This is a multi-part tutorial on creating a Demon-like ‘Lok Warrior’ with realistic muscle anatomy. In the first day of this tutorial we created a base mesh for our character using poly modeling. Today we will take this mesh into ZBrush and sculpt intricate muscle anatomy. On day three we will texture the creature and add the finishing touches to the artwork.

Let’s begin day 2 of this tutorial.

Step 40

Open ZBrush and click on ‘Import an OBJ file’. Select our exported object (this way you don’t need to drag the object into the ZBrush workspace) and select ‘Edit mode’.

Step 41

Now subdivide the model by clicking Cntrl + D to create more polygons. Press X to select a symmetrical brush and start sculpting the torso while holding down the Alt key on your keyboard. The red lines below are where you have to sculpt while holding down the Alt key. The blue areas are where you have to sculpt without holding the Alt key down. Please pay attention to the brush size and Z intensity too.

Step 42

Use this image as a guide when preparing the back.

Step 43

We will finish the front part of the torso first. Press Ctrl + D again and now we are on subdivision level 3. Try to form the chest and stomach muscles using the inflat brush. You can increase the Draw size and Z intensity if necessary.

About

Here is a quick way of making grass. You need to have at least Cinema 4D Release 9.5 and the Hair plug-in to follow this tutorial. But similar effects can also be created with the free Hair Department.

Making Grass

Create a Plane object and press the Add Hair button. This created a new Hair object and a default hair texture will be assigned to it. Leave all hair settings to default for the moment.

Make sure the Hair object is activated and select the hair scale tool (Hair > Tools > Scale). Use this tool to bring the future grass to the desired length (either by using the tool controls in the attributes manger or by clicking and dragging in the viewport).

Now select the brush tool (Hair > Tools > Brush). Adjust the radius and bring in some variation in the grass. Make sure to rotate the viewport and work on all sites of the object.

This is it for the ‘modeling’ Now select the hair material. Three channels are activated by default: Color, Specular and Thickness. This is what you should see when you do a quick render of your scene.

Color: Create a brownish-green color gradient. The left side of the gradient will be applied to the grass root, the right part to the tips. If you want your grass to be slightly withered, select a light brown color at the right end. Create some color variation by setting the Var-H and Var-V parameters to something around 10.

Thickness: The hair still looks to thick, so decrease the Root and Tip values to 0.8 and 0.08.

Scale: At the moment every blade of grass has the same length, which looks to uniform. Activate the Scale channel to bring in some variation. Beware not to confuse the Scale with Length channel. Length cuts the hair which looks to artificial for real grass. You can leave the Scale settings at default. If you want more variation, increase the Variation parameter.

Frizz: Enable this channel to add chaos to your grass. With Frizz you can let your grass bend in any and all directions. Depending on what effect you want to get, use values between 30% and 50%.

Kink: If you want to have even more distortion in your grass, you can also enable the Kink channel and add a little bit of kink to the grass (I used a value of 15%).

That’s it for the hair material. Now select your grass object again and go to the Hairs tab. Increase the hair count from 5.000 to something about 50.000. But this value heavily depends on the size of the surface the grass grows on. You can also decrease the Segments to 6. If you do a close-up render and you realized that the grass blades are to angled use higher values.

Here is what I get with two light sources and soft shadows. You probably will notice that your grass looks way too dark once you enabled shadows. Therefore, go back to the grass material, Illumination tab and reduce the Self-Shadow and Received Shadow values.

Create a new material and leave only the Color channel activated. Chose a brown color and apply this material to the plane object.

Software Used :

ZBrush, Maya

Introduction :

I am a big fan of military topics. Since I had already done a soldier, this time I wanted to try a World War II German general.

Refrence :

Because this character was based on the real world look-and-feel, I didn’t draw any concepts for it. Therefore, I needed a ton of references instead. I found an old man reference from 3d.sk which I decided to use for my character; the reason was simply that it was a perfect reference to practice my ZBrush sculpting skills with and would also fit my character pretty well (Fig.01).

Fig.01

Modeling :

I created a plane in ZBrush with the reference image as the texture. Then, I started to model the head from a sphere. It’s much easier to get the right proportion if you have an image plane (Fig.02).

Fig.02

After I’d roughly done the sculpting, I exported a high-poly OBJ file to Maya and started to do re-topology. This is a very important step if you want your model to be used for real production. Modeling is only the first step of the production process; there is a lot of work after that, such as unwrapping, rigging, animation, etc. If you can keep your wireframe clean and appropriate, it will make everyone’s life much easier. I used a Maya plugin called “Nex”, which is a very nice tool to do re-topology with; using this plugin will keep your polygons in quads and evenly-spaced easily (Fig.03).

