create a curvy cartoon pin-up character

Use Zbrush 4R8’s new features alongside Modo tools

For this tutorial I will be showing how to create a curvy, stylised pin-up character. This isn’t going to be based on any particular concept art – instead, it will be a fusion of styles. Two main sources of inspiration will be the vintage pinups by Gil Elvgren and sketches by cartoonist Shane Glines.

When creating cartoon characters, sometimes less is more, so keep the shapes simple and focus on the character’s appeal and proportions. As a good starting point, use the ‘ideal proportions’ for a female body and the S-curve of traditional art composition in Ancient Greek sculpture. However, because this is a stylised character, we can play around with proportions a bit and exaggerate certain body parts and facial features.

We’ll start from scratch in Zbrush 4R8 using primitives and dynamic subdivisions to block out and capture the overall shape and proportions of the body. Once we establish the main features, we will move on to the more detailed areas like the head, face and hands. After that, we will merge all Subtools and use the Dynamesh feature to join all the body parts into one mesh and smooth out the transition between them, as well as adding details where needed. Then it will be time to retopologise the body using Zremesher. This makes it possible to create a simplified version of the model that will be easier to pose and edit. The topology is not perfect, but it is more than enough for our purposes. However, you can always retopologise certain parts of the model manually if you plan to use it in projects such as animation.