Digital Studio Sculpting Beginnings

I know I havent been updating this constantly, but since this has become a project involving a lot of reasearch, I thought it would be better to compile all my potential little posts into a weekly update, as to show a little more method between all the little parts. We'll just consider the last post before this to be a resource I posted for everyone.

So, to begin: the main purpose of this project is to improve my skills within ZBrush while emphasizing efficiency. As seen by the syllabus I posted before, my plan was to crank out several different speed sculpts, and have a few different pieces done by the end of these 5 weeks. Turns out, in making this syllabus, I forgot one key piece of the puzzle: it takes time to get good at things. With my experiences so far working on this and researching since the beginning of the quarter, I am refurbishing the syllabus to be geared towards becoming fairly proficient in making a human head, male or female, and then shave my time of creation down as much as possible.

So initially, I started with trying to find any sort of secrets to give me direction in how to be fast at sculpting in general. I ended up rewatching a bunch of videos I had seen before of speed sculpting by Joe Pikop, off of his website, So Much Monsters. While giving me an eye into the ideas and the process, this didn't give me too much of an idea on how to go fast.

But in watching videos off of his website, there is actually a few recordings where you can see all of his interface. This is due to the fact that he didn't use the build in ZBrush recorder, as it wouldn't catch him switching into other programs. His interface, being highly customized, gave me the idea to turn my initial focus towards efficiency.

Initial UI configuration

 

Customized UI

Personally, I like a very minimal UI in any application I use., If there's a shortcut for it, I don't want a button for it, and if I use it often, there should be an accessible button for it. I still have much fine tuning left, but for now I have to see what works and what doesnt. My hope would be to push it as far as my firefox browser has gone:

Everything is set up in such a fashion that I can do everything very quickly. The improvement is actually pretty large already, so we'll see where I can push it.

In looking around for more videos of speed sculpting, I found a few different methods. Some people start with spheres; this works out fine due to the fact that spheres in ZBrush are actually subdivided cubes, so pole pinching isn't too much of an issue.  They mold the sphere into shape and then carve into it to form the head.

 

Some also start with a premade base mesh and sculpt up from there.

I initially started to follow the method detailed in my previous post; I wasn't too big of a fan of this method, due to the fact that one has to place details into position by sheer memory, with little to no method about it. And also the fact that the head shape would not have been sculpted until later on into the process. I came across this sculpting demo of a female bust, and from it I drew alot of ideas and techniques:

In this you can see the base she starts with; a featureless smooth head shape. I decided to try to recreate this after trying to just carve a face straight into a sphere and finding that I had a very hard time properly adding the mass of the shapes of the features of the face.

Time: ~15 mins.

Reproportioned

Front view of the reproportion

I have gone through a few attempts at sculpting in features, I will post then when they're slightly more polished. This ended up being a very long blog post. I will continue to add posts like this about once a week.