Sculpting the body
Dev Diary #31
After importing my low poly sculpt into ZBrush, I began the sculpting process by sculpting detail into the torso, chest, shoulders and legs. When it comes to sculpting, I find myself sticking to the same 4 brushes; the Move Tool, Clay Buildup, Dam Standard and Flatten. As well as this, I make good use of the mask tool to section off specific areas and apply finer details without affecting the mesh around it.
Since this sculpt is for the body mesh that I will be using as a base for my modular character, I made sure to keep it perfectly symetrical using the mirror feature. Another aspect I felt important was making the character as realistic as I could. To do this, I would frequently look at reference material and watch videos on sculpting realistic human anatomy.
After feeling satisified with how the chest and torso were looking, I moved on to the first difficult part of the sculpt - the hands. After subdividing the entire base mesh at the start of my sculpting process, it unfortunately removed some of the shape and detail of the hands and turned the fingers into blob-like shapes. Without the base shape of the fingers present, I struggled to sculpt the bends and break the hand down into it's core shapes.
To fix this, I imported just the hand of my low-poly model into the scene and used that to understand the core shapes by adding and sculpting simple cubes and spheres on top of it. After that, I could delete the subdivided sculpt hand AND the low poly hand and replace it with my series of cubes and spheres and adjust them until they are positioned in the shape of a realistic hand.
Whilst the sculpt looks a tad strange with different objects (and different number of subdivisions) acting as fingers, this is okay for this stage, as when I retopologize it, it'll look smoother and connected as it'll only be creating a loose mesh on top of the sculpt and not capturing every fine detail.
While the hand is now much better than it's original subdivided shape, I still need to adjust it further (particularly the placement of the thumb) and move on to the feet and face.
Stay tuned! :3
