WHAT Steps CAN I take to enhance my Sculpts?
I’m going to talk about a few techniques I use when sculpting that help to make the final sculpt pop. I’ll be using this sculpt of The Penguin (the concept is by Javier Burgos).
The sculpt itself was started using Dynamesh. I was able to quickly block-out the head and body using spheres. The hat I created by appending a cylinder using the Zmodeler brush. Clay, Dam Standard and H-polish for the flat planes, and the Move brush to get the forms right.
From the concept you can see that The Penguin is apprehensive: The eyes are very important here. I tend to have two spheres; one concave for the pupil and one for the outer sclera. In my opinion it always sells the look when posed correctly because the light reacts as it would in real life.
Lighting is very important when sculpting. For this sculpt, I wanted harsh light for the final render, but during sculpting it’s also important to change materials and light position to make sure the form looks good in different conditions. The colour of the light also tells its own story, so cool colours for a night time scenario were appropriate here.
I tend to use Fibermesh for hair or fur, but this time I decided to try it on his collar. I had a piece of geometry which I masked and used to generate the fibres. I turned up the randomness on the gravity to break up the uniformity of the fur. It always helps to change things up in a sculpt by having different materials instead of just clay all the time.
Posing The Penguin was straightforward using Transpose Master: Remember, as long as the origin of your transpose line is in the centre of your model, that’s where it will rotate from.
I wanted the final result to be interesting so it always helps to have a bit of context or story, otherwise it’s just a guy in a top hat looking to the left. If you look closely in his monocle, it’s been smashed, alluding to a story behind The Penguin’s apprehension!