• Backstory
• Existing characters/Creatures
• Real world animals

Initial creature ideas for my first character

• Wyvern dragon with traits that seem merged with another animal (snakes and beetles)
• Lives in the harsh climate of the desert with active volcanoes, so they have evolved hardy scales/skin to deal with the climate
• Weapons are horns and thick tail for defence and hunting
• They would be in a large scale open world game with other unusual creatures and monsters, games such as Monster Hunter and ARC:Survival

Other very interesting references to refer to for help:

Crocodile made in Zbrush showing detailed scaling and also heavily stylized for a very well balanced character design, as I am not a realism artist this shows I could potentially stylize my own design with high detail: http://archive.zbrushcentral.com/printthread.php?t=88386

Very interesting dragon wyvern design, however I will have to make my design more Biped: https://polycount.com/discussion/153542/adventures-in-zbrush

High detailed dragon design, way too detailed for my to tackle. What to aspire to do in the future, but not for this module! This does however have a good pose for reference to to get a good space for making the wings: https://kevindg.carbonmade.com/projects/6407252

For this design, I had alot of trouble thinking how I wanted them to be, as dragons are a mythical creature without one set of boundaries with how they usually look I struggled to piece together a cohesive design. I didn't want my wyvern to be too detailed but at the same time I didn't want them to be boring and simple, so I threw together iconic parts of the two animals I wanted to merge with the dragon of the beetle's and the snakes but found that the beetle traits were too difficult I felt to merge with a dragons form without it becoming quadruped.

I concentrated mostly on the face as I thought if I came up with a good face shape the rest of the body would follow suit easily but I really struggled here to settle on a face I liked. The snake traits were more prominent and easier to merge so I tried to just stick to that but that too was a challenge. I do not think this is a good idea to run with so I will move on.

Ideas for my second character

• Forest imp with dog/goat/insect traits
• Protector of a forest, is a side/companion character with some influences on the players gameplay.
• Small and cute, soft features for a friendly character.

I feel I went too overboard with this idea with too many ideas mashed into one and so it made it hard to make a cohesive and simple design. So I simplified it for the last 2 sketches, which work alot better than the first sketch I tried out. As cute as these creatures are I want to try something bigger/more interesting for a sculpt, not just a fluffy round creature that might be too easy to make.

Third character idea

Thinking back as to why I chose the above designs in the first place, I realised that the thing that I want to do most of all for this module is fur and/or scale texturing and details.

So with this in mind, I looked up tutorials for these textures to get a good sense of how easy they could be made. One texture that caught my eye was feathers and so for this design I would like to see if I can explore fur, feathers and possibly scales. From my experience working with Maya last semester, I feel more confident in picking a more challenging design in terms of detail and an asset such as wings would be a good challenge for me.

Here are my thoughts on this character and design:

• Anthro Gryphon with Bearded Vulture and tiger features
• Belongs to an ancient race of high intelligence gryphons who live in tribes in a fantasy realm.
• They follow traditions of the bearded vulture, covering themselves with soil to appear more intimidating to their foes, giving the feathers the bright pink/orange colourings

This design I really enjoyed designing, it was good to try experimenting with whether the feline features should be on the top or the bottom as the silhouettes show at the top. I ended up really liking the first silhouette alot so I sketched them first and showed how they might use their bird hands as I wanted them to stay true to the birds design, instead of anthropomorphic.

I imagine this character has the ability to run on all fours too for speed and hunting in his tribe and so preserving his claws as this wild ancestors did, I did a quick sketch of this below and added some colour to get an idea of colours to use.

I then went onto explore more colours and used colours found on bearded vultures but in two variants. I wanted to keep the colours natural enough to be recognizable to be a bearded vulture and I really like the the black tiger aesthetic so kept that alongside the design though changed the tint slightly to fit either one.

I won't be including a staff when I sculpt but still liked the idea of the character having one if they were in a game. I changed the colours on those also to compliment their pallets.

