I'm James Taylor, and this time we'll be looking at the good stuff: sculpting high res character detail.
Picking up and we left off, I'm using the Amplify brush. The Amplify brush exaggerates the detail that's already on the surface of our model.
I can paint over the surface of the model with Amplify brush, and this is a quick trick to bump up the contrast of my mesh,
to make it look a little bit more interesting without a lot of effort. But Amplify only gets us so far. Next, I'll grab my Fill brush,
I'll apply a stamp to it, and I'll stroke this Fill brush on areas where I have a big difference between highs and lows.
So, the area where the bones protrude from the back of the hand. By stroking the Fill brush over these areas,
using this stamp, I get the effect of having stretched skin wrinkles in these areas.
We want to vary the our brush size - so bigger brush for bigger wrinkles, and smaller brush for smaller wrinkles.
Then in areas like the side of the hand, where there isn't a significant height differential,
we can use the Repeat brush, with the same stamp, to get an effect that is very similar.
So we're creating a wrinkle an area where there isn't necessarily something that the Fill tool would work on.
And if I use the same size brush for Fill and Repeat, I can blend areas together with the two different effects.
Now, the Repeat brush can also be used to texturize muscle and bone areas,
by tracing along the surface in the direction that the anatomy flows in. We aren't creating wrinkles in these areas,
but we are adding surface detail,
and that kind of detail is what makes a model look professional. For the style of character I'm doing, the goal is to cover every inch of the surface
with detail, whether it's sculpted or painted detail (we'll talk about painting in a later video). But one important thing to note,
when we're working with high resolution surface detail, we want to be doing it on its own sculpt layer. This is so that we can go back and change
the underlying shape of our base mesh, without having to worry about redoing all that texturized detail.
Ok, up to this point, all the detail that I've done has been created symmetrically, because the hands aren't usually visible in such a way that symmetry
is immediately obvious to the viewer. Now that we've moved on to the chest, though, we absolutely need to disable symmetry.
This is definitely a place where the viewer will notice it. I used a small Fill brush to create the stretching between the pecs and the clavs,
and I'm using a larger Fill brush to create the stretching along the pectoral muscles themselves.
And I used a Foamy brush to cut in a little bit sharper detail here,
and then I can use my small Fill brush to fill that in to create a little bit more localized stretching. That kind of detail helps make a model pop.
Here I'm using the Repeat tool, and I'm sculpting in the direction that the muscle striations - we want to be familiar with anatomy, so we can
so we can exaggerate it. I mentioned sculpt layers a minute ago. Here's an example of what I've laid out on different sculpt layers
for the chest, you can see how I created the base shapes and then distributed that detail among the different layers.
Let's move on to the legs, the leg is an example of an area where a lot of muscles are pulling against each other,
so there's a lot of potential to create these stretching wrinkles that I've been using to add detail to my mesh.
I'll start with a small Fill brush to do the crevices between the muscles. And then I'll use a
larger Fill brush to continue that stretching onto the surface of the muscle itself.
I did all this is on its own sculpt layer so I can control the detail better. And I'm using my Smooth brush to blend each set of wrinkles into the main
muscle surface. In some cases I can use that larger Fill brush to drag across the surface of the muscle
to add surface detail in that area. Not really to continue wrinkles,
but just add a little bit of detail. Here I'm just selecting the faces of the arm and hiding them, so I can see the legs better.
And as I continue to work on these wrinkles,
note that there are areas where the wrinkles are deeper, and areas where wrinkles are more shallow. Again this idea of contrast pops up,
it's one of the keys to creating an interesting model. We do need to make sure that we focus on achieving the highest possible level of detail
that we can, because that's what really sets professional sculptors apart. Now onto the back to the legs:
I've added a lot of striations detail here, on all the muscle groups,
and then I'll go back and smooth it right back in to the surface. This feels counterproductive at first, but this is essentially the way that the
striations on muscle are covered by the skin. The skin has a smoothing effect,
and by literally imitating nature in this case, we get something that looks a little bit more naturalistic. Also it gives us cool looking detail.
