STYLIZED QUICK SCULPTS Part II
2020 HULK. This was meant to explore how to do the second round of quick sculpts. Tried to see how to shade hair and skin for a good looking presentation
2020 Wolverine In this one I learned a few Zmodeller tricks that I've been using a lot since then.
2020 PICCOLO DAIMAO, this one was a lot of fun trying to get Toriyama's style.
2021 VENGER was a game changer. I had the sculpt on hold during months. When I got back to it I decided it'd be fun to add some background and mood.
2022 VOLDEMORT. While sculpting it, I thought I might aswell simulate a cape animation and try to render a video. Again, few elements in the BG to add mood.
2022 AKUMA. Here I decided to go further. I sculpted hair using haircages than I then converted into real hairs. These added a lot of depth to the Quick Sculpts series since I'd be able to do better looking characters. I also started using Megascans
I also learned how to use Substance Materials directly in 3dsmax, so I was able to just drag and drop materials to objects with Box Mapping for UVs.
This way, creating cinematic stills is much easier and looks good as long as we don't go to close ups.
2022 CATWOMAN. I made her trying to test the workflow, seeing if I was able to do a cinematic still in one day. Luckily I succeeded. I combined character sculpting and modelling in Zbrush with Substance Materials, Megascans and random pics for bgs.
First of all I want to clarify what I mean by QUICK SCULPTS. I've been working on character assets for some time now, and I'm used for characters to take weeks or even months to get done. Same thing happens with my personal characters that I do in my spare time and can take months easily. So when I get the chance of sculpting something in a couple of days, I still call that QUICK, even if it takes some hours to get done. In the case of these pictures, I don't think that any of these took more than a week of work hours, which for me, personally is a huge improvement on time management.
The idea of Quick Sculpts started kind of like an SCULPTOBER challenge to myself back in 2019. I wanted to get better and faster at sculpting and depend less on other modelling programs that weren't Zbrush while working on characters. When doing the first part (here) https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Bmb9Bz I thought it'd be good to take those test exercises and render them properly so, together, they'd also serve as a porfolio piece.
But even when working on some of those, I felt that the format was very limiting. They were only heads with no major expression, always the same lightrig, same setting... So I thought it'd be good to change the format, give them a bit of personality. This is how, in my second round, I started with Hulk,slightly posed and a vibrant plane color for the Background. I also wanted to get rid of the idea that the character was a floating bust, so I made just a bit more of the body.
After a couple of characters I saw that there was a chance here to create more cinematic looking shots with these sculpts. With some extra love to materials and rendering, I could be doing cinematic shots as in my larger projects, but much much faster.
Although they're obviously less detailed than my big projects, the shots are still good pieces of portfolio, I think, and a lot of fun to work on.
You can see these have been just a few pieces in a couple of years. Both 2020 and 2021 were very busy years for me, professionally speaking, but I hope to have a bit more time this year for a 3rd round, with the changes that redefined the second one.
Let me know what you think, what's your favourite and if this is something you'd like to try out aswell, give it a go!