye on and off and we'll turn everything off below it now we can turn back on the two cubes going back to the alphas first we mask where we want different elevation refine the mask and make it rigid now invert the mask now let's move it and make it a bit off-center get rid of the mask and clean up using the flattened brush if you need more geometry dynamesh it or hit control d using a mixture of flatten brush with other brushes like orb flattened edge trim dynamic and trim smooth border creates a rocky texture the reason i use a cube is so that i can scale it to change how intense the elevation looks now we can use orb clay tubes to build up an uneven surface scrape down the surface with orb flattened edge and the flattened brush once you have a library of alphas you can use other alphas you've made to mix and match make sure to blend in the alpha and change it a bit to get something unique once we're happy with the alpha we swap our tools and find the tool called mrgb z grabber when you hold ctrl click and drag you'll see a white box appear inside this box will be the alpha you grab position your mouse in the center of the object and fit in the parts you want if you want a perfect square then hold shift after dragging don't hold ctrl and shift at the same time hold ctrl drag and then hold shift once you've captured the alpha click on the left panel and export it out now that we have our alpha we need to get out the standard brush change it to drag rec and input the alpha simply just drag out on top of the surface you want it on you notice it's coming in as a circular shape and falls off to change that we need to change the focal shift the more negative the less fall off be careful though it can cause some banding in other spots playing with a mixture of intensity and focal shift can help it's up to you what you want now we go back to the single stone piece i want to show you a hidden brush that was shown to me by a great artist named lydia zenati hit the comma key to open a window click the brush tab find the trim brushes select trim smooth border brush give it a square alpha i'll show you the difference between trim dynamic and trim smooth border trim dynamic is great but a little soft trim smooth border is a lot harsher and a lot more sensitive you'll have to play with the angle and pressure to get something you want shrimp smooth border is really nice to get a chipped look on your rocks mix it up with some orb flattened edge now we're going to mix trim dynamic flatten brush or flatten edge and trim smooth border to get some dynamic edges i used trim dynamic and flattened to get the edge started and sharpen it with the orb flattened edge then chip it with trim smooth border remember to have reference up when you're doing this let's use our alphas for a nice beginning base before applying your alpha make sure you store your morph target so that you can erase if you find that all of your edges are too strong you can uniformly soften them by going to deformation and playing with the polish slider i'm not too happy with one side so i decided to erase it with the morph and bring in a different set of alphas to play with once you're happy with the look you can add some cracks we're going to use this rock since it's a lot flatter we're going to use the orb crack brush personally my hands aren't stable enough so i'm going to add some lazy mouse make sure to store your morph target i use the one key to redo the last operation if you want to use the one key make sure you don't touch anything else the one key is to duplicate the last action so if you move the camera it will not deepen the crack but it will just move the camera again or pinch to get some variety and width now let's blend in the crack some more use our flattened brush to make the crack flow better use orb pinch to close the gap some more now we can chip it trim smooth border is really great here here's a good example of a helpful morph target i want to add another crack that splits off from the main one use the morph brush to erase the bit hanging over and there we have it we repeat the process for all the other stone pieces and the single ring the next step is the inner pedestal design i'd like to start off by saying that if you want to try out an idea or a design take it into photoshop or other drawing software concepting in 2d is way easier to approach and saves time in my opinion similar to zbrush i have a tough time with smooth lines in photoshop however there is a tool out there that can help smooth things out i personally use something called lazy nizumi lazy nozumi has a bunch of different modes and functions the one i use most is called smooth massive here you can see me draw some s shapes without lazy nezumi and you can see how it's improved when i turn it on once you have the design you can make yet another alpha make sure the design is pure white i cover up half of it because i know i'm going to have it symmetrical fill in the background with black export it out now append in a cylinder and move it into place dynamesh and turn on symmetry now use the stone technique with the alpha you made lining it up can be a bit weird repeat the process for the other stone and you're finished i'd like to thank you for watching my style a sculpting overview if you have any questions make sure to comment them down below also make sure you subscribe for more great stylized tutorials

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 23,071

Keywords: zbrush tutorial, zbrush tutorial beginner, zbrush tutorial 2019, zbrush tutorial 2020, 3d modeling for beginners, zbrush character modeling tutorial for beginners, zbrush tutorial for begginers, zbrush tutorial for beginners 2019, zbrush tutorial for absolute beginners, zbrush sculpting tutorial for beginners series, zbrush basic tutorial for beginners, pixologic zbrush 2019 tutorial, stylized textures

Id: bLrbuqfq__g

Length: 31min 37sec (1897 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020

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