A1 - Digital sculpting
SHINDY LEONG
SHINDY LEONG
For all my ideas I will be focusing on making a fantasy biped creature. Idea number 1 is a creature from the future that is located in the forest, this area is humid. The creature's function are the ears that can adapt itself with the heat by cooling it down, this is how the fennec fox functions in real life [1]. Although the ears will be replaced to the lop rabbit's large ears instead. I can imagine the creature being good, as example this could be a supporting character the main character would come across in the movies or games. The body will be based of the kangaroo, the abilities are running and jumping, therefore it will have large legs that are the bigger muscles. The polar bear reference is used for the pose and proportions since my first idea it to have a tall creature.
My second idea is also a fantasy creature, however this will be from the past. The character is quite chaotic, tall and muscular or skinny. The two animals, moose and rhinoceros are heavy animals and have a square shape. This could be a creature who was a warrior from the past that has gone through a lot of history. The chameleon will be used for the tail and potentially the skin and colours, I thought it would be quite nice and unique with the texture it has.
Idea 3 is a fantasy creature also in the future, this creature can be found in the desert. I could imagine the character would being a seller at some shop in a video game, the creature will be good and helpful. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have a creature named bluepee (top left glowing blue creature) which is a combination of owl and rabbit with horns. Although the blupee is a glowing character I will be basing mine on real reference images on animals or plants from the desert to get inspiration for the skin and fur. My idea for the creature's appearance will be short, old with an energetic personality.
Creating all different silhouettes from idea 1,2 and 3, there were both tall and short creatures to give me a better idea which one I preferred the most. The ones I liked the most were 1,2, 4 and 7, I liked the gestures and the amount of details it had. Since it was a quite difficult to decide which one I liked the most, either a tall or short creatures I will make a few thumbnails to give me a clearer idea.
Creating the various thumbnails of the four silhouettes I got a better idea of the creatures personality and style. The owl is more friendly while the moose is scarier, however I liked number 3 and 5 the most. This ideas isn't refined yet and need more detailing, but I will do that once I have decided if I want to go with thumbnail 3 or 5.
Refined sketched and chosen creature
Once I refined the two thumbnails I was feeling thumbnail 3, although I really liked the moose silhouette. The owl was an easier option, as I found it difficult to develop my ideas for the moose and see the final outcome. I have wanted to do the owl since the beginning of this project, it would be interesting creating a fantasy creature and mainly focus on the fur with an interesting colour palette. I have used Zbrush before where I sculpted a bird and tried to do the fur but never managed to finish it. I think doing something similar this time will improve my knowledge in this software and that I achieve my goal for this project, the whole creature but mainly get the fur done.
Refining sketch and feedback - Owl
After receiving some feedback about the creature, the neck should be changed as it wouldn't go along with the creature's fur. And minimise the amount of elements put into the creature as there is too much going on. I will replace the neck by removing the frilled-neck lizard part and perhaps have none of it or some kind of fur.
I decided to go with the middle one as I don't want to make me creature too complicated sinceI'm not very comfortable with Zbrush. I will also replace the tail to a kangroo tail as it looked better and would work better with the fur.
Refining my final creature I replaced the tail to a kangaroo tail and did a turnaround of the face and body. I looked at kangaroo anatomy and how it would go with the owl's head. Although I would say I'm quite happy with the final results and have a understanding how the kangaroo anatomy works. When doing the sculpting I will keep using my reference images to get the details on the creature, especially the body.
For the creature I decied to use poison dart frog as reference for the fur. I thought it would create a neat texture for the fur as it's suitable for the fantasy area. This would also create a cool effect with the black dots, I think this is fairly easy to do as there are various ways to create the fur, such as fibermesh. I will try to aim for this technique as it I know I can mask areas such as the black spots which could be very helpful. And seeing other artists work using fibermesh looks great.
Exploring with the colour placement I chose to go for number 4 as I the hues blend with each other nicely and the monochromatic hues. The black dots are placed on the back of the creature, I will be adding more dots around other areas such as the frog where it continues to the back of the head and legs. The reason I went for number 4 is because I want to keep the original features of the owl such as the eyes and exaggerate the face by making it white.
