How to Turn the 2D Concept of a Girl into a 3D Sculpt with ZBrush

Introduction

Hello! Thank you so much for featuring my work on 80 Level. My name is Tom, I'm from the UK, and I've been working professionally as a 3D Character Artist for over 3 years. So far, I've primarily worked across several mobile game projects, currently working for a small team under the global tech company Voodoo.

My journey into learning 3D is bog standard, starting from a 3D Games Art course at university. When graduation hit, I realised I was not on par with industry standard level yet, as I missed out on vital program knowledge, such as ZBrush, plus Substance 3D Painter, when the PBR workflow started becoming the new standard texturing pipeline. So I had to grind for a few years, til eventually my stubbornness paid off and I landed an internship with Electric Square.

Even after breaking into the industry, though, I knew I had a high ceiling to continue pushing myself with sculpting, texturing, and improving my critical eye. Personal projects, art challenges, and collaborations are how I achieved this, and I'm still gonna continue this for as long as my passion keeps burning inside me. However, I couldn't have made it this far without the help and support of my spectacular art friends, with whom I've co-worked.

Coffee Girl

The original sketch belongs to the fantastic Julia Zhilyaeva (also known as Yui Shi). Funny enough, Coffee Girl was initially a rough speedsculpt I did during a speedsculpt phase my friends and I were a part of. I'm not the fastest speedsculptor in the west, but I was enamoured with the shape language, simplicity, and colour choices of Coffee Girl.

So, I iterated on her from time to time, til eventually, I wanted to create the whole character inside ZBrush. I planned this to be a short project, focused on textured hand-painting and sculpting a stylized character to look appealing from all angles.

I worked from the top half gradually to the bottom. Excluding the head, I mainly worked with low-poly objects with dynamic subdivision preview enabled, pushing and shaping each part of the body to match the shapes in the concept.

This method is helpful when matching the sharp, graphic design-esque silhouette of stylized characters such as this. A neat trick for pulling sharp corners is using the Move brush, but with AccuCurve turned on and shrinking the focal shift.

Sculpting

For sculpting the anatomy and inner details, I tend to stick with the same selection pulled from various brush packs. I like to use Smoothing and Clean_BuildUp brushes for building the forms, and the GIO_Soft_Forms brush for sharpening lines and cutting stylized folds. If any area has noticeable bumps, I try to smooth them out using a combination of Smooth Brush, HPolish, or utilizing the Clay Polish function on lower sub-division levels to iron them out.

Tip: for asymmetrical sculpting, the Stager feature is a powerful tool. You start by setting the subtool to 0, 0 coordinates to allow perfect mirror symmetry, and assign it to Home Stage. Next, move the subtool to the position you want it for the final pose, and assign it to the Target Stage. If set up correctly, you can swap the positions of the subtool at the tap of the Switch Stage button, whenever you need to sculpt symmetrically.

Up to the first pass of the sculpting, I had Perspective turned on inside ZBrush to ensure the composition didn't feel flat for the final renders. However, knowing that ZBrush doesn't apply Perspective correctly in the viewport, eventually I realised it wasn't going to work. The original sketch had no field of view applied, so the proportions and orientation of each body part weren't aligned. I turned it off and reworked the proportions until they matched more closely.

I try to retain as many segmented parts as I feasibly can, where merging isn't 100% required. This is so I can make adjustments, keep smooth transitions, and remove cleanup. Even for the hands, because the waving hand has 3 fingers pressing together, I decided to fuse their topology together in order to carve distinct line strokes indicating the gaps between each finger.

While the aim was to match the concept as faithfully as possible, I was bothered too much by the front sleeve folds in the original sketch (no shade on Julia, she's very talented.) They didn't look natural, especially after replicating it in my sculpt, so I deviated from it.

It was a good opportunity to study and practice my current knowledge of cloth folds. I aimed to keep the sleeves baggy and loose while having fun with carving bold compression folds along the bending joint.

My favorite part of sculpting the character was the balance of wide and slim proportions across the design. For example, the thickness of the girl's thighs catches your attention, and as your eye trails down the leg, it gradually tapers to slimmer legs, increases again with the back of legs pushing into the leg bend, slims down further towards the ankles, then it hits you with these chunky, pumped up trainers with fat shoelaces. You see this same pattern in reverse with the front arm, starting thin -> thick -> thin again, starting from the shoulder to the hand.

Texturing

My favorite part of character art! I wanted to reduce the amount of time on this character by not retopologizing/UV unwrapping her, so I decided to paint her entirely in ZBrush. Luckily, I came across a lovely set of polypaint brushes made by Pierre Rogers. They have a mix of marker to textured brushes that feel close to a Photoshop brush. You can find them on Artstation. Highly recommended for ZBrush hand-painting enthusiasts!