After watching the linked in learning videos, I had a go at sculpting the basic shape of my character, without a reference imported, to get a feel for how easy the software works and how easy it is to sculpt.

I used the ZSpheres to model out this basic shape of my character. I found this really easy to do and it was fun to see the basics of my character already taking shape. One thing I noticed though was it was fairly difficult to get the ears right and they still aren't perfect, I think this is because the effect of the Zsphere "coning" properties.

To help me with correct anatomy and muscle placement, I have done some further research on how an anthro gryphon would look. For this, I broke the character into two forms again- the vulture and the tiger, and looked at how the muscles work for them. Here are some very useful reference images I found for them.

After this week's feedback, I was adviced to simplify the zspheres and delete some, which I did and then made it into a 3D polymesh. Here I noticed that the ears were causing issues, so I removed them and will sculpt them in later on. After applying the adaptive skin, The back warped quite a bit but it is fixable so I'm not concerned.

Starting to build up the shape of the body and face, I use the clay build up tool to add and remove to the shape to create the features and muscle of my character. I used a photo of a bearded vulture for reference to shape the head to the proportions and using my muscle refs, I bulked out his chest and hips.

Adding more muscle mass and shape to the legs, I want to keep them lean and muscular like a tigers, I ended up bringing up the knee joint slightly higher and almost to a point to show his bone structure more.

I also shaped the face more and started to refine the eye shapes, beak and mouth crease.

Before continuing to much further, I wanted to get a 360 of the model and sketch my design back over it to see how well it would match my style, as I felt the head and leg shapes had strayed somewhat from my own personal art style and more into the realistic realm. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as a realistic touch will make the animal's structure and overall design more believable, but I still wanted my model to reflect my art style.

I also wanted to see how his wings would need to flesh out, how his claw hands would work and also his ears. This also helped me flag up some problematic areas like his bottom and thighs needing more mass in areas. Still, I think he's shaping up very well and I'm very happy with his progress.

For this model, I have put together a very rough schedule to sim for while building this model. This is an important part of the process when project building as it can give a realistic timeline for goals to aim for for effective time keeping. I hope too actually finish before each of these goals but with the detailing stage I don't want to rush it.

My Personal schedule for this model:

• Week 2- Start Zsphere building of basic shape of model
• Week 3- Dynamesh my Zspheres/Start sculpting
• Week 4- Finish muscle sculpting
• Week 6- Start wing, hand and feet details
• Week 8- Start feather detailing and fur texturing
• Week 9- Final detailing/touch ups ready for colouring
• Week 11- Start Lighting the scene for my model and posing

Now onto building the ears- My first attempt was made by bringing in a new object, a sphere, and moulding it into shape. this was really fun and easy to do, but I realised after sculpting that to make it mirrored would be a bit of an issue.

So instead I errased it and started again by adding the ear onto the sculpt with the subtool mode and mirror sculpted it from the get go and got two perfectly mirrored ears. I then moved onto the eyes so I could sculpt the eye sockets around the shape of the eye.

Here I am moving on with the wings and fingers. I made them as new inserted mesh primative shapes, that were mirrored and duplicated the fingers, modifying them as I went to make each finger/claw. Once Happy with the shape and placement, I merged them with the body using the dynamesh tool.

I'm very happy with the shape and form of the claw fingers as I feel they reflect a bird's claw very well and will be a good base to build up on. The ings on the other half I am not so confident in as the shape doesn't feel right, but this is something I will work on later on.

Working on the feathers now, I tried out the tutorials I gathered near the start of this project and tried out the differenct types to see what would work best. I want to keep them fairly simple as to not take away the focus of the defintion of the body and face but also make them interesting where needed- such as the wings, back of the head and chest.

This first feather I used the tutorial from here- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-PL_s9Qvzc&t=38s The feathers are very basic and easy to make, using the crease and move tool. I think these will be a very effective basic shape that I can use over and over again and just change them as and where I need them.

After some insecurities on how to proceed, I got some feedback on how to progress with my model and with making the wings. I did start making some wings in Zbrush but it crashed and got messy, so with attempt two I'm returning to Maya to help make the shape of the whole wing.

