As an illustrator and an aspiring character designer/ character animator, I was looking forward to this week as we were going to start our introduction to Zbrush. We had a guest lecturer, Mr Carlo Bautista, for 2 weeks who has quite an experience in the software.
He started our lecture by teaching us a basic understanding of character design. And detailed information on how to start designing any character, what to keep in mind, and the process of understanding the background story, dynamic posing, silhouettes, etc.
These are some of the notes I took in the lecture. And I tried to implement those notes in these rough character designs I did in my free time.
In class, Carlo gave us an exercise to create our own character profile by choosing the options from the doc he prepared containing various choices. These were the choices I made for my character profile.
After that, we were asked to collect the references from Pinterest and make a mood board on Pureref.
After creating the mood board on Pureref, Carlo taught us about the importance of silhouettes and how simple shadow drawings can help us create the whole character.
As per Lesley Padien when designing a character lineup, it's essential to make sure that each character has its own unique silhouette, so that you can identify the character in a crowd.
We were then asked to sculpt our character on Zbrush but since I was on 2D section in the start I didn't get much time to create my character. So, after class I decided to try out the interface and tools with one of the tutorial provided by Mr. Carlo.
Before starting the explanation on my sculpting practice, I would like to talk about how we were told by Richard how understanding Human Anatomy plays an important role in sculpting and modelling character.
We then proceeded to annotate muscles/bones on the human body model provided by Richard by taking references from the internet.
I have a book by Victor Perard on Anatomy and Drawing which I use to learn more on different anatomy of human which will help me in understanding more in stylising the characters.
Now, on to sculpting in Zbrush.
At first, I started blocking out the character with basic shapes made from sphere. I also used tools like mirror, duplicate, split, merge, gizmo tool.
The most tool I used was split and merged as I made a lot of mistakes and had to go back and forth on each part.
I started with poly sphere and started pushing and pulling the mesh by using the Move brush. After pushing the top of the sphere slightly inward, I duplicated the sphere and manipulated it to make the chest. All the other parts were duplicated from an already existing ones.
The model was really high poly so I applied Zremesher in subtools after decreasing the Poly Count to 0.1
Zremesher means it helps you to set the poly count as per your choice.
Inside subtool there are many other options such as append, duplicate, delete, new folder etc. Append means adding objects to the workspace, you can duplicate the object by using duplicate tool and delete the object by using delete tool.
Another 2 important function in the subtool category is split and merge. There are different methods to do split such as a) split similar parts (which split the object having similar shapes)
b) split to parts (it split each part from each other) c) split unmasked points (It splits the unmasked parts) d) split masked points (It splits masked parts).
Merge function enables us to merge different layers of objects.
The reason behind applying Zremesher this is it makes it easier to achieve the desired shape we want and tools like mirror and weld, knife cut etc can't be performed on high poly model
After that, I merged the chest and torso and duplicated and manipulated it to make the fingers on both hands.
I continued blocking out and I knew Carlo's reference face was different but I wanted to go with this shape as it gave different type of expressions from both the angle.
With chest I used flatten brush to give a little shape to it and increased the size of palms and give little more definite shapes to stomach/ torso as well
At this point when I tried to make the neck ornament in high poly as I forgot to apply ZRemesher on it, my laptop crashed to this part.
So, I tried to make it again, but it messed up the shape of hand and fingers.
I put it this project on shelf for now as I wanted to start sculpting for DSP module. I have to make Butterfly for this module and either animate it or make turnarounds.
I mainly used move, mirror, split and merge here. One more new brush I used here was snakehook one to create antennas of the butterfly.
Self-Critique
I faced lot of issues with splitting and merging as I had to go back and forth between tools and objects. Sometimes I even broke the topology by splitting and merging using mask and when that happened, I had to sculpt that same thing again.
I've been practising a lot since then and hopefully I'll be able to put whatever I have learned from my mistakes into use in my final project.
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