I'm James Taylor and this is the bodybuilder sculpting video. We'll take a
look at making this guy
in Mudbox. So, I'm picking up where I left off in the texturing video
I've got my guy here and I've subdivided him to level 5
I'm turning on symmetry and using my BULGE brush
I'm using a relatively large brush size and a weak brush strength to just
block-in my basic forms
I start with the rib cage, it defines a lot of the torso
and then I'll lay in the abdomen, and I'm just sketching in these shapes. There's the
obliques
they sit it under the rib cage, and curve around to meet the abdomen
Now I turn around to the back, and I'll start with the trapezius at the top, and they are basically a big
t-shape. I'll exaggerate some of the other shapes in the back
now when I modeled this guy in Maya, the silhouette closely matched the image
reference. That means that all his musculature is already built
into his silhouette. That's why I'm using a relatively weak
brush, I don't want to change the silhouette too much, I just wanna add definition
now my next step is to turn off symmetry
and start to build in shapes that are specific to this person's body
and this is when my texture reference comes in handy, because I can see the forms of
the body specifically laid out
over the geometry. So I'm still using my bulge brush, and I buildup on top of the areas that
that I've already started sculpting on
here I'm working on the rib cage and as I add that detail you'll see the
next thing that I do is I go back in and smooth it all out
so we want to get a nice even blend, where the sculpted strokes blend back
into the surrounding surface
we don't want to see any discrete sculpted strokes
here I'm working on the abdominals, just building them up
remember that the abdominals are NOT symmetrical, make sure you do these
asymmetrically. I'm adding in some of the obliques
around the abdominals. The abdominals are framed by
the rib cage above, and the obliques to the side
we can see how they all flow together, creating this nice kinda diagonal
gesture
in the side the body area. But during the block out phase we're not
just pushing out, we're also cutting in. I'm turning on symmetry and I'm using
my FOAMY brush
and I'm cutting in around the bottom edges of the pectorals
to better define the shape of the muscles there. And the foamy brush
I have it set so that it has a very sharp fall-off, and its set to be a
negative value
so it carves in around the body shapes
and I can better define musculature. Up to this point, our textures helped
us with anatomy
but we need something a little bit more defined. In these photographs the
bodybuilder is lit from the sides instead of from the front
we can see that this makes the anatomy really pop
not so great for textures, but we'll see that it is very effective for sculpting
reference
so for example, the definition between the pectoral and the deltoids is much
sharper in these photos
and I can use my foamy brush to carve in and to create that same sharp
detail
on my sculpt. However we can't rely entirely on our textures
when I turn it off, we can see that a lot of blending needs to happen to our mesh
so I'm gonna go through and smooth a lot of the
sharp edges of these brush strokes back into the mesh
the goal here is to have a nice smooth blend
where every shape fits into the whole, we can only do this when the texture is
turned off
so I want to start carving in more of this same kind of sharp detail
I will step up to my level 6 subdivision, and create a new sculpt layer
and I leave my textures semi opaque so I can see the sculpt detail
I use my foamy brush to go in and start to carve in the really fine sharp
details that I see
on that texture. We definitely want to be using
a graphics tablet here because we need to be able to control the pressure
we want each stroke to start off shallow, then cut to deep,
and then end shallow as well. Now I'm carving around a lot of the different
muscle groups that we see here
and these sharp defined lines I'm cutting in
are going to be extremely important for creating that
high-resolution detail that we're looking for. I've turned on another
texture projection that highlights the serratus muscles, that's what I'm carving
in right now
basically I wanna go in and highlight as much of the detail I can,
really exaggerate it right now. I'm not cutting in too deeply
but I am making sure to be very thorough, to go in and cover pretty much
every area of the abdomen I've worked on so far
here I'll just cut in to create a little bit of the belly button,
also build up around the outside edges and smooth
all that back in. Then I turn my attention to the back here
The back is challenging for an artist because it tends not to have the same
level of
of definition as the front to the body. And we end up with a mismatch where the
front of our sculpture looks extremely detailed
and the back tends to look plain by comparison
okay, after cutting in these lines and I've got the detail, I turn my texture off again, so I
can see the results of my sculpting
and I'll see that it looks like I've just drawn lines on top of the
surface - which is exactly what we've done - but we have to get it to blend in a little
bit better
so I turn on my ERASE brush, and I set it to
a low strength and since I sculpted this detail
on its own sculpt layer, I can't use the erase brush to
fade the detail into the main surface
you can see I'm painting mostly on the endpoints of the lines
so the result is that the lines gradually kinda build back up into the
surface,
we get this nice fade out effect that definitely helps things blend
together better
Once I'm happy with the erasing, then I turn to the SMOOTH
tool. And with the SMOOTHbrush we can actually create a new layer, a new
sculpt layer
and smooth on that sculpt layer, so that we can always step backwards in case we
make mistakes or we over smooth.