I started off with a cube and added divisions to make a start on the basic shape of the arch and down to shape the first wing feather, I then moved and added topology loops to aid with shaping. To make the bulk shape of the wing, I deleted the faces on the underside of the mesh and bridged the bottom edges together then used the fill hole tool. After simplifying the topology ready for basic shaping, I then added extra edgeloops where the feathers divided and extruded the faces down to make the feathers.

Once I was happy with the shape of them, I added a crease to the middle of each feather and then smoothed the whole mesh to see how it looked. As I'm happy with how this looks, I believe its ready for Zbrush. I did not shape the wings in the end to shape the contour of how I wish them to look at the end on the model from the side view because this one wing will be used for both and mirrored and I felt I could make this work easier in Zbrush with the mirror mode after attaching them to my character mesh.

To append the wing in, I used the MultiAppend tool to bring in the wing onto my model under a new subtool ready to be moved into place like so.

To mirror the wing to the other side as well, I used the Mirror and Weld tool and then merged the character model with the wings.

After this week's session, I got some feedback on how my model is doing it was suggested that I try making the wings bigger to be more realistic to how this large griffon would fly and add some fantasy drama to the character. So here is what I tried out, keeping references of big birds at hand to see the proportion of the body to the wings in mind. This really does add more to the design and character so I will keep it like so.

To be honest this was not something I considered when creating this character as realistic anatomy is alien to me and I tend to draw what feels right, not how or why they travel on these wings so this was some very useful feedback to take to my drawing side of art too.

To acheive the shape of feathers I wanted, I extruded the faces at the top of the model, on both sides, and shaped them into points. I smoothed before exporting it back to Zbrush.

Here there are imported and mirrored onto my model, I am happy with how they are looking but I given some feedback to save time to pre-pose the wings ready for the end result so save posing them later on.

As I said above, I felt the more relaxed pose most fitting and also thought this would also be a realistic goal to achieve with my knowledge of how the transposer tool works in Zbrush. I was also advised to make my model asymmetric as this would enhance the believability of my character and design, so I will lower the wings individually at seperate heights, move the legs separate and even pose the two tails he has to be different from each other.

However I got very confused and got my wires crossed here as I tried using the Zremesher guide tool alongside the Decimation master and it didn't work too well. The wings and body topology did improve some but the zremesher guide tool did not work and instead I go these edgeloop markings stuck to my model without any changes to the mesh.

I ended up moving forward anyway and working some more on the wings as the feathers that were attached to the wings were bothering me with how blocky they looked so I started to work on fixing them by smoothing out the unwanted feathers and placing new ones using the custom feather brush I used before.

However after all this work, I had to take time to stop and reflect on where my model was going. I was spending way too much time on fixing the mesh when the mesh wasn't even finished being sculpted on, as I was still adding feathers to the wings. This would mean another use of the Decimation master tool and more topology fixing which would no doubt affect the other already fixed topology so I ended up returning to a previous version of my model to back before I used these tools.

I am so glad I made so many versions of my model, this current model version was v.24 and because of all the changes I've made throughout the time working on this and saving new versions each time, I was able to easily return to a previous version to fix my mistakes easily. This did unfortunately mean the wings were back to the blocky form, but I can always merge the v.24 wings to the previous version without problems. This process of problem solving though has really driven home how important it is to save your model each time as a different version to avoid wasting time and keep workflow professional.

Here I learnt another mistake I've made. I re-learnt what exactly what the Zremesh guide tool did and realised that it was for using it to simplify the topology ready to go in and add details such as wrinkles and textures, which is something I should have done before adding the feathers onto my character! And as I have added all the feathers on individually straight onto the main mesh and not on a subtool, they were heavily affected by the Zremesh tool. I weighed up my options and did some research on the functions on this tool with the hopes of saving all my hard work from placing all those feathers on and found out that if I kept the target polycount around 60, instead of the recommended 40 and kept the setting on for 'Detect Edges' it still removed some of the feather detailing, but was bearable enough to not destroy all the feathers. The first image above is the settings in the tutorial, the second is my own settings as explained.

