Character Artist on Creating Different Creatures with Unsettling Vibes

Introduction

Heya! I'm Ashley, I'm also known as A_Cubed online or Ash, and I'm a Character/Creature Artist with a history of 3D sculpting and modeling mostly in the animation industry, as well as numerous concept/vis dev jobs as a Freelancer. Some of the released titles I have worked on include Disney's Elena of Avalor, Unicorn Academy, Next Gen, A Tale Dark and Grimm, and many more I wish I could share! I have also taught with CGMA and regularly stream ZBrush sculpting on both the official Maxon ZBrush Live channel as well as my own Twitch channel.

I got into 3D while playing around with ZBrush (instead of doing my animation homework) in college. I was a bit directionless while in school. I didn't really know what I wanted, but I learned that sculpting was a lot of fun, so I followed the fun! And since I have a background in traditional art, ZBrush was kind of a natural bridge into 3D for me.

To be honest, a lot of the sculpting skills I've developed through the years have been thanks to streaming and the online art community. Watching others sculpt always inspired me to sculpt more myself, and I hope to continue to do the same for others.

I focus mostly on concept sculpting, but I also draw, paint (traditionally and digitally), and 3D model. Usually, I am working inside of ZBrush for the majority of my sculpted work, but depending on the project's needs, I may also be using Photoshop, Keyshot, Maya, Blender, Substance 3D Painter, and/or Unreal Engine 5.

A large portion of my professional work has focused on appealing animated characters. But when it comes to my personal work, I immerse myself in fantastical, dark, and otherworldly imagery. And I think a lot of my personal work reflects a mixture of these opposite worlds, but I definitely lean towards exploring darker themes for my own work as catharsis.

I grew up reading my dad's airbrush magazines and artbooks from the 80s, playing Dungeons & Dragons, watching tons of movies and animations, and playing a LOT of video games (still do!). I also love looking at macro photography and get inspired from the natural world as many creature enthusiasts would, but a large amount of motivation also comes from my peers.

Being a part of discord groups like the Hellfire Sculpting Club and having the art community I've built over the years through streaming really encourages me to keep creating. There are far too many artists, current and past, that inspire me to list here. I just know I am the artist I am, and continue to keep striving towards it because of the talent all around me.

Rizzlord - VDay Project

So this little devilish cherub was actually just a joke thing I started on stream since it was Valentine's Day coming up, and I wanted to theme the sketch for the live session and maybe get a card or two out of it. I didn't have a plan, references, or anything outside of wanting to sculpt a cheruby-thing with a bow. Super professional, I know, reference is king! But sometimes you've got to roll with it, have fun, and let it develop along the way.

Make being directionless on a blank canvas work for you! It's one of the many projects/sketches I have started on stream on a whim while involving viewers, and quickly finished up afterward. All in all, a very speedy and fun workflow, and a great way to stay loose and adaptable.

Modeling

The Rizzlord is just a sculpt. No retopology (beyond a ZRemesh) or UV unwrapping was needed since the aim was just to get it rendered out for some Valentine's Day card stills. But that doesn't mean it isn't without a workflow! I still wanted to make sure it was appealing in a turnaround, too, simply because I was having fun on stream with its pose and creating the folds of fat.

Within ZBrush, I started with a sphere, pushed and pulled the shape, and added primitives, also pushing and pulling into rough shape for the body, arms, and legs. Working with primitives at low res early on allows me to get the larger forms blocked out without accidentally getting lost in the sauce of detailing.

It also helps to prevent lumpiness in a sculpt that is otherwise supposed to be simplified and smooth. I then began to merge pieces and dynamesh them, keeping the fingers separate for now, since they were chubby, I didn't want a DynaMesh to weld them together.

This is where a re-mesh by union becomes super helpful. After all the main pieces of the body were DynaMeshed together, I merged the fingers down and applied a re-mesh by union modifier. This attaches the fingers to the palm without the need for a DynaMesh. Before the Rizzlord could hit the 360 no-scope pose, they'd first have to clean up their mesh.

A ZRemesh with keep groups active, to preserve polygroups, provided a cleaner base to begin posing. Cleaner topology at a lower resolution makes masking with a soft fall-off far easier and more effective for posing using the gizmo.

Before ending the stream, a general idea of a "tough" action pose was roughed out, and with the chat also involved in the sculpt coming to life, a viewer, Leonard, mused about a "gangster" bow grip. But as rough as it started, and despite the protests from chat about the impracticality of the bow's angle, I decided to push it and the characterization further afterwards, which you can see with the second pose pass I did right after an eye break.

Here, you can see just how much pushing the line of action and exaggerating the squash and stretch of fat and folds to get a dynamic pose makes a huge difference. The polygroups and multiple subdivision levels made coming back to areas like elbows and knees far easier to push, squish, and smooth out. The head I kept in DynaMesh the entire time and just used masking and snakehook to nudge the eyebrows down and squish the cheeks.

I don't have a head process saved for Rizzlord, but I do have another example here of how I approach head and expression sculpting for stylized characters.

Some tips! When I decided I wanted to give the Rizzlord a hair transplant, it was already in pose, so to re-establish symmetry on the hair base (which changed styles a few times as I experimented with what I preferred), I lined up the gizmo to the axis I wanted to mirror from (x).

