With my references ready and my previs completed, I began the most time-consuming stage: sculpting my original character in ZBrush. This took me roughly 3–4 weeks, from late July to around mid-August.
Since I wanted realistic body proportions with some stylised features, I paid extremely close attention to anatomy. I created the entire body first, making sure all muscles, joints, and proportions were believable. One of my main concerns during sculpting was making sure the clothes wouldn’t intersect with the body during animation later. So I sculpted the character carefully, considering space between clothing and the base mesh.
After the body sculpt was complete, I added the clothing. I had a very clear image of how I wanted the character to look, inspired by JRPG aesthetics, so I sculpted the garments directly onto the body. The final high-poly sculpt ended up being around 14 million polygons, which captured all the fine details I wanted.
Surprisingly, ZBrush didn’t give me many technical problems. No major crashes, no corrupted files. This part went smoothly, which I was grateful for because I knew the next stages wouldn’t be as forgiving.
This stage ended with a finished high-detail sculpt that I was proud of and ready to take into Maya for retopology.
Sculpting in ZBrush
Screenshots
