In this video, I am going to go over the process I used to create the muscles on this guy.
Let's get started in Mudbox. I've got a low res
base mesh. And I'm going to get some texture reference of a muscular guy
and I want to project it on to my model as a stencil.
The first thing that I do is go to the Edit menu,
then choose Edit Stencil option. And Iwill change the stencil around so that it matches my
model more carefully. To edit this stencil, I can use both
painting tools and sculpting tools.
So I'm going to use the grab brush to
just push the image reference around so that it matches my model more
closely. Then I'll project using the Projection Paintbrush,
and now I'm ready start sculpting. So I've created a sculpt layer
and I'm going to try using in the Sculpt brush first.
But creating muscle shapes with the sculpt brush can be difficult. I like to use the wax brush instead.
With the wax brush, I'll lay in
big areas of muscle mass, and
in general, I'll try and mimic the shape the actual
muscle fibers and the direction that the muscles flow in,
with individual strokes from the wax brush.
I'll continue this all across the front of
the character, so that I've created as much muscle detail as I can,
that's visible from my front view
projection. Once I get that blocked in,
I want to turn the texture off,
so that I can view the sculpt detail without the texture. And I'll see that I
have this
obviously very blocky shape, so I want to take the Smooth brush
brush and just smooth those muscle shapes together.
Creating this way mimics the way the actual body works,
where we have these big muscle shapes, that are covered underneath skin.
The skin is almost like a fabric, that stretches over these big shapes,
that kind of mutes the individual silhouette of each object.
It makes them all blend together. We end up with this,
now we're gonna turn our attention back. I've already projected the texture,
and I'm just going to use the wax brush again,
to block out the shape, and smooth it out as I did with the front.
Next, I'm going to reduce the opacity of my textures to
50%, and this means I can see more of my sculpt detail,
and less of my texture detail. It's time to up-res our mesh, to subdivide again,
and we wanted to test our brushes to make sure that we can get that level
detail we need. We're looking for brushes that don't have a lot of aliasing
around them, when we use them on the mesh. The next step
is carving detail into the surface, using a brush that has a very sharp
fall off and a negative value. I'll just
push in around the larger shapes, to better define the
edges of those shapes. So I'm using this sharp,
negative brush, to carve around muscle
edges and bone edges, to really emphasize
that sharper level detail. I can also add
more detail using the wax brush at this level. In both cases,
whether I'm adding mass using wax or carving in using that sharp negative brush,
I'm always smoothing right after I paint that detail in,
to better blend everything together, to make it look like
a more organic form. You'll note that I'm sculpting
asymmetrically. This is because most bodies are asymmetrical.
But especially the front of the torso, this is very important
because that's generally where the viewer is going notice it
most. In the case of the pectorals and the abdominals on a character like this,
we really want to make sure that we're creating a symmetrical shapes,
and we really want to pay attention to a reference, as opposed to trying to create
shapes the way we think they should be, instead of the way they actually are.
I'll add the belly button while I'm here
using a sharp positive brush, to just stretch it between the existing abdominals.
It doesn't pop out or sit on top of the
abdominal region. As always, to check my sculpting,
I'm turning the texture off so I can see actual surface detail that I've created.
Then I repeat the smoothing process on the back.
One thing I notice as I was sculpting, is that the muscles on the back
really didn't have enough volume. Things weren't popping out enough.
I tried to use the wax brush and the sculpt brush to
push things out. But for existing detail that's already
well-defined, the Bulge Tool will inflate the existing detail.
It's really great for popping muscles out.
Now I'm still working with the back, making sure that all my shapes
are very smoothly blended together, so I have a cohesive,
organic feeling body. And then I can
step up to a higher subdivision level, and start to add finer detail, the way that I did
on the front of the torso, where I am pushing smaller details out.
I'm also using that sharp negative brush
to carve detail in around shapes.
Now, the bigger the area that I'm carving into,
the bigger I want my sharp brush to be.
Because I want to create some roundness along the
edges of the area I'm carving into,
so in areas where we have big muscles, areas like the center of the
spine, we're using a much bigger brush that we might expect,
because we want to have nice, rounded shapes, so they look like muscles,
as opposed to creating really thin lines
between our shapes, which looks like a comic book drawing.
Takes on fake, artificial look.
After I've carved in all that detail,I'll smooth a lot of it out.
This may seem counterproductive, but again this is the way that the body
works. We have these very defined muscle
and bone shapes, and the skin is laid over them,
the skin stretches on top, and it creates a much smoother surface.
Once I'm done there, I'm going to subdivide again because I want to add even
finer resolution detail. At this point, now I can represent
very detailed things like striations in the muscle,
and more unique organic forms.
I stressed earlier that we don't want to have a symmetrical shape,
so now is the time we start carving in
asymmetrical detail around our muscle shapes,
using that sharp negative brush.
I also mentioned a few times how the skin stretches over top of
objects, and we've used the smooth brush to accomplish that
until now. We can also used Fill Brush.
When we have a pretty big gap between areas, we could use
that Fill Brush to stretch between those areas, that will actually create a very stretched look,
that we can blend into the surface. We do that when we're looking for
a guy who looks really ripped, whose muscles are
basically too big for the skin that they're covered with,
it creates that really hyper muscular look.
At this level detail, I also use my sculpt and my wax brushes
to add tiny bulges along the surface.
This helps things look more organic, more like a natural shape.
It reflects the fact that each individual's body is going to have
differences between the way their muscles are
formed, and the way that they're used.
I can stretch between those details using Fill brush,
to enhance that stretched look again.
We haven't looked at the front in a while, so I'll turn my attention back here.
I'll start to carve in those same sorts of high-level details,
where I'm using my sharp negative brush,
to add some difference in definition between muscle groups.
For example, between the pectorals and the deltoids here.
At the same time, I'll smooth other bits detail,
for example, the area where the abdominals connect to rib cage.
We're usually not going to see tremendously sharp line there unless we get someone that's
flexing very hard. I'll smooth that out so I get a better blend.
Depending on the kind of character that we're trying to create, we might want to
have exactly that kind of
super sharp hyper-muscular detail. At this point, I just noticed that the clavicle is
sticking out a little bit too much.
I'll use my Grab brush to push that back in.
Now we're ready for our next step, we subdivide again,
test to make sure that the resolution is where we need,
and I will use my Pinch Brush now.
I'll drag the Pinch Brush around all the
edges, that usually, we've been using our sharp,
negative brush to define. And this Pinch brush will pull
all that detail together, to create a much higher frequency detail.
The end result is going to be sharper, or more crisp,
detail. This is a really important aspect
of the sculpting process, because, by default,
our sculpt tools give us very naturally soft shapes.
This is where the pinch brush comes into play - it pulls those shapes together,
it creates sharper creases between objects.
And this is definitely a big step. It separates
professional and amateur models. It's easy to create a soft body model.
Knowing how to sharpen it, how to pull those shapes together,
is what pushes the model to the next level.
Once again, seemingly counterproductively,
I'm again softening my detail using the smooth tool,
and I am smoothing around the pinches that I created,
too blend the pinches into the surrounding areas.
What I'm not ssmoothing is the sharp line at the
center of each pinch. This way, we get a nice
smoth organic model, but at the same time
we still retain a lot sharp detail. This is as far as I'm going to take it with
this tutorial.
We've laid in our basic shapes, we've carved in some sharper detail,
blended everything together nicely with smooths,
we've used pinch to sharpen things up. And this process is a quick one.
It took less than an hour to create this muscle detail, because it's a quick intuitive
way to work.
Thanks for watching, hope that you found this helpful, you can check out more at
METHODJ.com.