I created a lowpoly base mesh in Maya which I will be importing to Zbrush. Using Maya in the beginning would be very helpful as I'm quite comfortable with it and would be much easier for me than using Zbrush. I think I could have used the Zbrush to create the base mesh, but I decided to focus more on the sculpting and fur when it comes to the software.
I followed HOKIROYA I Digital Art process of making the basemesh as it has similiar anatomy as the kangroo. The basemesh was used as a reference by following the tutorial, if I was unsure how to do the arm so I used the tutorial as I guide where and how I should extrude it.
Reviving some feedback for this week's show and tell I had to make the creature into a more natural pose which was the ear as I can work in symmetry and adjust the pose later. Luckily, I didn’t do much digging into the fiber mesh as I wasn't allowed to go for this method as it gets too complicated. Therefore, I will be doing fur sculpt and do further research into it and make it more realistic.
For the sculpting I will be using the references below which is the kangaroo anatomy as it's a great example of the muscles and skeleton. I will be using the tutorial of the fennec fox as a reference for the ears and potentially the fur although the fur might be different compared to the kangaroo.
After doing the blockout I began doing the basic anatomy where I sort of marked which areas of the muscles will be showing through. Most of the muscles will be shown by the legs as that's the largest muscles of the kangaroo and has less fur on that area. I found it quite difficult since the animals I choose has a lot of fur or feathers.
For the body I will be analysing and use the kangaroo reference, I found this image very useful as it includes all the parts of the body which will allow me to be more accurate with the anatomy.
Once I finished the basic anatomy I refined the anatomy by bringing out the form and details. I was mostly defining the muscle areas and adjusted the face to create a base once I get to that stage since I had to play around with the face shape a lot.
I created a timetable to help me stay on track with my work. At the moment I'm a bit ahead (week 5), I have started adding the eyes and will eventually starts refining the feet and fingers. At this point I'm quite confident with the timetable as I feel like I'm ahead of my schedule, if I keep the same phase I will have more time to learn and work on any issues I will come across.
Here is the hand I created which is the kangaroo hand. I did a mistake when creating the base mesh, I went into too much details around the hands which disappeared once I used dynamesh in Zbrush. Redoing it in Zbrush I added seperate subtools and shaped and duplicated the fingers. I eventually connected the subtools with dynamesh and created the nails by using the tool snake hook. This isn't the final result as I will go into further details later, at this point I will get the eyes, sort out the face and get the ears done.
Conuting with the sculpting I worked on the head and adjusted the face as I felt some areas was misplaced. This is the process so far and it's starting to look like my final piece. At this point I'm going to adjust the ears more and look into the research from week 1 tutorials to make sure I haven't forgotten anything important.
For this week I'm currently in week 4/5, I'm doing both as I keep going back and forward to do further adjustment. I have finished doing the gravity and movement, the gravity will also depend on how the fur is placed. The two parts I need to refine the most for now are the hands and feet as it's just simple base mesh.
Getting some feedback from last week, I refined the ears by following the tutorial and reference images. I'm quite happy with the fennec fox ears, this should be the final piece for the ears as I will be adding fur later which will be the last step for this process. I had some issues with the eyes as it was either too wide or small, this was one of the areas I struggled with for a while. I think if I colour the eyes black it should help me with the placement of the eyes.
Adding more detail to the hands, I will be adding the texture of the paws later. However, I will be doing this once I come to the further details as I will lose the polygons if I use dynamesh.
At this point there might not be a lot of difference from the previous process. But I refined and merged the hands together with the body, refined the feet by adding claws where I used the fennec fox as reference and refined the face. I was struggling to change the material of the eyes as it kept changing the material for all subtools, but I managed to change it at the end by learning the Mrgb, Rgb and M.
For this week's timetable I'm in week 5 and 6. This is also a bit of both as I might have to refine some details when doing the fur sculpting. I have looked at a few sculpting tutorials and think I prefer the Clay Buildup and DamStandard method as it will allows me to get the fur the way I want.
