I'm James Taylor, and I'm going to show you how to make this guy start to finish, beginning with the sculpt.
This tutorial focuses on the idea of Progressive Detailing, so we will start big, by defining the basic shape of our character.
I'll begin by using the Grab Brush to reshape the Mudbox base mesh.
I want use as big a brush as possible with the grab brush, that will get the best results, so I can very quickly reshape the mesh.
Next I'll use the Bulge Brush. The Bulge brush adds a lot of volume very quickly, and is
really great for blockouts like this, where we're still defining the shape of our character.
Once I have a shape I'm happy with, I'll turn on my Wax Brush and I'll use it to create muscle shapes very quickly.
Now this is very similar to the technique in my 'Creating Muscles' tutorial, you can check out that vid for more.
What's important to note here, is the general workflow: I want to block out the overall shape of my character
before I start adding any sort of detail. I want to get the overall layout done, before I start focusing my attention in any one area.
Since I am focused on creating the whole, at this point my camera is still far away from the character.
This let's me see the entire character at one time, and keeps me looking at that overall shape. Here I've turned all the Foamy Brush, and
and I use the Foamy brush in a very specific way: I always have it set to a negative value and it has a sharp falloff turned on.
This means that I can use the Foamy brush to cut in very sharp details, and this is in contrast to the Wax brush which I used to build up the surface,
my Foamy brush I use to cut INto the surface, to take away volume. And speaking of volume, you see I'm using my Bulge tool again to add
some volume into the legs here. And I can also use the Bulge to build up the area around the horns and then
use the Grab tool to push that into shape. In this way, I can quickly add geometry that didn't exist on my mesh.
So we iteratively continue to build detail: we first block out shapes, and then cut in finer detail using a sharp negative brush,
or using our Pinch brush. And generally after almost every stroke, we want to use our Smooth brush,
to blend things together. Here you'll see I'm using the Fill tool to create a stretched skin effect,
I'll go into more detail on this later. But the stretched skin is part of exaggerating this guy's physique.
We want him to look really monstrous, and that means we will be exaggerating his anatomy.
However, we have to understand basic anatomy before we can start exaggerating it. So we can really go over the top with muscles on a
character like this, but we do need to have something that is somewhat human, so that your viewer can relate to it and understand
what they're seeing. One thing to note, now that I'm adding more detail, my camera is closer to my character.
Up to this point, we been working symmetrically. Now I'll turn symmetry off and
use my Grab brush to move things around and to breaks symmetry.
Organic creatures are not symmetrical, and the viewer is going to notice this most along the line of symmetry: so, the front of the character,
the face, the chest and abdomen, those are areas and we want to focus asymmetry in. Ok, back to the idea of progressively adding detail.
I sculpt on a sculpt level until the entire character is covered with a similar level of detail. Only then will I subdivide and step up to a higher
level of subdivision detail. And when I do step to the higher level of detail, then I can start carving in sharper and sharper details.
In this case I'm using the sharp negative Foamy brush and my Pinch tool to create much sharper shapes on my mesh. Our goal is to create
a mesh that has a nice sharp detail, and to do that we need contrast. So I'll find areas that have soft feeling details,
and I'll carve in around the edges of those, using
a negative Foamy to carve in, or my Pinch brush to sharpen, or a positive Foamy to add to the area
to create a positive ridge. Again, we're creating contrast to counteract the natural softness of our sculpted mesh.
So this stretched skin effect: not only makes my guy look more monstrous,
but it adds a lot of contrast, it's got a lot of nice sharp details around the edges. To do this I'm using my Fill brush,
and our Fill brush is basically used in valleys: areas between two raised points. And the Fill brush will kind of,
fill in that valley to meet that high point of those two raised points. Difficult to describe, once you start using it, it's very easy.
However, I can't just simply fill in those areas. I also want to use it in conjunction with my Foamy brush,
to cut in negative areas in the middle, to get an even more stretched, a more taut skin look.
By combining these two tools with the overall muscle shapes, I'm adding contrast because I get these nice sharp fine details
and those contrast with these big broad muscle shapes. We also have the plus side that it makes our guy looked like he's insanely ripped.
Now you'll see if you compare the sculpting I'm doing at this part of the video to the sculpting I'm doing in the beginning of the video,
you'll see I'm using smaller brush sizes, and I'm sculpting in smaller and smaller areas.
Since I'm progressively adding detail, as that detail gets up to higher and higher levels of resolution
I have to make much more fine resolution changes. So I'm sculpting over smaller areas, to add more and more detail into
those smaller areas, and that's what will create that really fine level of detail that makes our model pop.
And since this is a pretty stylized character that I'm working on,
I can add a lot of detail that we wouldn't be able to add on a more realistic character, so we can do a
lot more fun stuff, when we're sculpting at these high levels of resolution.
Now, onto the head. And head is basically the same process that we used before. I start off using big, broad brushes:
My Grab brush, my Wax brush, to very quickly blockin detail on the surface. And this is what progressive detailing is about:
we start broad and then dial it in. We will see that I'm using my Grab brush to make overall changes to the shape of a head,
that's a lot easier to do at lower levels of resolution than it is at high levels of resolution. That's why we want to handle it in the beginning,
so we don't have to worry about it later. Now I'm at the high level of detail for the head, and I'm adding detail the same way as the body.
I'm using sharp brushes to carve in detail, I'm using my Pinch brush to focus detail,
and because the face and the head of the character are such a focal point for viewers' attention,
we probably need to spend a lot more time
adding detail to the surfaces here than we do to any other part of the body. So we see that my camera is in much closer, I'm adding much smaller
lines, and I'm covering a lot more of the surface with the small details.
Depending on the art style that are working in, plan on spending as much time working on the head as on the rest of the body put together.
That's how important it is! Now, progressive detail should reduce the number of mistakes that we make, but it won't eliminate them.
So the next videos is going to talk about a tool that makes revisions a lot easier, the Transfer Details tool in Mudbox.
I'm James Taylor and thanks for watching. Drop me a comment and let me know what you thought of the video.