It is unfortunate I have still lost alot of the detailing from the feathers I carefully places and shaped, but due to time being tight and this just becoming a lesson to learn from I'm glad I was at least able to problem solve my way to a bearable outcome to learn from.

I then went on and added the new feathered wings from v.24 and kept them as separate tools from each other and the body for easy posing later on and did the same process I took to organise the body mesh topology and kept the settings the same as to match the body at 60 polycount. After this I divided the mesh topology twice to get 3million+ active points as per the tutorial with Rayce Bird to take this model further into detailing and refinement.

All images above referenced with credit here- Reference images

To achieve the textures I wanted for my character, I returned to my research above on how different feathers and fur looked and how they would also vary in size and nature depending on where they were on the body. To achieve these textures, I used the Damian Standard brush for the majority of the feather detailing with various intensities for the upper half of the body and the wings to blend in the feathers I sculpted on and texture the smooth areas. I overall kept it very loose as Bearded Vultures are known for messy feathers that are wind and uneven.

For the fur texture on the bottom half of the body, I experimented with the use of textured brushes and the alpha textures. I tried to keep the texture different from the feathers and keep it short but deep in the texture. I wanted to use more pressure with the depth of the textures here because the lower half of the body will be much darker than the upper half so I wanted to make sure it could be seen through the dark colours later on.

When I came to the wings I really wasn't very happy with the look of them, they really don't reflect the amount of detail I used for the main body and I feel they look very flat and rushed. However I am on very tight time restrains now so this is unfortunately the best I can do for now. If I had the time I would have liked to have sculpted the entire wing with individual feathers from a thinner skeletal base and bring them down in each layer. I believe this would have given the sculpt a real wow factor and be a better focus for a viewer, however I understand this method would have been very time consuming and have a very high polycount which may not be suitable for a gaming engine, even if they were compressed.

To finish off the sculpt, I added more sculpted feathers to the base of the wings where it meets the body to help the transition of them both.

Now the sculpting phase is done, I am overall happy with the result apart from the wings, as I mentioned earlier. I believe there must be a much better way to integrate the lower poly wings from maya to Zbrush, and although I tried my best they did eat up too much of my time to give a better result, but this is definitely something I have learnt from through this process and I should have done more research on how to do this.

Bitter sweet feelings on how I reflect on this part of the model, I leave the sculpting behind and move forward onto polypainting. I did overall enjoy sculpting in Zbrush, but near the end it felt very tedious and issues in my personal life have made it harder to deal with. However I'm excited to move forward.

To start painting, I added a material base to the whole model and explored which material would work best for this character. In Rayce's tutorial above, he had a character with a fleshy texture and one base colour, so for mine I have to experiment with how to add all my desired colours and materials. returning to my texture research I came to the conclusion that fur and feathers are very similar in sheen so to reflect this with my character, I used the material called SkinShade4 as this had a good sheen overall without being garish. I then used the masking tools to section out where each colour needed to be and coloured them in individually, being careful to keep the "Z add" and "Z Sub" options off and turn "Mrgb" and "Colourize" mode's on before applying the coloured sections to the mesh.

For the eyes I used the Jellybean material, but I'm not sure how it will respond to me painting on the pupils later on, so this may be changed.

After the basic coloured were painted in, I started feathing in more colours and adding variation to the feathers to help emphasize the feather texturing to the neck, arms, back and arms.

Once I was happy with the basic painting of the upper body, I then went on to do the bottom half and added the stripes to the legs, tails and wings. After this I then applied the final colour pattern to the mesh to combine them together. I also ended up changing the material of the eyes to the base material Blinn and painting on the pupils as desired. When I attempted to add his eyes on like this to the jellbean material, it was overly saturated and no matter how much I tried to feather out the paint brush hardness, it didn't make a difference and so was definitely worth changing.