Now let's switch gears, to using our Spray brush to create textureized surface detail, again, on its own sculpt layer. So - I'll pick a random stamp,
and apply it, but when I zoom in, I can see that it's awfully low res. Whenever we're using this kind of sculpt detail, we have to subdivide to very high
levels of resolution. So when I subdivide again and resculpt, I see that that detail is a lot sharper this time.
Now I'm at the resolution where I can begin adding detail.
I'll play around with the stamps that come with mudbox, for example this reptile stamp, but we'll see that the apply it, it overpowers the sculpt
detail that is already carved into my mesh. So I want to select something that complements my surface,
and doesn't overpower it. In this case, there's this leathery stamp, and I'll use that.
I'll apply it across the entire surface of my object. And generally I won't use symmetry when I'm doing this.
I will change the size of the brush, so some areas will have smaller stamp detail, and other areas will have larger stamp detail, for example,
the back here, I'll do it very large. And it may look like it's very low resolution, we'll get stuff that looks blurry,
but in some cases that's simply a limitation of mudbox displaying all the detail that it can; and when we zoom in it looks sharp.
From a distance, we'll see the detail that I'm adding via the spray brush isn't conflicting
with the sculpt detail I created before. This is the kind of balance we want to strike,
and using a sculpt layer will really help us here. We can always adjust the opacity of the sculpt layer
to make our spray detail either stronger or weaker.
Spray is great create a lot of detail very quickly,
but in some cases we will be able to avoid creating detail manually. For example, when I zoom in on these hands, they look very soft,
no amount of Amplify or Spray can fix that. So I'll use a sharp pinpoint brush to really carve in and define the detail in the finger area.
And I can cut in or I can pull out. One thing to note, my Spray detail is still turned on, and if I try smoothing,
it will erase that detail. I need to make sure to turn that layer off, as I mentioned earlier. So I use a pinpoint brush to create hard edges on the
outsides of shapes, to carve in recessed areas, to define them better. And overall, just try to create sharper and more refined detail.
And when it comes to refining detail, the Pinch brush is another great brush.
We can trace it along the edges of the shapes that we just created, and that will compress that detail, to sharpen things and essentially
increase the level contrast on our mesh. It will make things more interesting to look.
So I use the Pinch brush very liberally at this stage. It's just a great way to really fine tune all the shapes on my mesh,
and to make things hold up better when the camera gets closer.
But I don't use the Pinch brush solely to define sharp edges. Pinch is also great for pulling shapes together,
especially in the areas where muscles are pushing up against each other.
Pinch is great for pulling those surfaces together
and giving us a look as if there's actual tension in that region. I also like to use the Pinched tool in
conjunction with the Scrape tool. So I'm using Scrape now on this bony protrusion,
to create some planar shapes. And then I'll use the Pinch tool to trace over the edges of those planar shapes,
that will give me a very sharp, faceted look. It's good for creating, say, stone faces, or in this case,
bony protrusions. And then I'll blend that into the rest to the surface with my Fill brush, as we used throughout the rest of the tutorial.
But I see that the detail in my hand still isn't pronounced enough. I want to exaggerate it even further.
In this case I'll use my Bulge brush to trace over the veins and the blood vessels in the hand, to puff things out,
so that they stand out from the background. Again, this is the essence of contrast:
we're making different features stand out against the surface that they sit on, so that we create interest.
What can really help here - you'll see I just turned on the Cavity Ambient Occlusion - it will really help our surface detail pop and just
towards the end of the process, I give my mesh a once over. I want to use the Amplify brush to exaggerate details slightly in various areas,
I'll use my Pinch and my Foamy brushes to create a little bit of sharpness. And in this case, reviewing the mesh, I found this error sitting right
under the shoulder here. And because I've used sculpt layers so extensively, I can isolate where the error is, and
just Erase it on the layer that it's on, as opposed to having to resculpt large areas of the mesh.
So the focus here has been creating detail on our sculpt, and if you take one thing away from this video,
remember you want to try and cover every square inch of your mesh with sculpted detail. And after watching this tutorial series,
hopefully you have a good idea of how to go about creating that sculpt detail.
Thanks for watching, I'm James Taylor!