Character Body Sculpting
Before carving, I wanted to start with a sphere, but I found that there was a very basic human body in zbrush’s library. After seeking the approval of the tutor, I decided to start sculpting with this basic human body instead of a ball, so that I could not only focus on sculpting and learning the muscle structure, but also save some time to sculpt the human body with more details.I didn’t have a clear understanding of the muscles before sculpting the character’s body and head, so I needed to find a lot of muscle references to study before sculpting. I started sculpting from a basic human body without any muscles, I adjusted this part many times, I also learnt a lot about human muscles during the process of sculpting and adjusting, such as the direction of the muscles, the structure of the muscles and so on, in order to make the whole character look closer to the realistic game character effect, I sculpted sinews and some fold details on the arms, I spent more time on this aspect because of the ronin’s hands should have gone through a lot of fights, so it will be a bit rougher, taking these factors into consideration, I will sculpt the hands and arms in more detail.The reason why I would spend a lot of time focusing on muscle sculpting instead of just using a basic mannequin and starting to make clothes is because the structure of the muscles will greatly affect how the fabric simulation will look later on in Marvelous Designer, and because the protagonist is a character who has been through a lot of battles, so the muscles should be very toned.
At the very beginning of the project I planned to make this character as a ronin wearing a ghost mask, so I didn’t need to focus too much on the face sculpting, but then I considered the gameplay, and this character, if used as the protagonist of an open-world game, the protagonist should be able to choose to wear or not to wear a ghost mask, and this factor was one of the more important points I considered during the production process. So originally I just referenced the muscle model’s face and sculpted the face to be more three-dimensional to fit the mask, but the whole scene and the main body is Japanese style, so I needed to sculpt the character’s head to be more Asian-like. In this part I encountered a lot of difficulties, the Asian face is not easy to sculpt, because the structure of the bone is relatively flat, there are many subtle changes in the structure of the face is difficult to sculpt perfectly, so I modified the character’s head before I looked for some skull analysis diagrams to analyse and study, in the process of analysis, I also use zbrush for sculpting the skull to practise, which will make me more familiar with the study of the skull. This will make me more familiar with the study of the skull, after gradually understanding the structure of the skull I also have to look for some suitable references of Asian faces and refer to their facial features for sculpting.
In my opinion, to make the character’s head more realistic is to add pores, skin textures and folds to it. In this part, I purchased the skin texture alpha brush released by an artist on artstation, and then drew some bumps and downs on the skin at appropriate positions. I need to consider that the character’s face should be the most rough at the cheek position. There are also more pores, so compared with other positions, I will pay more attention to the texture effect of this position, but these effects should not be too heavy, otherwise it will affect the normal effect of later baking. These are some problems that need to be considered in each step of the production process.