Fig.03

After completing the re-topology process, I exported another OBJ file and went back to ZBrush. With clean edge-loops, this time I was finally able to work on the details. There’s one thing I’d like to point out at this point: each area of the face has a particular skin texture. It’s important not to use the same texture everywhere because it will look unrealistic (Fig .04).

Fig.04

Software Used :

ZBrush, 3ds Max & Photoshop

Introduction :

The Dominance War is an annual game art character competition involving many different forums worldwide. This year, the choices of races you could create were Demon, Machine and Norm (basically anything NOT a machine or a demon and wielding a magical item) and then a series of classes within those races. Though my first instinct was to make the biggest, meanest demon I possibly could… I really wanted to challenge myself this year; go beyond my comfort zone and do something that wasn’t a safe choice for me. So I decided on “Bishop.”

In this article, I will attempt to cover the various different steps of his creation, from concept to final render. I’ve also included three accompanying movies, which can be found at the end of the article.

Concepts :

When the competition started, I had NO idea what I wanted to do. There were many different ideas floating around in my head, but nothing that really called out to me. Using the program “Alchemy” I started cranking out a bunch of different rough thumbnails that could represent the character designs I had in mind. This worked out really well because it mean that I spent very little time getting hung up on details and would know fairly quickly if a design was going to be “the one.” After taking some time to consider each (and with some helpful feedback from my forum mates) I decided to take the chunky, gun wielding cleric a little further (Fig.01 & Fig.02).

(Fig.01)

(Fig.02)

Base Mesh :

To start off, I created a basic, human, male mesh that was constructed of all quads (polygonal faces with four edges) with a moderate amount of detail. Generally, this is the resolution I strive for when creating base meshes; enough detail to show bigger shapes like the biceps and pecs, but not so much detail that it will cause problems during sculpting. In past characters I have modelled details such as nostrils, fingernails and abdominal muscles. Modelling these areas into your base mesh can cause problems down the line if you need them, because you end up with more geometry to deal with within a given area and, if you have to adjust these areas, it can make the topology of your model more complicated.

There are a few reasons why I modelled my base mesh to this level:

1. I didn’t have a full concept for Bishop, so I knew a lot of the work would be done on the fly and that I would end up “going with the flow.” If the base mesh was too detailed, or if I tried to model everything out in Max right away, I would end up causing roadblocks for myself in the future. Limiting myself to a certain layout right from the beginning could have hindered possible design choices.
2. Speed. I work much more quickly in ZBrush than I do in Max, so it makes the most sense to me to just rough in what I need in Max, mostly just for placement, and then go crazy with pushing and pulling details in ZBrush until I’m happy with the model.

Generally for all of my modelling in Max, I use the edge extrusion method. This basically consists of creating a plane, creating an instance of that model, mirroring it in the X axis and then starting to model away. At this stage, it is all about form rather than edge flow. The purpose of this mesh is to be clean and give a solid enough base to sculpt from (Fig.03).

(Fig.03)

As you can see in Fig.04 below, I went through various body shapes before hitting on one that I felt confident with. Originally, the body shape for Bishop was looking very “generic”, like an overweight man you’d see in an everyday situation. This, however, was the Dominance War universe…pushing things to the extreme was almost mandatory! After a little more pushing and pulling in Max with soft selection and lattices, I came up with the final body shape. This made his look more dynamic, though slightly cartoony. I felt his massive upper body, offset by the undersized lower body, created a nice contrast that really pushed his heavy weight status over the top. In future stages, you’ll see that I pushed the weight more towards his shoulders and trimmed down his gut even more.

(Fig.04)

Sculpting :

From here, I just exported the OBJ of my character and imported it into ZBrush.

Using the Standard and Claytube brushes, in combination with a set of alphas that I like to use, I began roughing out the muscles and major landmarks of the character. The standard brush, as I’m sure you have noticed by now, is useful for adding a large amount of volume to your model. In some cases, however, this can become destructive and in it’s place I’ll switch over to the Claytubes brush (Fig.05).

(Fig.05)

I try to treat sculpting as much like the traditional medium as possible, by which I mean that I build up the bigger shapes, step by step, and then move into the finer details. At this stage, I also began playing with ideas of how Bishop’s face would look (Fig.06).