Finishing final details I moved on to the fur, my aim was mainly kangaroo fur but it's too complicated. Therefore I will be going for something more simple with a thicker fur as the barn owl has. But I will still stick to having thinner fur around the areas with larger muscles such as the legs.
I did half of the face as I didn't want the fur on the face to be symmetrical, this took quite a long time as I used claybuild up and Damstandard brush afterwards. I liked this method as it allows me to get into smaller details. I also did a quick fur base for the body as I don't want to get stuck with the details too early. At this point I will be focusing on the head/face as it's the largest feature of this creature.
Working on the face and ears, I decided to redo the fur by the ears as I felt like it looked too messy and looking at the Fennec Fox reference the fur was more compact than spread out. I couldn't get the similar results because I feel like the fur sculpt limits me to create the realistic fur. But learning the fur sculpt is fun, as I keep working on the fur my workflow gets better and I get better results each time.
I looked at different tutorials how to create the fur but it wasn't the the results I wanted. Instead, I explored with different brushes and alpha. The setting on the left side are the ones I used to create this sort of fur. I'm not very precise with it since I will adding the alpha below to add in the details. The brush alpha have different width of the strokes which allows me to create different shapes for the fur.
When doing the fur I decided to create my own alpha that I can DragRect to the creature as I want the realistic results. I found this useful guide of how to create the alpha which is very useful. I will be adding this alpha on top of the fur I have refined.
At last I finally refined the rest of the model such as the face, feet and hand by creating further fur. I'm quite happy with the results as I used the reference which helped my workflow. Most difficult part must have been the face and hands since I went back and forwards several times to get the correct shape. Even if this was a long process I'm glad I kept doing adjustment until I got satisfied with it.
I have never done any colouring in Zbrush before, but since the whole process will be done in Zbrush it could be useful for future project. I certainly would have used Substance Painter, since I'm new with the colouring in Zbrush it would make more sense to do everything in the same software. I have so far done a cavity painting which emphasises the sculpture. This could be useful the enhance the fur details as example.
I did a couple of changes with the colours as it's not very precise as my own concept. I changed the colour of the beak from black to a beige/pink hue as that's the correct colour of a barn owl. I also found it suitable as black made the creature look too dark. I also wanted to keep to realistic feature of the face, therefore I went for this colour choice.
Starting off with a base colour, I will eventually add the shading and work my way to define further details such as the black spots on the back. At the end I will be using the cavity painting from above to add the final details. At this point I only want to focus on the base colour.
Working on further details I began with some shading and highlighted the beak as it's a smaller area of the face, and around the eyes. The reason I did this decision is so I can find my workflow and process. If I were to do a larger area, I would have spent more time and maybe regret it. This helps me to work with the different colours and brushes to get the results I want. And it will be a lot easier for me once I do the larger areas. Comparing the beak from above and now, the beak looks narrower and details are more enhanced.
Adding the base colour, shadow and highlights, I used cavity to define the fur and further details. I find this tool very useful as it helps me work quick to get into the darker/lighter areas. I still want to add more details, but I think I will do further research before doing that. Although I have something in mind, which is painting on textures or use the spotlight. However, I don't like the way it functions in Zbrush as it includes the image colours. I did try to edit the texture in photoshop and tried this method, I didn't really like the outcome.
For the back I used the blue poison dart frog to create the black dots. I don't like using full opacity as it's very noticeable with the texture. I had a low opacity and then filled in the dots by myself. This method worked better as it created better results and blends with the hues better. I still find it weird as this is only sculpted fur and won't be able to get the effect I want. Using fiber mesh as a fur would make the create look much more realistic. But this is something I could experiment with once this project it finished.
As I were ahead of the timetable, I spent some time more time adding shading and refine some areas. I tried to add as many details as possible, and don't want to make too many changes as I have reached a high polycount. The last area I had to finish were the hands by adding some details to the palms. Lastly, the fur needs to soften up a bit such as the back of the neck which needs more blending. And looking at realistic fur, the fur tends to have random dark/bright spot in various areas. At the moment I feel like it's the colour are too flat.