So remember, we want to avoid the appearance of any
individual sculpted strokes. And this is usually most
evident at the endpoints, the beginning and end of each stroke. That's where I usually
focus my smoothing
so that the end points blend in. You'll see that I'm also smoothing along the
edges of strokes, and this is to make sure that I get a nice gradual blend
so I don't get a very linear cut that looks like I've simply drawn on to the
surface
rather the entire stroke just blends into the surrounding muscle
we get something that looks very natural. This can feel like we're
undoing our own work, but this is really the way the actual body works: we have
these muscle shapes that are under the skin
and the skin stretches over them and it blurs out the shapes
and by using our Smooth brush in this way we are replicating that
so this has all been happening at level 6. I'm going to step all the way down to
subdivision level 4
and create a new sculpt layer. I'll turn on my WAX brush with the relatively low
strength
and I use all the sharp Foamy detail that I created previously as a guideline to
placing these Wax strokes. So the idea here is that I'm creating striations
striations, which are
generally organic shapes, and I'm using the detail I carved in previously as a
guide for the direction that
those shapes are traveling in, and also the size of those shapes, as well
most people like to create a really symbolic version of a human being
where all the muscle groups are perfectly defined and they're all
exactly symmetrically laid out, exactly as a text book will have them
the thing is, real human bodies don't work like that, they're never so well
defined
and by creating this kind of shape using the Wax brush
I'm basically adding in that organic detail, that lumpiness
that makes it feel more like an individual
organic creature, as opposed to just some idealized,
symbolized comic book character. With this technique, I'll create a lot of
detail in the back
I'll place these strokes in such a way, that they follow the direction
that the muscle fibers pull in
I'll also use a relatively small brush so I can get multiple strokes
into a small area. And once I'm done
adding that striation detail, I'll start Smoothing everything back into the
surface
when I'm doing this smoothing, I'll use a small brush: I don't want to blend the
entire shape together
I want to smooth everything together without losing
the nice organic detail I just spent all that time creating
I also use my Foamy brush at this point, to start to
emphasize the edges of the shapes we've just created
and when I'm doing this I use a bigger brush radius, that will give me
less of a sharp pinpoint line, and give me more
of a smooth curvature. I'll continue with the Foamy brush
after I've stepped up to level 6 (my highest level of subdivision detail)
and I'll use it to add asymmetrical detail to the back
where I'm better defining the back shapes
carving around the edges, and I'm focused on the spine area here
and when I'm adding this detail in, I'm doing it pretty randomly
I'm carving in organic looking shapes, so I get some nice weird curvature
and then I blend it all back in using the Smooth
brush - and while I'm doing this, I will look at it from very oblique angles
you'll see I'm looking at it from below and from above - I'm checking the
displacement of the surface
I'm making sure that nothing bulges out too far
and if it does, I use my Smooth brush to bring it back in line with the rest of the surface
let's switch over to the neck - I'm blocking in the volume for the sternocleidomastoid
muscles around
neck area, I'm using my Wax at a low
subdivision level, to just add the overall mass
for that muscle, and then use my Foamy to go around the edges of that
carve it in a little bit, so I get a bit sharper refinement around the edges
afterwards I blend it in with my Smooth brush as usual.
then I'll use the Wax to build up the clavicle
the clavicle sits just above the pectoral,
it connects from the front bottom part of the neck
all the way out to the shoulders - the overall shape is curved a little like a horseshoe
and there's a negative volume that sits right behind the clavicle, right at
the base of the neck
I'll hollow that out using it the Bulge or the Wax brush
getting a nice, smooth curvature for the clavicle is pretty important
and it can be difficult to wrestle with that. so in this case I have
turned Steady Stroke for my
Foamy brush, and then I can drag that in a smooth curve
along the edge until I get the shape I'm happy with
now it's pretty much the same process over on the arm. I Bulged it out, now I'm using the Wax
brush to start to build up striation detail
and then I go back and I smooth it all into the surface. Again, it kinda feels
redundant, but
I find this is the way they get the best results. In the case of the elbow here,
you'll see I
use a lot of Wax strokes - that's because I want that area to be slightly rougher
and I'll continue with the wax strips to build up that region but also the rest
of the forearms. I use it to create the bone shapes and
add volume under the forearm that mass of muscle down there
but I'm using the Foamy tool extensively as well
with relatively large brush size to help define the curvature around these
muscular shapes
anytime we have these muscular shapes that are bulging out against the
skin
that generally means we're gonna get a nice rounded profile
so the Foamy tool helps us achieve this. The same approach works nicely on the
leg - I'll use Wax
to block out the overall shape for the musculature
then immediately smooth it back into surface
and get a nice curvature. But unlike the Bulge tool I used in the
beginning, the Wax tool can be used to create harder shapes like the knee and
the shin area. A little extra volume will help down in the calves,
but a lot of the work here is going to be done with the foamy brush
so we can cut in sharp edges to define the muscles
and then after we use the Foamy to create the base detail
we smooth that back into blend it into the surface
in this case I'm doing it in multiple passes so
I'll lay in the basic shape with the Foamy first, and then once I get it defined,
I use my Bulge or my Wax to build up the
edges and the muscles around the Foamy, and smooth it all back together to create a
nice shape
we can do the same thing in the back as well
where I use the Foamy tool to block in my shapes, and then go in with the Wax brush
to fill in the volume around it. So the Foamy creates the sharp edges,
but I'm always using other brushes around the foamy
to get a nice bulge, to make it actually feel like muscle
here I;m cutting in high-level detail for the knees, this is the same process I
used to
carve in the detail around the abdomen
as I carve in these details in you see that I split
a lot of lines that could be a single line into multiple lines
this gives us a much more organic feel
as opposed to using a single line traced around the muscle shape
so this short negative brush is a great way to create detail but if we go too
far, things look fake
we can see here, that the lines in the chest and shoulder are defined
way too sharply. We have to go in and Smooth those back out
we can also use the Fill brush to just paint along
edges where we need to smooth things out, and it will basically look like
skin is being stretched between the two areas, which will soften out that too-sharp look
I also ran into the same problem on the abdomen - this is another area where we
need to pay
a lot of attention. The pectorials are also a good zone where we'll have that sharp detail
that might look a little bit too sharp, that we have to go in and clean up
now when I was polishing the sculpting in the abdomen area
I realized that the back, especially around the obliques,
is a little bit too thin, and I have to go in
and fix that up by adding more mass in that area
this is where sculpting layers really come in handy
I can step down to a much lower Subdivision level
I can create a new layer there, and I can add volume into that region
and it's not going to disturb any of the high res
sculpting done on the higher levels, so I can
change the shape of the body, and at the same time a preserve other sculpted
detail that I've created
okay, here's a neat trick to use painted layers to affect our sculpting
i get a texture layer that is just the briefs
I'll select that, right click it, and choose 'Freeze From Selected'
you will see that it freezes that part of the mesh
I can invert that freeze by going to Edit> Invert Freeze, and it'll freeze everything but
the briefs area. Now I can sculpt this out using a very large
Bulge brush set to a very low intensity
and the result is, we get just part the of mesh popped out
the borders will be relatively sharply defined,
because they were defined by a texture, and then all we'll need to do is go clean it up a
little bit with
our Smooth brush, and then do a pass with the Pinch brush
And the Pinch brush will just draw both the textured and sculpted detail together
and the result will be a very nice sharp border between the briefs
and the body. Afterwards I used my Wax brush
lay in the stitching detail for the cloth
and then using new sculpt layers, I use my Bulge brush
to add the wrinkle detail, based on the wrinkles we see in
the texture.I'm also improvising a few wrinkles
anywhere where there's going to be stress on the fabric, is a good area
in general to add
wrinkle detail. And that wraps it up for this video
still to do, we have to sculpt the head, one of the most difficult sculpting
challenges a character artist faces
and we've got to start adding skin detail
and other tiny high-resolution details that will make our sculpt look
really good. I'm James Taylor, thanks for watching!