Digital sculpture

4/8/23

First lesson on digital sculpture was very in depth about the human skull and the differences between a male skull compared to a female skull. In the lesson I also used Zbrush for the first time. I had a lot of fun during the lesson when creating my own villain in the short time that I had. The software we were told was used to create Gollum from The Hobbit and The lord of the rings.

Below is an image of a male and female skull. On the left is the skull of a female and on the right is the skull of a male. The images have been drawn over on Adobe Photoshop to distinguish the differences between one another. On the right the Jaw is bigger and quite sharp round the edges whereas the female skull is more curved and smaller. The mandible is the angle located on the outer jaw, you can almost see a right angle here for the men’s skull. Another difference is forehead of the skull. The man’s stretches back further and the women’s goes up more in to the cranium. Lastly just above the nose is are bony ridges located above the eye sockets. The more exaggerated they are and bigger they are means they most likely belong to that of a male skull. These are called superciliary arches.

 

Learning the different shapes and bone structures of a human face is something I found very interesting, something necessary for the subject of digital sculpture. When modeling especially you have to think about the physics in how something moves, how the body will react physically on screen. I didn’t comprehend the level of detail the visual effects industry goes in to character creation. An example of this level of planning is in Lord of the rings with Gollum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_Z7YUyCEGE

Making of Gollum above (check out)

The link above is a video that I think is really cool and talks about the detail that goes in to character creation. The team who made Gollum on screen go in to detail about his skin, the light and how he moves his body/face. This video is my own research that I thought was pretty cool so I’ve included the link here for reference in the future. Definitely worth a watch

Using Zbrush was something an interesting experience. The only experience I have in the visual effects software’s is auto desk Maya. So when I moved over to Zbrush I found it to be interesting and more relaxing. I’m no expert on using Maya but I can say that it is very technical so before learning Zbrush I didn’t know what to expect.

The class were taught the basics of making a villain model head while leaning the new software. I started off with making the shape of the skull, I tried doing this by entering a sphere and stretching the sphere downwards with the move tool. I also changed the move tool size so it would interact with more of the face, ‘S’ is the shortcut for the size of the brush. You can probably tell that the face was made from a sphere due to the leftovers at the back of my characters head.

I then pulled out bits of the head to create these horn looking things and soon a nose as well as lots of smaller horns round the back. I enjoyed playing around with the program a lot more compared to Maya due to the creativeness, I find Auto desk Maya to be more geometrical with the shapes, edges and beveling. By holding ‘B’ you can see the different brushes on the software. There’s a huge amount of options available to use.

 

These are just some of the many tools available. You’ll get this pop up when using the short cut for brushes on Zbrush.

11/10/23 week 2:

Week 2 involved studying the nose. Similar to the skull lesson this week we focused on the structure of the nose. As you can see below we had to note the different sections of the nose on photoshop for referencing for the second half of the lesson.

Second half of the lesson involved us using Zbrush again just like last week. We created a sphere for the morphing of the nose and began using the move tool and standard tool tool pull from the sphere creating the nose. I’m very proud of the outcome for the nose since I didn’t use anything to reference the nose. I will use referencing for future because it will give me an idea on different nose shapes. I found the lesson to be very enjoyable. You can see my work below of the nose I created including a 3D interactive model.

For some of the details I held ‘Alt’ while using the standard brush. This would dig on to the model, allowing me to add in details like the nose’s little dent in the centre as well as create the nostrils.

Alphas – Another thing to mention is alphas. Alphas are extra brushes that can help create details on to sculptures. They layer over the builds texturing the projects. Just like the brushes they can be selected and interacted with when holding the mouse left click. They work the same way. For the nose I used an aloha to create spots for my model, you may notice this further down on my model.

Nose 1

Sketch fab

Nose 2

Nose 3

I tried to create a varied look of noses just so I could understand the differences when making each of them. I made each of the noses in different ways to get an idea of how each designed looked when changing the alar fat and alar cartilage. For the third nose I went too big on increasing the size of the alar cartilage. It makes the nose look a bit cartoonish in my opinion. A lot of cartoon characters such as Super Mario have very round noses. To me it looks cartoonish. We used some new tools like the Dan standard and trim dynamic for these builds. Trimrect was a new tool we used to cut out the model we made. Makes the mode clearer to see, less of a problem going

Week 3

Week 3 we focused on the mouth. I think this is the hardest part of a face to make. The mouth has so many different variants. There’s so much that can be different from each mouth, even the slightest changes in the pillars of the mouth and vermillion border can completely change a mouth. I found modelling mouths to be hard because the changes had to be subtle. I kept messing up the lips, Every time I tried making them the shape was off and I was pulling them out too much.

