STEP BY STEP STARTING THE SCULPTING PROCESS
01 BASIC PROPORTIONS
When sculpting in clay, you might find yourself with limited resources. If you start focusing on details right away, you may end up using too much clay, and not leaving enough to complete the sculpture. Thankfully, in digital sculpting, you do not have to worry about the amount of clay that you have available, but you still have to bear in mind the proportions. Blocking out the big forms first will allow you to spot any potential problematic areas of your artwork.
02 SILHOUETTE
Clear, basic shapes allow anatomically correct distribution of muscles, bones and joints in character creation. It will save you the time otherwise spent on re-adjusting and fixing the overall shape of the mesh. Make sure to check the silhouette of your model as you sketch it out, as it will help make sure that the shape makes sense.
03 CLEAN TOPOLOGY
A properly blocked-out mesh will result in a cleaner sculpt in general. Whenever I am done with the big forms, I like to use Zremesher in the early stages so that every level of subdivision is tidy. This allows me to control the amount of polygons in the project, as well as avoid raised points in case of too many edges sharing a vertex.
04 ADD THE DETAILS GRADUALLY
It’s better to work in layers, as it allows you to detail the model evenly in stages. Adding fine detail to a big blob could cause topological issues, slow down the processing speed and in case of any design changes, you could lose a lot of your work. With big shapes and clean topology sorted, I find it easier to detail the mesh. It is good to duplicate the base, so all I have to do later is project those details onto it.