Same as the sculpting process, I focused on the face first because that's where the eye will draw to the most, so I wanted to make sure she looked just as beautiful as her 2D design. Texturing was more straightforward since I'm mostly painting through imitation of the sketch.

Thanks to separating most elements into subtools, I could get clean transitions where needed. Even the hat's brim is separate from the temple part! Masking tools were handy here. The border between the socks and the leg is a simple polygroup masking.

For the yellow/black banding pattern on the socks, I had to mask the polyloops around the leg and fill the colour, then painted over the edges again to give it a slight painterly feel. The trickier part was the warped orange patterns on the trainers. I couldn't project the concept onto them to cheat, as it didn't look right, so I had to paint them manually.

I used a mix of the Lasso Mask tool with Lazy Mouse, plus Pen Masking, to carefully imitate the pattern and fill the colour. As I said earlier, I wanted her to look appealing not just from the front shot but from all angles, so I needed to think about her lighting and colours from behind. However, her front shot is the key shot, and I don't think too many people would pay attention, so I kept my effort minimal.

Since the light source is from the front-above, her backside will be in dark shadows, but I thought of adding a subtle ambient light by painting a faint blue tone to link it to the blue gradient background. I thought this would be effective in tying the character to her environment.

Animation

After training in animation on the job, I was more confident in my animation skills and thought this was a good opportunity to apply what I learned to a personal project. I referred to Leslie Van den Broeck's spectacular portfolio, as he loves to give his 3D characters a bit of life through short, simple idle animations that loop.

I ended up being a bit experimental with this project's setup. Since I chose not to create a low-poly version, my only choice was to decimate her as low as possible without ruining the painting. I exported an FBX with vertex colours to store the polypaint data, then brought her into Blender with an Emission and Albedo material applied. As you'll only see her Albedo colours rendered in the finals, I didn't have to worry about her broken normals shading caused by decimation.

My PC's powerful, so I can animate her decimated model. However, I learned that although navigating her around the viewport was fine, Blender was not happy with the rigged decimated models when it came to scrubbing through the animation timeline. If the vertex count is too high, the playback turns very sluggish and choppy. So I had to break up the rig and use other tricks to try to make this method smoother.

Regarding the animation, the waving hand was the key focal point of selling her emotion, combined with her warming smile. Every other part was secondary in supporting this, from the little kicks in her overlapping feet to her fringe quietly blowing in the wind, expressing a sense of calm and playfulness. Little tricks such as slow breathing (making her torso move back and forth slightly) and eye blinking also help to make her feel less rigid when in a fixed position.

To make her eyes blink, I created two Shape Keys. One with her eyes open by default, and the second when they're closed. I had to manually move her vertex in Blender's Sculpt mode (with the Move brush) to create the blink and assign it to the Shape Key. With that done, all you have to do is set up the key frames with the Shape Keys to give her an eye blink animation.

Lastly, I added a quick and easy wind particle VFX that looped seamlessly in the animation. This is a wonderful touch to reinforce the visual of the hair braids blowing in the wind. I created two unique particle emitters, one in front and one behind the girl. They share the same properties except they're set to different wind speeds, the front emitter being slower, helping to fake a parallax effect.

Conclusion

Coming from the experience of sculpting characters in T-Pose only for video game character production, this was a fun exercise in sculpting an asymmetrical pose and practicing my brushwork. I encourage any artist wanting to evolve their skills to practice with smaller projects based on simpler concepts if you want to improve efficiently.

It's a common trap to become bogged down by a long-term project with a complex character design if you allow project scope to creep. A healthier alternative would be to conduct short study projects alongside your big project so you can apply what you learned from your studies. They can range from speedsculpts to studies on anatomy, cloth folds, facial expressions, or even learn how to rig/animate!

With so many character art projects featuring only static renders, I think giving your 3D character a simple animation that speaks to their personality boosts their appeal tenfold. Saying that, the experimental method I used for animating a decimated character was tedious, but it was enough to work for a short project like this.

However, if you wanted to do more complex animations with your character (or just avoid Blender slowdown altogether), I would highly recommend that you don't do this and stick with creating a low-poly version for a smoother animation experience.

One final note: if you're adapting a concept but there's a section that doesn't look or feel correct, don't be afraid to deviate! As long as it's within sound reason. Just make sure you have a visual reference for guidance on how to resolve those design issues.

Thank you so much for reading! If you want to follow me or just peruse my other work, feel free to find me on ArtStation, BlueSky, or LinkedIn.

Thomas Jordan Wanless, 3D Character Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine