SCULPT A SUPERHERO
Ali Jalali shares his process for the ultimate Zbrush workflow to sculpt a zombie Batman
Ali Jalai shares his ultimate Zbrush workflow to sculpt a zombie Batman
this Batman character was created for a challenge as part of Comic-con 2016. The theme was undead superheroes, so I decided to go with my favourite of all time.
I begin all my projects by sourcing and collecting together reference materials. I knew that I wanted Frank Miller’s Batman with an undead style. I therefore had to find some differences between the undead and zombies. After watching plenty of zombie and undead movies, I realised that the latter are a bit more agile! This agility affects the pose and overall mood of the final piece.
In this tutorial I will talk through the sculpting process and the methods I used in Zbrush, which is in my pipeline from the beginning of production. I hope this will inspire you to have a go at creating your own undead character.
01 start sculpting
With these characters there isn’t an exact concept; it needs to be created from scratch. I use Zbrush to play with some ideas and get an understanding of what I’ve imagined. I have some blurry images in my mind, so create this head sculpt in a few minutes – then put it aside for a few days. When I come back to it I see it as a fresh piece of work that needs completing.
I start with a sphere and, after creating the biggest head proportions using the Move brush, I continue blocking the face shapes using the Clay Buildup brush. It’s the very first level of my sculpt, so I block in using big shapes.
02 Body proportions
I continue the sculpt using my Frank Miller references, trying to make the body proportions as close to Miller’s Batman as I can. For the body, I start with basic shapes ready to use in Zbrush: sphere, cylinder, Insert Multi-mesh body parts (IMM Bparts) and combine them using the Mesh Insert brush. Sphere is used for making something similar to the torso, cylinders for arms and legs, then the pre-made hands in IMM Bparts brush. This makes it easy to focus on the main proportions and play with basic shapes to achieve my desired composite. I convert the insert meshes to Dynamesh as I go (see image 2).
03 Body sculpting
Again, I use the Move brush and Clay Buildup brush to create my biggest blocked shapes. Usually I use pin marks in my sculpts to gain a clear view of what I’m doing, and avoid getting lost in anatomical details. My main pin marks are in places where there is nothing between bones and skin, such as the clavicle bones, hip bones, elbows, knees and the rib cage. By paying attention to these, I can see what is where and make clear shapes in my model, as in image 3.
04 Make the cape
The torn cape was one of the trickiest parts to model. Create a rough sculpt for the cape, showing the main (large) wrinkles – the thickness doesn’t matter at this stage (see image 4a). Start painting a Zbrush mask on one side of the sculpt – the side you have worked the most on that has good shapes and wrinkles (image 4b). In the Tools>subtools>extract rollout, set a suitable thickness for the cape fabric and hit Extract. Then click on Accept to make a subtool from your masked area (see image 4c).
As you can see, this will give you a cape with the same thickness all over. It has three polygroups: front face, back face, and sides. Hide and delete the side and the back/front polygroups. Using [Ctrl]+[shift] and Lazymouse, click on the polygroup you want to unhide and then hit Del Hidden under Tools>geometry>modify topology (image 4d). We need clean topology so use the Zremesher from Tools>geometry>zremesher to create a suitable remeshed object (image 4e). You might see some polygons intersecting with each other or overlapped; fix them simply by using the Move brush and pushing the vertices around.
Now we need to give our clean, remeshed cape a thickness. Use the Zmodeler brush and click OK to close the pop-up window. Hover your mouse over one of the cape’s polygons and press and hold the Space key. A new command window opens. From the Polygon Actions window select Extrude. From the Target window select All Polygons, then release the Space key. Now select and drag one of the polygons, in order to extrude the cape with the desired thickness, as in image 4f. Now we have our torn cape we can divide it and sculpt torn leather effects on the edges of the holes
and sides of the cape. I use the Slash3 brush, as it’s perfect for sculpting sharp, hard edge effects.
05 create the skin Details
For skin details I use a combination of different detail levels; using Surface Noise and Hand Paint Noise, which I will explain. First of all, I add a large noise distortion on the skin, especially if it’s a creature or has a sort of exaggerated skin. To do so, select the Standard brush, set Stroke on Spray and set the Placement Variance to 0.8. Use alpha 49 and start brushing on the skin, trying to brush with different pen pressures and random intensity all over the surface.
Mask areas you don’t want to have skin noise, such as lips and eyelids. To use Zbrush’s Surface Noise plug-in, go to Tools>surface> Noise and play with Noise Scale and Strength until you have an even and small noise on your surface. Choose Spray Stroke and start making skin variations according to the skin position. Use different alphas, different intensities and some smoothing, as in images 5a, 5b and 5c.
06 remesh AND uv
I use Zbrush’s Zremesher and 3Dcoat remesh tools for retopologising the character. As for UVS, I use Zbrush’s UV Master plugin as well as Maya tools. The UV is detailed below.
UV Master works pretty well with polygroups. First of all I assign polygroups to my object, then I go to my first divide in Zbrush and mask any areas that I want to be a UV patch. Use [Ctrl]+[w] to make the masked area a polygroup. Instead of masking, you can hide other areas of the model and hit [Ctrl]+[w] to assign a polygroup to visible polys.
Next, go to Plugins>uv Master, turn on Polygroups and hit Unwarp. If you don’t have any divisions you
can click on Flatten to check the flat UV and edit the UV with the Move brush. You can pack your unfolded UVS in Maya or any other software.
07 texturing
Quixel Suite is the software I use for texturing. It’s super easy and fun to use, and it has a 3D viewer where you can check your texture and shaders live. Substance Painter is another option and has a similar workflow. Both Painter and Quixel have many smart materials that you can either make layers with, erase each part of the layer you want, or assign smart maskings that the software creates from your Normal map or Cavity map. The textures I export for each object are Albedo, Glossy, Normal and Specular.
08 shading
I use Marmoset Toolbag for shading and rendering. As Quixel and Marmoset workflow is based on PBR rendering, the maps I export are matched with Marmoset. So it’s just a matter of assigning the textures to the shader and it’s done.
09 posing
I use the Transpose Master plug-in for posing. I do some tests to see which pose creates the mood I had in mind. I am looking for a zombie feeling, plus a heroic comic book character.
10 lighting
I need lighting which is sharp, with high contrast between shadows and light places – it will add a comic book feel to my work. For this, I use four Spot lights as back lights, with really high intensity, and an Omni light with controlled reduce as the key light. I leave some areas in darkness to add to the undead, horror feeling.
11 rendering
As I use Marmoset Toolbag for rendering, I can see the final result during the process of assigning textures. There are some special post effects and options in the Render tab to pay attention to before exporting a final image. In the Render tab, changing the Resolution to 2:1 will produce a sharper and higher-quality image. Be careful to use it only for exporting the final image as it makes the file very heavy to work with.
In the Lighting options, turn on Local Reflections. In Marmoset you can’t see an object’s reflection in a reflective material, such as a mirror or high-glossy metal. Local Reflections turns this feature on.
Don’t forget to turn on High-res Shadows to achieve better calculated live shadows. You can check the settings for Render and Camera Post Effect options in image 11 – download it from the online Vault.