I really think this makes the world of difference to the model and is already looking so much better, making me feel more confident with how well it all looks and how far I have come.

To bring my model into further refinement and to bring out all that sculpted texture I added, I then went ahead and painted in the cavities of the texture by using the masking tool setting "Mask by cavity".

I did this to both emphasize the engraved texture and inverted it to also add highlights to necessary areas. This proved a little tricky as I had to use the right colours for the right coloured areas but overall it makes a big difference and I'm very pleased with the outcome.

I also kept in mind the trick to try and keep the model asymmetrical by adding areas of interest such as the scar on his one ear and painting the feather details different in areas.

Now the character is all painted, its time to pose them. I started with the one arm first, moving it from the shoulder down to try and match the pose I had in mind in my sketches. However I found posing the mesh very difficult and soon realised that turning a limb in drastic poses was going to be very difficult- I wanted the mesh to have the hands turned all the way round to have the palms face upwards, but the deforming of the wrist and the feathers made it very difficult to mask effectively and manipulate.

I am aware that I could have probably fixed these huge deformation issues by using the build up tool afterwards to clean up, but I felt this issue was too big of a problem and not worth the time for what I have left for this module, so instead I changed up the pose entirely and just posed the character in something that felt natural and personal to this character.

In the end this is what I came up with. I wanted to give the character motion so posed him as if he was traveling a scene. I feel this pose works well too at several angles and so this is the pose I will settle for, even if it isn't the original pose I wanted to work towards.

To ensure the pose felt more natural and didn't warp the mesh in places, I used the clay build up tool to the problematic areas such as the foot angle (back foot) the crook of the arm on the right arm and the tails.

Here below are the default side views of the model in this pose so you can see the asymmetric details I made to each body part.

Lighting the character is a very important step to bringing out all the detail of the sculpt and highlighting the best parts of the model for showcasing. From watching the above videos, I was able to get a grasp on how a simple 3 way lighting set up could make a difference. The screenshots below show my understanding of it.

And the last lighting is HDRI lighting- I had horrendous issues with this with my model and so I'm unfortunately unable to get a render of this type of lighting. My understanding of this type of lighting is that in Zbrush you import the image of the background you intend to use for your character and apply them to custom lightcaps to make numerous custom lights fitting for that scene. I followed the tutorial by Rayce Bird HERE but no matter what I did Zbrush crashed and I ended up loosing some of my progress. I tried finding a solution online and tried lowing the amount of lights the lightcap would render, but it didn't work and I couldn't find a solution.

In the end, I felt best I try putting in lights that would be fitting for my scene and eyeball how it should look and use photoshop to fix any inconsistencies. So to work around this, I got searching online for a suitable scene for my character. I felt a mountain type scene with mist/fog would give my character a sense of mystery and magic which is what I wish to portray in their characteristics. I found the image below and did some quick photobashing to remove the man from the photo. I felt this was a good image to go for as it has alot of blank space to place my character in and would be versatile for what I need.

Once I had finished with the lighting, I rendered each layer of lighting and form and took them to photoshop. Here is how I organised them in my folders per pose so I could remember which render held which light source and of course keep the different pose renders separate to avoid confusion.

I tried to use the Depth mask with this pose, but as there were too many elements and too many levels of depth, I felt that just using the regular mask layer instead was best for this pose.

I also wanted to talk about the refinement I had to do in areas on my sculpt, as this shows below I did have alot of areas where my lack of attention to detail with the mesh showed. I had alot of areas of need like this and I do wonder if this is the right thing to do or not. For this project I think it's fine as this is a learning journey on how to make a successful sculpt to showcase, but if this were a model to be sold to a client I feel like if i were to cover up my mistakes like this it would reflect badly on my professional practice as a sculptor. So I have learnt that I really should be careful while in the detail stage of sculpting and try better to avoid making mistakes like this to keep professional.

Out of the three images, I think the third one is my favourite, the illusion of him coming from the fog towards you is really interesting. Though I really love the first one two as it shows all the hard work I put in for the posing and it really looks as if he is traveling through the scene. To finish off the scene in each, I added some custom trees and foliage to make the scene interesting and also added extra highlights to his eyes, which I feel brings him to life more.

