Getting stuck in there

As mentioned in my previous blog post I had already dabbled around with ZBrush, this made it a lot easier for me to get my head around some of the tools I need to complete my finished sculpture.
But I wasn't convinced I had enough skill or knowledge that I would please me enough for the end product. This led me to do several practice models just so that I can work comfortably instead of googling each problem I encounter when I do the final sculpt.

Before starting the actual model work we were told to form a moodboard, and as dull as this was I later realised how useful reference and idea generation can be.

As you can see from my sketches, I've taken a lot of inspiration and ideas from these. Both the sword images were helpful, the top left one for the actual blade, and the bottom one for the handle, which again was   futuristic and something I liked a lot. The body armour on the right was important because of the actual material used and how it looks, how the curves look like and how it's shaped. My shoulder pad was majorly inspired from the image on the bottom left, I really liked how it sat on top of the torso but also looked like it fits in perfectly.

Furthermore, a good orthographic will be hugely beneficial to a 3D sculpt since it covers all views and you can get a good feel for proportion, so I did this quick orthographic in photoshop using a tablet.

Here are a few examples of my earlier work:

As you can see these models weren't up to standard, not even close, in fact it's rather embarrassing looking at these sculpts now. The first two on the left were my first go at sculpting my character design, and I didn't really have any idea of what I was doing, I knew what I had to do I just didn't know what tools did what and how to achieve what I had visualised. The ones on the right and the bottom left were an improvement but still not quite what I was looking for.

One thing struck me, in each of my practice sculpts, the anatomy was completely off. So I went ahead and started to understand and learn the facial anatomy. I started to watch as many videos as I could of Ryan Kingslien. He was a former developer at pixologic, so obviously understood the program, but what I enjoyed most about his videos is how in depth he gets about anatomy, certain terms that I had never heard before started to become common terminology for me.

This was the outcome of studying facial anatomy, even though I wasn't great at using the program, the knowledge of anatomy was so helpful, this sculpt could actually pass as a human!