The Process of sculpting

I started the process with a spherical armature sculpt that would inform the basic proportions of the body. I then began roughing out basic anatomical definition around the torso, arms and leg area.

When I felt I had a good enough base, I began roughing out the head, eventually adding eyes, eyelids, a mouth and some ears. Using several pieces of reference, I began adding in general landmarks on his head like the ribbed head, puffed cheeks, wrinkled mouth, and small nose.

Along the process, I had to properly optimize the mesh to multiple subdivision levels to make small and large changes easy to manipulate. This allowed me to split the body into several poly groups so I could focus on areas like the arms and legs. Once I felt all whole body was 75% done, I moved onto clothing and smaller assets. Utilizing uv texture maps, I was able to give each asset their appropriate textures shown through my reference.

The last steps in the process included finishing any remaining detail on the head, add the hair and color every asset. Once everything was finished, I sent over the sculpt to Keyshot for the final renderings. I added an ambient occlusion pass that would be composited over the base render in Photoshop to add an extra layer of detailing.

What I learned

For my 3D modeling class, we were first tasked with creating a sculpt of our own hand, then a sculpt of a famous person’s head. I sculpted Matt Smith as my very first head sculpt and I am very pleased how it turned out.

Through these projects and my final, I learned how to:

• Use 3DS Max 2022 to create basic geometric shapes to be turbo smoothed and imported to Zbrush

• Optimize meshes to multiple subdivision levels

• Learn how to use polygroups and polypaint

• Create clothing and hard surface assets

• Create hair assets

• Utilize UV texture maps to import tileable textures for surface noise

• Pose a character

• Render a character in Keyshot and composite different types of passes on the render through Photoshop