OldLady

One of my earliest major projects in ZBrush was a character study focused entirely on recreating an older woman from a provided reference image. The assignment challenged us to capture not only the overall likeness, but the anatomy, structure, and aging of the face down to its smallest details.

This was an intense project for me, especially because I was still learning ZBrush at the time. We started from the very beginning with a basic mesh, establishing the overall silhouette and proportions before gradually building up the forms of the face.

From there, I began working into the finer anatomical structures: the brow, cheekbones, chin, neck muscles, and the way all of these shapes come together to create a believable human face. Once the larger forms were working, we moved into the most challenging part of the project — the skin.

Rather than simply sculpting wrinkles randomly across the surface, we learned how wrinkles actually form around the underlying anatomy. I studied how the skin folds and compresses around areas such as the eyes, mouth, forehead, cheeks, and neck, and how those patterns change depending on the structure beneath them.

That process completely changed the way I think about sculpting. The goal wasn't just to add detail, but to understand why the detail exists in the first place.

For one of my first serious ZBrush projects, this pushed me far outside of my comfort zone and taught me a tremendous amount about facial anatomy, sculpting, skin detail, and observation. The final result earned an A, and it remains one of the projects that helped establish my foundation in 3D character work.