The hands were the final part of the colouring. The reason I used the spotlight was to add more details, using cavity wasn't enough to enhance the details. Therefore, spotlight was the best way for me to get more details in without changing the sculpt. I still think I could do better with the hands such as add some highlight, but this can be done in photoshop. On the other hand, this area won't be very noticeable as my focus is the face.
To complete the creature, I included the blood vessels around the ears as fennec foxes have quite thin skin. I found this also gave the creature a warmer tone and is livelier.
For the eyes I could have use the chrome shader I have been using the whole time since it had a quite reflection. But I decided to texture the eyes which has a dark brown hue, from a far distance the reflection wasn't noticeable and which made the eyes look mat. I found a ZbrushGuide,[12] I really liked the outcome as it creates a stronger reflection for the eyes and look more realistic. I just duplicated the eye subtool and added a reflection shader which is done through material modifiers.
Here is my final creature, I'm very pleased with the outcome. As this is my first time colouring in ZBrush I think the results came out good, the options were easy to navigate through. However, at the beginning I found quite confusing with the Zadd, alpha channels etc. As I progressed, my workflow went smoother. Although I think I could have done the fur differently such as add more details with the damstandard, this would have created more details. This is something I will consider doing future projects, my goal for this project were to understand the process and get a better understanding of the software. I have learnt to use the cavity to add more details, spotlight to add textures/patterns and multi-eye reflection, I also find these three very useful as it will be used very often.
I looked for some further reference images for the pose. When analyzing the kangaroo gestures the arms looks very relaxed while the fingers are slightly curled. One of the ears will be leaning down a bit, this will be done with the transpose mater. At the end there will be areas that has been stretched which I will need to adjust with the move tool and fill in some details. I think the most difficult part will be making the creature leaning forward a bit. In this case I will have to adjust several areas of the body. Although I'm not very worried about that since I have found some useful reference material to help me.
Throughout the process I found the Gizmo 3D tool quite confusing, how to position it and what the axis did. I sort of got an understanding of the tool afterwards besides that I tend to have some issues with the x, y and z axis still. The biggest issues were making the body lean forward and rotate the head upward as it kept stretching everywhere. The stretch would have extended the body which isn't the purpose. Going back and forward with the move tool, clay buildup and alphas to add fur I finally got 2 poses finished. I would say I liked the second pose more as there is more weight and interesting pose.
It's my first time rendering and using light in Zbrush, I have no knowledge about the software when it comes to this. Doing some research, I found two useful and informative tutorials, the left one helped me with the editing in photoshop. The right tutorial is 11 videos going through the process of setting up the light while explaining everything. I would say this helped me a lot since the guy explained the how the materials with the light. Before that I was struggling trying to figure out why matcap materials didn't function correctly when adding lights.
Since I'm using a matcap material I wouldn't be able to add light, I learnt that the matcap materials already have light baked in. I tried using standard materials, but this would affect the eye reflection and make it matt. To fix this I used the standard lighting where I used 4 lights in total to be able to get the details for the renderer.
When finishing the render, I went through artstation to get inspiration for the background. I found that most of the artists had a simple background. I also think this will focus a lot more on the creature itself and bring out further features. Below are a dark and brighter background, the left one is a bit too dull as there isn't enough light in the scene which hides some details such as the left leg. I like the right one as the shades blend very well, and this bright area behind the creature enhances the light, shadow and details.
Here are my 3 final rendered images, I'm pleased with the results. It took me a long time to get the correct lighting in the scene since there would be more shadow on one side and less details on some areas. I have used the same lighting for all three rendered images, I think the details came out quite well for all of them. When doing the touch ups, I used noise and sharpened the image, to make it brighter and increate the details for the creature. I had to do some further painting for the eyes as there wasn't enough reflection showing up. And to enhance the fur and eyes I manually drew on some shadow and highlights with a low opacity soft brush. If there is anything, I could have done better is probably the fur around the face, I could blend the area better and used a different alpha then used the dam standard brush, as it's not enough details showing. Other than that, I would say I'm very happy with the results and the renders came out better than I expected.