I then activated Dynamic L.Sym (make sure the little white "dynamic" is highlighted) and hit "mirror and weld". By pressing "x", symmetry was now dynamic and local, meaning I could sculpt symmetrically on the hair as long as I didn't move the gizmo. This is incredibly helpful for any work when you need to get into a pose quickly.

For all hair sculpting and wing sculpting, I used masking with Ctrl and snakehook to push and pull shapes, then built forms using clay build-up. I defined these forms using Dam_Standard. The lash lines and hair hearts were created with curve tubes. I moved them around using the snakehook brush and lightly smoothed them out. The flatness of the hair strands was achieved using HPolish.

The straps and fabric were easily controlled with single-sided geometry at a low resolution. Dynamic subdiv was active, allowing a smooth mesh preview of the low-res geometry, which made it easy to make changes to and pose without it getting lumpy.

Texturing & Lighting

Since this was just for some stills, I didn't go through the whole texturing process and instead was able to achieve some good colour through polypainting alone. When using the ZBrush to KeyShot Bridge, KeyShot actually respects polypaint data and can separate it from the matcap in order to create a physically accurate shader, with the diffuse driven by the polypaint or vertex colours. This makes concept work and illustration super quick!

In KeyShot, I used the advanced shader for the skin and drove the roughness variation with some basic noise. KeyShot also has several metallic and plastic shaders that are very straightforward to tweak, which I used for the bow and arrows. The sash and wings are a simple velvet shader. A simple backlight wasn't giving the effect on the hair I was hoping for, so I cheated the look by driving the diffuse with a biased AO to give it more dimensionality. Pretty simple, but it did the trick and solved the flat hair problem.

The actual light setup is very straightforward for this project. Others I have done are far more complex, but for this one, I was aiming to get a bright and soft 3-dimensional feeling. The scene consists of a single HDRI, which I got from Poly Haven, angled to be very bright from behind, and a spotlight angled down on the face to both brighten the character and push some extra occlusion.

The composite was also very straightforward since I wanted this to be pretty simple. It only required a mask layer, a saturation adjustment, some minor SSS applied with an overlay layer, and a simple cloud for the background that I scribbled in. The clown pass is always super helpful for compositing in Photoshop and is easily exported from KeyShot when rendering.

The clown pass will separate into colour groups objects that use the same materials. You can then easily select things like the skin or the eyes, for example, to paint over or add adjustment layers to.

Chimera and Pillars of Destruction Project

My other concept, sculpture and illustration projects usually follow the same general rules, albeit with added complexity to each step.

Pillars of Destruction was a continuation of the ZBrush Summit Sculpt-off competition in 2025. The theme for the competition was "The Art of Summoning: A Fantasy Illustration Challenge" based around TCGs. We initially only had 3 hours to sculpt a card illustration, so I chose to create a world-destroying hydra summoning its destructive magic on a planet.

I placed third with the initial idea and then, just like the Rizzlord, took the idea further and polished it into the illustration it ended up as. I also, just for the fun of it, mocked up a fake card and game rules to place it in. I have a lot of the process viewable through VODs here and the initial sculpt-off competition here.

Chimera was a longer-spanning project done for the Hellfire Sculpting Club, themed art shows for its members. Every time they host a themed art show, I participate and have many past pieces done alongside some of the coolest horror artists.

I could write a whole tutorial just on this piece alone, but to keep it as simple as I can, the theme was "Cacophony". I wanted to create a monstrosity of noise, feeding off the droves of abandoned hopes, dreams, and wishes. Giving imagery to our recursive and nagging thoughts of regret. Something is terrifying yet captivating about the valves and twisting tubes of horn instruments that I wanted to give the "yes, but more" treatment to.

It was the core pillar that I explored around. More horns need more hands, which need more bodies. Voracious, gripping, surreal. A Chimera. Again, the same process was applied as Rizzlord, just with far more complex sculpting and lighting. I also did a fair amount of actual painting for the final illustration.

The sculpt still works in a turntable with the shaders I created for it in KeyShot, but in order to achieve the illustrative, dream-like, surreal look, I just really wanted to paint, which I did in Photoshop.

Conclusion

The main challenge is always just starting. Once the ball is rolling, the ideas are flowing, and the reference is settled, it's much more enjoyable. It's really about beating down the blank canvas. I do this by abstract sketching, facing it head-on, and just messing up a sphere sometimes, seeing where it goes without any reference to start. I think sometimes we can get so stuck in our own heads about doing a personal project that is perfect, doing something that will get us hired, or get us tons of likes or views, that it blocks us from being genuine.

At the end of the day, I'm an artist, and I feel the most free when I push all of that pressure aside and just start scribbling. As you see above, make it exist first, you can make it better later! It's always going to look janky before it doesn't, so get radical about having fun, making mistakes, adapting on the fly, and enjoying the process.

Thank you, Emma, for reaching out about the Rizzlord! I'm glad you caught a stray arrow. Maybe that bow's aim isn't so bad after all! I'm always super happy to share my work and process with anyone who wants to see it, and I hope this was insightful to those reading.

I'd like to invite anyone who may enjoy the way I approach sculpting and art to join me live on my Twitch, where I'm live every Monday and Thursday, 4-8 PM EST. Or check out my work on any of my socials here.

Ashley A. Adams, Character Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins