Project Overview

Pikebound Pete was once a simple peasant, caught in the turmoil of a raid. While fleeing his farm, he met a gruesome end and was beheaded. Bloatbelly Benny found his lifeless body, stitched Pete’s head back on, lopped off his appendages, and impaled him with a pike, using him as a macabre puppet.

Bloatbelly Benny is the spoiled, morbidly (that’s convenient, isn’t it?) obese son of Malek The Merciless. Growing up in the shadow of his father’s ruthless conquests, Benny developed a taste for the macabre. Despite his privileged upbringing, he is both feared and ridiculed by those around him. Benny’s humor is a disturbing mix of morbid jokes and comedic antics, often involving his “puppet” Pete.

Goal
My goal is to sculpt/paint these characters in Zbrush, then take them into Substance for some texture and finally into Maya for some rigging and animation. By the time I’m done with them, Pete and Benny will be ready for stream animations, cinematic shorts, game engine import and vtuber usage.
I’ll push my skills further in each stage and do my best to document the lessons I learn along the way. Hopefully, this will serve as insight on the process for other artists and maybe garner some additional prestige for the work we, as artists, put into this kind of stuff. Not that a 3D artist doesn’t already carry an awe value by simply doing what we do, but I feel like that mostly comes from other artists and not really from the collective.

What are the stages?
In the upcoming content, I’ll break down each step of the process for both characters, starting with Pikebound Pete. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect:

Sculpting the Foundation: Establishing the base shapes and proportions.

Adding Details: Refining features, muscles, and clothing.

Painting: Creating realistic paint in ZBrush and bringing the character to life.

Retopology: Both characters will run the previous 3 steps individually. Then we’ll go through a retopology phase where I’ll clean up the mess I’ve made in preparation for textures and rigging.

Textures: We’ll take the new topology and throw it in Substance to give it a more finalized look. The painting I did in ZBrush will serve as my guide, but we’re ultimately looking to achieve better quality.

Rigging for Animation: Finally, my most familiar phase in the process. Putting the joint structure and control system into place for believable animations.

Join The Conversation
I’m eager to hear your thoughts and feedback as I progress. If you have any comments as I work through all this, you’re welcome to post it here or on the socials I’ll be posting additional content to:

YouTube
Tiktok
Discord
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Thanks for joining me on this journey. I’m sure I’ll face a few challenges along the way. Going the distance is pretty tough when the self-criticism unexpectedly surfaces. It can be easy to get caught up on the details and let the inner critic win, but having others along for the ride helps silence that pesky sonofa bitch.
Also, if you’re starting your own project, I’d love to see your progress as well. We can work through the obstacles together!

The post The Eerie Ensemble: Character Design For Streams And VTubers appeared first on Khaos Kollective.

I’ve started to realize that although the idea to sculpt only 1 feature is great for a focused effort; plopping something like a nose, eye or mouth down on a sphere doesn’t give me any context for how they’re represented in relation to the rest of the face. There are structures immediately surrounding each feature that define character and emotion that I should also read into.

So, instead of sculpting on a blank sphere, I’ll now build off of the last sculpt and see where it takes me. There aren’t many things I can call out as lessons learned during this sculpt aside from knowing I needed the areas next to the nose to achieve something believable.

Maybe, I should point out the different parts of the nose for reference since it’s helpful to know them and see the muscles that form them.

Here’s a reference image I found with useful labels on key landmarks. Some of the areas that seem more commonly defined on a male’s nose would be the supra alar crease, glabella and tip of the nose. Females seem to have much smoother shapes to their nose. Even though a certain part of the nose like the supra alar crease might be more pronounced on some females, the entire shape as a whole tends have softer angles.

Here’s another displaying the muscles underneath:

Below is a video of my process on the nose:

@mayjormayham Sculpting someone a day at a time, 1 feature a day. Who do you think this will be? #artist #creative #art #3d #3dart ♬ 1901 – Instrumental – Phoenix

Here’s a link to my previous post in case you’re interested in the mouth sculpt leading up to this one

The post Sculpting A Nose For Practice appeared first on Khaos Kollective.

For instance, I’ve found it much easier to form eyelids by first establishing some basic form around the eye socket. Nothing too precise, but enough mass to have an idea of where the eyebrow is, the bridge of the nose and cheekbone.
Then, take the DamStandard brush and draw out the shape of an eye. Similar to how you would do it in 2D. Once that’s done, inflate the mass in the middle of that shape. It’ll definitely look weird at first, but there’s a method to the madness.
Also, here’s a huge lesson I learned to easily establish forms without fighting ZBrush too much. In this block out phase, sculptis pro mode tends to be a game-changer. I was originally taught to use dynamesh to block out, but I now disagree with that approach. Dynamesh has it’s purpose, but when you just need to push and pull mass around to establish form, sculptis will get you there.

Anyway, after you’ve inflated the eye lids, append a sphere, scale it and position it where the eyeball would go. There’s plenty of nuance to this, but it’s difficult to explain in text and I simply didn’t capture pics to elaborate. I’ll do that on a later post when I share the progress I’m currently at.
Now, deflate the lids until they wrap around the eyeball as eyelids do. Use pinch to define the edges and clay tubes to add mass in areas where you’d find fat deposits.

I know that tiny bit of text isn’t enough to establish a good workflow for yourself, but I’m mostly just blogging all this out to solidify the techniques in my mind. If there’s anyone out there actually reading this and would like a demonstration, I can make a video.

Ok. Now that eyeball was only the first sculpt. Day 1. Where things have developed from here is actually pretty shocking to me. Day 3 and forward will all be separate posts, but I want to combine day 1 and 2 here.

My 2nd day, I focused on lips. Here’s the reference I used

This led to a pretty decent sculpt and it actually wasn’t the only reference I used, I just can’t find the other one right now. The other reference showed the muscles under the skin so it made it easier to visualize where to put the mass.

I’ve taken to TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to post clips of the process. If you’d like to check those out, here are the links:

@mayjormayham Sculpting someone a day at a time by only sculpting 1 feature every morning. Who do you think this will be? 'Dystopia' by Neutrin05 is under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0) Music promoted by BreakingCopyright: http://bit.ly/Neutrin05-Dystopia #artist #creative #art #3d #3dart ♬ 1901 – Instrumental – Phoenix

More to come. If you enjoy this post, please leave a comment below. Although I do like to use this blog to record my progress, I tend to keep a majority of the info in written form. If there’s an audience that actually wants to read this stuff regularly, I can post more often.

The post Sculpting Anatomy To Improve Overall Sculpting Technique appeared first on Khaos Kollective.