Sculpting

• Going into this program I knew that my first attempt definitely would not be perfect. However, playing around with the manaquin made the flaws of the refrence image more obvious. Aside from that, I also managed to merge the top part of the legs together, so a re-do was inevitable. I wouldn't consider this a waste of time, since this first sculting attempt did help me get used to the interface more. Since I know where I went wrong this time, the next attempt will hopefully go a lot smoother.

While re-watching the tutorial, I realized that I made one enormous mistake. Whenever I used the Snake Hook tool to pull out hair strands I forgot to turn on Sculptris Pro Mode. The limited polygon count ruined the character's silhouette and made for a very sloppy design. With more polygons to work with the hair flowed much more nicely.

The hardest part was making sure that each hair curl looked good from the front, side and back view. When I made a strand I had to rotate the character to check that the angle did not look awkward. If it did, I corrected it by pushing parts of it to the side, then I made sure that did not get ruined in the original view.

This part was tricky at first, but with a bit of experimentation became fun.

Way before I even finished sculpting the silhouette worries on how to make the skirt began to emerge. When looking up examples on how to create a big A-line skirt most explanations included some form of mapping. This method seemed a bit too complex, so I was anxious to start modelling it. However, after sitting down and fully watching the Zbrush sculpting tutorial, I realized that that will not be necessary. By extracting and moving the shape down, then shaping and re-meshing it, I managed to get the shape that I am satisfied with.

The top clothes were by far the easiest part. The only struggle was getting to know the clip-curve, but after a few tries, I am now fully confident in using it.

The hand import took longer than expected. Because they end up so far from the model, finding them and trying to get them move towards the right direction was tricky. Not only that, but at some point using the move or scale tool made the hand strech in bizzare ways. It took a few times to import and get the hand to the right position, but eventually I got it to a place I was satified with.

Extracting the head from the body proved to be easy. At least, at the beginning. When time came to remesh the figure, I kept getting an error notice. Eventually, after about 10 tries, I had to turn to Google for help. I clicked the button next to the Remesh button, Then undid my action and remeshed again. That seemed to work. Shaping the bust to the body also took a while, but it did help me exlpore the move tools more.

• After finishing sculpting, I set everything to ZMesher to get rid of the messy areas caused by the sculptris more. Overall, I found the sculpting process to be quite enjoyable. Although the thought of working in 3D still makes me nervous, it's good to learn as many employable skills as possible. If I ever get the chance to work with Zbrush again I will make the most of it.