Zbrush Torso

Final renders of my torso sculpt.

I also searched for inspiration elsewhere, not only looking at diagrams of the bone and muscle structure but looking at 3d sculpts of what other artists have done, of course this is years of practise and I can only admire their abilities, with the three images below the muscles and bones are really clear for us to see and they just look great and helped me when looking back at reference. Although I didn't use this as much because I know quite a lot of artist aren't perfect and there are mistakes which is why I used diagrams as my main reference.

Here are a few selected reference I found myself, I mostly used the ones provided however I will not post them on many on here just the four main ones. 

To begin with I had never done any sculpting before, I had looked into it a little and saw other peoples work but it just looked too complicated for me, they is so much detail and human anatomy knowledge needed to know to get it all right, so I looked forward to what this module could bring. 

It took me a little while to get used to the program Zbrush, the interface is very weird and I wasn't sure where all the functions were but after week 3 I got the hang of it and began doing the tasks in class with more confidence. 

As the weeks went on I started looking at the reference provided and looking into where everything fits in and connect, all the bones and muscles, and learning their names and how they are formed on the human body, it was much easier to understand when doing a bit on learning on this and really helped a lot as I knew what I was sculpting on the body and not just putting lines in anywhere. 

So when starting to sculpt the torso I worked from the lowest subdivision level and worked my way up, it is better this way because if I started from a high level with too much detail the sculpt would end up lumpy and not look good at all, it is better to do it in sections, when I couldn't put any more detail in I divided it to the next level. 

I began marking down the upper body, starting with the stand-out landmarks such as the clavicle, then I could work my down to the pecks, deltoids and abs. Also marking down the main landmarks on the back such as the scapula and trapezius and the lower body. After I worked on the deltoids, as the whole arm wasn't needed I could focus on the shoulder more and the same with the legs, just the top of the thigh was needed for submission. The most difficult part for me were the getting the lower back right as well as the abs, I am happy with my results but could have added more detail in on these places. The sternocleidomastoid (neck) was a little difficult to keep added detail in, I found it quite hard to get right but got their in the end.

The process was quite easy but time consuming and took a lot of patience, but once I got into it I started to enjoy sculpting more and is something I would like to do to add detail to my environments. I am not so sure about going further in character studies as a career. So with the process it was simply added on and smoothing it out, I mainly used the clay builder brush and smoothed it out to produce the final results. If I had more time I would have added in details such as scars pours..., something to give it more detail and stand out more. 

Character designs

For the final 3 character designs I have chosen to do two male characters and one female, using all three different body types, the first character I will design is a Roman Patrician (upper class) who has an endomorph body type. The second character I will design is an African women who has an ectomorph body type, and finally my final character will be a Lizard man with a mosomorph body type.

1. My first character design will be based on upper class Roman (Roman Patrician), I chose this specific character because I struggled to think of a good example of an Endomorph body type. However I think this fits in quite well and when I think of these people, usually I think they are overweight after watching programmes with these type of characters in. The robes are covering quite a lot of the body but I think the size of the arms and "cubby" head gives it away.

Character reference

2. My second character is an African women who is squeezing orange juice into a bowl, this idea came from one of the poses I found on posemaniacs.com and helped me quite a lot getting the proportion correct, after that I added the clothing in with the help of the reference I gathered. This certain character has an Ectomorph body and is quite tall compared to the other two, she is fairly skinny, the idea to do an African woman came from some research on athletes and I found myself looking at African clothing and thought it would be a good idea. 

Character reference 

3. For my final character design I wanted to change it up a bit from doing just humans and mutate it into a lizard man, this idea came from the new amazing spiderman film however I didn't want it too look too "Lizardy" I wanted it to keep a good amount of human features which I quite like, this character has good muscle definition, but not over the top, with the body type Mesomorph their bodies can develop muscle much faster than the other two types. 

Character reference

5 minute+ life drawing

Here are a selection the more detailed drawings which I spent over five minutes on in life drawing class, as the weeks went on I applied different shading techniques to try make my drawings more 3D looking and realistic instead of flat on the page, using 4 shades of the pencil I achieved this as the best I could.

2-4 minute life drawing

Here is a selection of quick two to four minute drawings, using the 30 second method I tried to mark down my drawings by getting the body shape much more accurately, I found this much easier and quite happy with the results, I was able to get good proportions on my drawings, however I didn't have enough time to add shading, instead I focused on the body shape.