Throughout this project I feel I have learnt so much and grown alongside this whole process, not just as a 3D sculptor but in myself too, this has been a very challenging yet fun experience I’m sure has increased my knowledge immensely.

Looking through my blog again and reflecting on my work, I realised that I had forgotten my personal schedule on setting myself deadlines and I feel unprofessional for forgetting this as I understand it is a very important task that any professional should work towards in order to set and reach realistic goals throughout the project. If I were working for a company or client on this project, or any other for that matter, I would have people asking me where I am in the process and how long it would take to get finished or reach certain goals. So, this is something I recognise I should have been more aware of and is something to work on next time.

From the start, I was very excited to work with Zbrush as I am interested in 3D work but I felt Maya to be too rigid and geometric for my liking, whilst Zbrush felt fluid and marble, almost as good as moulding the sculpt yourself with your bare hands which is what I’m more familiar with my own interests. Although I was excited for Zbrush sculpting, I first found the software very confusing and even overwhelming at times and felt that the sculpting stage went on for eternity at times.

I think what didn’t help with this project was my lack of knowledge and understanding of how bird wings look and function in a 3D space and as my blog reflects, I had a very hard time replicating these complex limbs into my workspace. I really wish I didn’t have to turn to Maya to make them as I feel I did them justice in Maya itself, but when brought into Zbrush alongside my mesh it was very apparent they were very different in poly count and detail.

I could make excuses on how current life events affected this, but the bottom line was I did not do enough research in the right time frame to learn what exactly was wrong and how to fix it. That being said I am happy that I made this mistake and that I did have to rely on Maya as I now understand how the two programs can work together and near the end of my sculpting stage I did learn how to retopologize the mesh and I really should have done this right after importing the wing model into Zbrush to match the rest of the body. So, although too late now, I do know how I should have handled this situation and that it was fixable, but I should have done it before merging them to the body and adding more feather detailing.

Once the sculpting work was done, I really enjoyed the poly paint section as it brought back the fun of the project that I lost near the end of the sculpting phase. I am surprised at how easy it was to paint straight onto the mesh and feel confident in saying that I know how exactly it is done and how important masking in the right areas was.

Using the transpose master to pose my character however was another battle as I felt my mesh was almost set in stone with the original A pose I sculpted him in as I was scared to break the mesh as I warped his limbs. I do feel that I could have done a more dramatic pose that would have suited him better, but I am happy with how he is posed now as it is versatile for the character’s portraying needs.

Overall, I am very happy with my progress with Zbrush and would gladly use it again as I found it unique and rewarding to use. I would however remember the issues I came across and think again about the pipeline of making a successful 3D model instead of working from video to video and learning only what I needed for the time, as this left me at times realising I was jumping the gun and assuming certain parts of the process would come next when actually I missed an important step. Such as when I started adding feather detailing to my mesh before topologizing the body and I ended up only being able to retoplogize so much before damaging the feathers I spent so much time on placing beforehand.

I felt that this project also pushed my boundaries with my art style in general as I am not too fond to be honest with sticking to “correct” anatomy and instead have always liked my stylised art form , so as you can probably see from my sketches and concept art vs the actual model, I did push myself to keep this gryphon as realistic in proportions as possible, as if it were a flying, breathing creature on two legs.

Before this project, I hardly considered an animal or person in any form how they are actual muscles would protrude or move depending on their movement and instead would draw something that looked “right” in my eyes. So from this perspective I think this project has opened my eyes to remember that these creatures, real or not, have some form of muscular system and should be kept in mind when modelling AND drawing to achieve a believable form, even if they are unrealistic in real life.

I will however say how proud I am of my achievement with this sculpt as I never thought I could ever make something so amazing for my first try and I’m ecstatic how well the overall sculpt looks in the scene added for the final photos. I have learnt so much not only about sculpting but drawing and form too.