Above is a photoshop exercise of the anatomy of the mouth. As you can see there are lots of part that make up a mouth. The older people get the different mouth form, most notably the nasolabial furrow and node’s. Also the lips shrink a bit. There’s a lot too think about when making characters lip and how it reflects there weight or age.

Mouth 1 (first attempt)

Week 6

For the eye ball we created the model in Maya instead of Zbrush which we have been using for all of our previous work. Working in Maya involved us using images to go over our models. The following images that were used are below:

Building our eye models started off with a sphere from the poly modelling tab in auto desk Maya. Upon placing the model in to the scene we then went in to faces and chopped half of the sphere off.

Week 7   Villain

For my Villain project I’m looking in to creating something that still resembles a human design with ears, eyes, nose and mouth. In this assignment I want to create a character that is often referred to as a Satyr. Mythical creature with horns. I think this could easily be used to resemble a villain like a demon or the devil. An evil character.

Another physical feature I’m looking in to that villains often have is scars. Wounds that are visible on the character face showing that they’ve potentially been through some rough encounters. That they’ve felt pain.

A somewhat funny yet true website that I found goes through the popular. The writer goes through the popular physical appearances of a villain. I think this is very true and helpful to my project. I need to capture the look of my villain in one image, since the assignment requires me to send one image of my model. The look needs to be fierce or terrifying for someone to see.

5 Physical Traits That Determine if a Character Is Evil | Cracked.com | Cracked.com

Another feature that the writer talks about is slick back hair. Once again a feature that I find to be very true for villains. I don’t think I’ll be giving my villain this hair, to be honest I’m not too focused on the hair at the moment. But scars, potentially tattoos and horns are features that might be kept for my character.

For this project we aren’t allowed to copy an existing character. However this doesn’t count for a real life person. My idea for this project is to create a typical villain, like a devil character. But base the facial features off of a real life celebrity. I think it would be funny and interesting to make someone like Simon Cowell the Devil or demon. Someone with horns. I’m not sure if we will be coloring our models, I don’t think the color is a massive factor in my character, as long as they’re menacingly and fit under the tropes of a villain.

Week 8

Week 8 we used the ai standard tool and shaders from Zbrush to pain ton skin. Even using some Alphas to get that skin look. As you can see above I didn’t use enough Alphas. The dots are very visible in the pictures below. We used some different colors on the face to capture the kin look. Such as red being used on the eyes and ears.

For the Mouth above we had a sculpt of a real life image, so it was almost exact.

By importing an image you can select the add to spotlight icon and it will give you a wheel that you can used to paint on you model.

Week 9 – Villain model and inspiration

For my villain I’ve chosen to base the face off of Grand Morph Takin. I think the physical shape of his muscles and head is villainous. The Skinny and defined cheek bones to the droopy eye muscles. The actors face is perfect for a villain, no offense.

I’ve been working on the nose and cheeks at the moment in Zbrush. The nose has been taking a while but I think I have it. The nose goes down consistently, there’s no tip that goes up or anything like that. The Alar fat on the nose is thin, doesn’t go out as much.

I want my villain to be a mastermind. Someone who is cunning and uses tactics to take down the heroes. Takin from Star wars is a villain that represents this role quite well especially in his physical features.

Vulture

Lex Luthor

Other than the fact these characters are all bald they all share similar feature and facial expressions. There also all thinkers that aren’t necessarily special in strength or have any superpowers. There all old and have fat that is noticeable as well as defined cheeks/creases.

 

Week 10

One issue I had early on was that my poly count was too high. I spent the start of my project building the face rather than getting the basic shape of my villains head and neck. Because of this it took sessions of smoothing out the blocky parts. The smooth tall was less effective, resulting in my just use the smooth tool for a long time to get a natural look.

I started to build the neck up on my Villain using the danstandard tool as well as the standard and move tool. This was to build up the muscles on the neck and also to push back some of the skin in the neck. I made the shoulders go in a bit more because I don’t want my villain to look too big, I think my villain is slim and smart. Just like two of the references my villain is based off of, vulture and Grand morph Tarkin.

I decided to try and give my villain a shirt to add more of a look to the camera. I thought it needed this since I didn’t decide to add anything out of the ordinary like horns which was one of my first thoughts when making a character. I tried adding some on this villain but I thought it didn’t suit what I was going for.

When making a shirt to go over for my villain I also made some of the neck white when I was texturing on Zbrush to give this t-shirt look to go under the other shirt that was going to go over. I thought this would fit the villain mastermind look that I wanted.

For some of the wrinkles on the side of his head I used the clay tubes and clay build up. Smoothing some of it out and defining more of the bones in his face. This look came out quite well in my opinion. I wanted to create that look of someone with old and defined features. I also added some eyes in Maya. Using the ones we were taught to make.