Waiting for feedback after Easter week, it would be helpful to have an environment as a background to sell the concept a lot better. I used the same pose and rotated the creature to front the camera more. Since I mentioned my creature would be in a desert I decided to put the creature into a winter desert to blend in with the cold colours rather than warm colour as it would affect the tone of the image I would say.
Everything was done in Photoshop, this process also went so much quicker as it was a repetitive process. My process to create the environment consisted of photo bashing to be able to get the realistic background, I had to change the brightness and desaturate the images to make sure the layers would blend. To fill out the area I created my own snow brush, also added snow around the feet to give it more realism and sunk in, the plant and snow in front of the image is to make the image look less dull. At last I added a gaussian blur and used the depth mask to create a blur which focuses on the creature. I'm quite pleased with the images as I sort of managed to make the creature and background merge in with each other.
This project has been very fun and learning, I enjoyed all of it and learnt something new all the time throughout the whole process. At the beginning I didn’t have much knowledge about the process or a lot of knowledge about the software ZBrush. I have used ZBrush before when baking a high poly to low poly model, this was more of the sculpting part. Other than that, I had no idea about the poly paint, lighting and render etc.
For the project I already had an idea to create a fantasy creature with a combination of different animals. I think the beginning was effective as I had an idea of the process and what I wanted to do by making different collage of animals to get create my own image of the creature, personality, environment etc. I’m pleased with the decision I made which was a fantasy creature taking place in the desert. With the research I did, I could image my creature being a helpful and good character. I wrote that it would be short, old and have an energetic personality. I managed to achieve that besides that the creatures don’t look old. And this is something I need to work on, stick with my ideas. The feedback throughout the whole development has been helpful, such as minimize the number of elements put into the creature as there was too much going on. At the end I had a simple creature with interesting elements.
My goal for this project was to be able to do everything in Zbrush, everything was done in the software. Only time I didn’t use Zbrush was at the beginning when creating a base mesh in Maya because I felt more comfortable with it. This was easy and quick, but I will try the Zsphere for my next project as it would be fun to learn something new in Zbrush. For the project my focus was to be able to sculpt fur and learn the software, it took me a while until I got pleased with the final fur as I kept exploring until I found the perfect one. I didn’t find any fur tutorials I liked that suited my creature as I aimed for kangaroo fur and owl fur. Instead, I managed to create my own fur alphas to make it more accurate and get further details in there. Although the sculpted fur could have been done better if I used the DamStandard brush to add more details manually.
The most difficult for me was understanding and sculpting the anatomy, I’m not very good with it in general which is why I found it challenging especially combining multiple animals. This must have taken me several weeks until I was completely satisfied with the anatomy. Most of the session I would refine the muscles and adjust the face shape as it would be misplaced. But once I had to pose the creature, I found it a lot easier analyzing the kangaroo gesture as I already were used to the anatomy. The results came out great, the reason I managed to achieve this was due I used reference images, followed tutorials and had patience I would say.
At the beginning I found the software confusing such as the Zadd, alpha channels etc, but as I progressed my workflow is much smoother. Every time I move progressed there would be something new to learn. I didn’t enjoy the transpose master as I found the gizmo 3d tool confusing, this made me restart the pose multiple times which I found frustrating. But there is always another workaround, I used the rotation tool instead. I also learnt and found tools I will be using for my next project, I liked the cavity as it helps me masks areas which allow me to paint the areas efficiently. The multi-eye reflection which was a part of my own research that could be useful for other characters to achieve the realistic results. Although, I wished I knew more about the materials before adding the lighting. I used matcap material the whole time, this means light is already baked in the material. If I used a standard material, I could have done more adjustments with the lighting. However, I’m happy with the lights I managed to get into the scene and render.
Overall, this journey has been informative as I have improved my skills in Zbrush. Understanding the pipeline was confusing at first, but the development consisted sculpting, colouring, texturing, posing, lighting and render. Most of them mentioned will be used for my future projects as well. To make the fur more challenging for me in the future, it would be interesting to learn fibermesh as it looks realistic. Other than that, I’m happy with the final render images even though I did more than 3, I didn’t expect the results to look like this due to the sculpted fur. It came out better than expected.
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