Character Base Sculpt

 07-08/10/21 - Week 1

As I've now finished the main design I have moved onto sculpting the base of the character. My plan was to sculpt the head and then move on to the body so I have a base for the clothing to go on top of.

This is my first time sculpting in this style so it was useful to have up my style ref board as well as some other references I found to stay consistent and not move in to a more semi-stylised approach.

This was how I blocked out the head. I used this method in my second year sculpt too, it involves using dynamesh to progressively add ploys to the head. You have to use your available polys to your advantage to have as strong base as possible. I was very happy with this base, using my face reference board for my character that I sketched out was extremely useful and influenced a lot of the style that I used for the face in general.

At this point in the sculpt, I had confirmed a lot of the placement and shape of the main features and I was still really happy with how it was looking - I was mainly using the move here to move the polys about rather than worrying about detail. I was surprised with how much I felt at ease with the stylistic approach and I feel that it gives a lot more freedom and creativity from a more realistic style.

From that point my process sped up quite a bit, as I had spent so long getting things in the right place I was able to up the poly count a lot and focus on getting the details and crisp edges in. This was something that I did struggle with a bit, obviously stylistic approaches tend to be very smooth and clear cut so I was trying to get everything to look as smooth as possible. I think there are still some areas here that I need to focus on to just make it as clean as possible.

By this point I had also added in some eyebrows and eyelashes, I'm not sure weather this approach is the best one since I just used some cylinders and used move to adjust them appropriately. I am thinking that these could be replaced with alphas if I see this is necessary or would improve the look of my sculpt.

Overall, I am happy with how this looks for the moment, the shape language, overall aesthetics and anatomy seem appropriate with the style and the character I am aiming to create.

Here is my current standpoint for my character sculpt. There is still a bit to do here in terms of the base such as the hands and I need to do a bit more on the arms and legs but obviously most of this won't be seen anyway as the majority of skin is covered up - it is more for reference as I am sculpting the clothing. There is definitely some improvement in terms of anatomy to do here, looking at this screenshot now, I can tell that the head is too big in context of the body and I think the wrists are too wide, the shoulders may need to come out a bit too but fixing the sizing on the head may fix this. I did a quick fix using photoshop to show what I mean here.

Making her head smaller would definitely make sense - here I have made it small enough to fit in line with the 7.5 heads tall rule. Making it smaller than this to be 8 heads would be an option for me as it is used for a powerful figure but considering that I want my character to be more of a young adult/teen I think 7.5 heads is appropriate.

I need to work out a way to move all of my assets together in zbrush to make this appropriate then this will be an easy fix.

I have also began to block out the hair, this was mainly a rough thing to get an idea of how things would look so I can begin to move on to this once I get more things figured out. The hair is a bit tricky for me and I want to get some advice and do some research on how to create good looking stylised hair. I struggled a lot with creating strands in my last project and because of the style of pigtails I've gone for, the strands, flyaways and sections of hair need to be communicated correctly.

Overall, I am happy with the progress I am making though I know that next week will be much harder as I will be approaching hair and clothing. Hopefully, to stay on track with my plan, I will manage to finish the whole or majority of the sculpt and can move on to low poly in week 3. I also want to try to create some props to go with this piece to help with the story telling, so I could perhaps start that next week too.

Here is a quick drawover of some things that I wanted to get a bit more clear from my first ref: