My First ZBrush Sculpt | Reference by Gray Shuko

My first 3D sculpture using ZBrush.

My experience at The Los Angeles Film School has been amazing, and I’m super happy with my animation degree progress.

This is the first of four 3D models I created during our Digital Sculpting class. For this first assignment, we were asked to create a simple exploration sculpt within ZBrush using one of Gray Shuko’s portrait illustrations.

The reference

Gray Shuko drew this really cool portrait. A few adjectives that describe my first impressions of this portrait are masculine, stern, muscular, serious, and hardened.

My biggest challenge was trying to capture the flatness of the forehead, the nose, the wrinkles throughout the face, and the enlarged sternocleidomastoid muscle (commonly known as the SCM) that starts at the base of the ear and skull and runs along both sides of the neck.

First pass

At this first stage, we were instructed to sculpt the primary forms representing the character’s general shape, proportions, and silhouettes.

Since we were getting started with ZBrush, we were asked only to use the Move tool.

My first impression of ZBrush was the fluidity of the user interface. Although the program does not resemble any other program I’ve ever used, the menus are named well, and the best part is that you get pretty detailed explanations of each menu item when you press CTRL while hovering over them.

The move tool proved to be the only tool needed at this stage as we pulled and pushed the “clay” to capture the general forms of the character. The most difficult areas to sculpt were: capturing the flatness of the forehead, making the nose and lips, and matching the sternocleidomastoid muscle.

Here are the 3/4, front, and side views of the first pass

Second pass

Here we were asked to review the first pass and determine how to improve and build upon the first pass model.

This assignment introduced us to hotkeys, new brushes, and masking. I had a fantastic time working on this model and was determined to capture the flatness of the forehead and the wrinkles throughout the model. The DamStandard, hPolish, and the Inflat proved to be the most useful for creating facial features, especially the cuts.

For the lips and ears, I used the Pinch brush. I also tried to create an eyeball for the model, but the result was unsatisfactory. The brow ridge appears to compress the eye socket a lot, making the space for the eyeball very small. In the end, it did not look anything close to the character’s eye, so I modeled the eye by hand using the Inflat and DamStandard brushes.

Here are the 3/4, front, and side views of the second pass

Final

This final version was all about polishing the model and unifying the overall look of the character

I really appreciate my instructor’s, Hannah Josepher, feedback on this assignment. I took all of the opportunities for improvement she mentioned very seriously. Because of it, I removed a lot of unnecessary “noise” throughout the model and worked really hard to give this character a “body builder’s” body worthy of his mean mug.

Here are the 3/4, front, and side views of the final

Thank you so much for reading and cheers! 😘