Evaluation of Sculpting.

Sculpting

This pipeline is something i have done before in a second year project, so i have had experience using zbrush before, but the project opened my eyes to many new techniques learnt from digital tutors and youtube tutorials, such as facial sculpting, building features from bone structure, and creating skin textures. 

I started the head with a ball and built up the bone structure of a skull. Then i layered the large muscle groups on the face over it, and finally added skin. i feel like this gave the face a realistic look and expression, and is definitely something that i will take forward into other projects. The face is also slightly asymmetrical, this is to make the face more realistic, but is not asymmetrical enough to complicate the remeshing process. 

After the head was done i modelled the body and projected the head onto the neck, making it into one solid mesh. The armour plates were something i learnt from a zbrush tutorial in sculpting beasts, and consisted of me masking an area of the mesh, extruding it out and using the hard polish and plane brushes to shape it. The straps and belt were done in a similar way.

The skin was textured using the demacian standard tool, various alpha maps, and patience. The pores around the head and face were made bigger to imply a rough shaven face, and the tattoo was added on the back using an alpha stamp. At this point i was trying to include as much detail as possible to reduce the amount of work i would have to do in photoshop later.

The skin colour was built up using multiple layers and alphas, starting by coating the whole body in a deep red then adding brighter skin tones on top , giving the illusion of depth.

Over all i feel the sculpting part of this module was executed very well. I produced a good quality model of exaggerated human anatomy with convincing skin texturing and good poly painting. If i were to do this again i would change the way i made the armour plates, perhaps making them in maya to reinforce the hard edges. It didnt matter too much in this model as the armour wasnt meant to be perfect, but if it had been an example of hard surface sculpting this method would have been messy and unprofessional.