(Fig.06)

As mentioned earlier, I had no official concept for Bishop and, for the most part, just played everything by ear. I had a decent idea of the gear that I wanted him to have, but had to build it in 3D before a decision could be made. A nice way to go about this, I found, was to sculpt a very rough version of it on my model in ZBrush, combined with building objects out of very primitive models like cubes and cylinders in Max. This helped me to block in details and know almost instantly if an idea was going to work. The workflow for modern game art has evolved to a stage where, even though concepts are very important in solid character design, they are no longer tied to being in 2D. Quick “speed sculpts” can be used as not only a concept, but even a base for your final model to start from. At this stage I also began thinking about what colours I would use for Bishop. This was done by bringing a screen shot of my ZBrush model into Photoshop and simply painting over the model. Not only does this help visualize what the final product
will be like, but it also helps break up the materials and helps your eyes separate these different sections
(Fig.07 & Fig.08).

(Fig.07)

(Fig.08)

I then began modelling out sections of the armour in Max and imported them as subtools into ZBrush. In Fig.09, you can see that I built these plates using an optimized export of my character’s base as a guideline for where the plates should go. I repeated this for all of the armour plates and, practically, all of the gear on Bishop.

(Fig.09)

Software Used:

Maya, ZBrush, 3D-Coat, and Modo

Motivation:

I have been sculpting quite a lot of heads lately to improve my sculpting skills and I sort of have the feeling I’m starting to understand the anatomy of the head, which is actually one big puzzle. Once you know what goes on under the skin, a whole new world opens. A world full of freedom. By respecting the facial structure of a human being you can start sculpting your own wonderfully weird designs. So I thought it was time for me to do something else than generic heads, copies of references or digital doubles.

Concept and Modeling:

What I absolutely love about ZBrush is the freedom an artist has. I started out from a very simple base head (Fig.01) and then began searching for a concept. I didn’t really have a specific design in mind, but I was heavily inspired by the fantastic work of Schell Sculpture Studio. After concept sculpting for about two hours I had something I was quite happy about… back then anyway (Fig.02)!

Fig.01

Fig.02

I wanted to take the sculpt a little bit further this time in order to improve my rendering skills. I have been focusing on sculpting and anatomy so much lately that I’m kinda ignoring every other aspect. Once I got this design I liked in ZBrush, I had to retopologize the mesh. I prefer doing the retopo in another package than ZBrush, so I decided to use 3D-Coat. While there are a few different programs I could have used, I’ve always liked 3D-Coat’s retopo tools. I think it’s a very efficient program and its MAC compatible.

For most character artists, retopologizing is probably a boring job, and although I’m not a technical wizard myself, I kinda enjoy building a nice clean mesh. So I exported my ZBrush head at level 4 (mid level) as an OBJ and imported it into 3D-Coat for the retopo. After four hours I ended up with this new mesh (Fig.03).

Fig.03

Texturing:

Before going back to ZBrush, I had to make UVs in order to texture my head later on. I did a simple unwrap in modo. With this new clean mesh I went back to ZBrush to project all the details of my original design onto my new mesh. You can simply do this by clicking the magical “Project All” button. All you need to do is select your original mesh, have your new mesh as a subtool of it, subdivide this subtool until you have approximately an equal amount of polygons as your original mesh. You are now ready to click the “Project All” button!

Once I had most of the details of my original design on my new mesh with UVs, I could start thinking about texturing. I really wanted to achieve a pale look, so I knew it was gonna be quite a challenge to get the skinshader right. For the colormap, I started painting from a high-res image that I’d downloaded from 3D.sk (which I really recommend if you are serious about character modeling and texturing).

Rendering:

Since I was using Maya’s SSS fast skin, there was also need for a subdermal or epidermal map to create subsurface scattering. The subdermal layer is the middle layer and simulates the red glowy effect. To create a subdermal color map you need to saturate your diffuse map and give it an extra reddish tint. The epidermal layer is the top layer of our skin, so this needs to much more desaturated (Fig.04).

Fig.04

With all my texture maps sort of finished, I started tweaking the sss skin shader to get the look I had in mind (Fig.05). After a lot of trial and error, I got something I could live with (Fig.06).

Fig.05

Fig.06

Conclusion:

I hope this overview made some sense. Forgive me for not digging deeper in every aspect, but I wanted to give more of an overview of my workflow, which works very well for me. Finding a workflow that suits you can take while, but is very important. I am now working on some full body characters with this same workflow and it’s going pretty smooth. For some more work please visit http://delavega.cgsociety.org/gallery/ or you can always contact me on jellevandeweghe@gmail.com

Cheers