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Facunda Ganesh
Learn how to sculpt a realistic male face in ZBrush in this FlippedNormals Exclusive. You'll see the entire process, from start to finish. The goal is to teach you a methodical and well-tested approach to making realistic faces time and time again.
See Through the Magic
Sculpting a realistic face is often seen as an almost occult experience, reserved for only a few. In this tutorial series, we'll show you that it's not magic - and that there's a clear formula you can follow. Once you understand the steps, you can start to truly learn how to sculpt anything.
Sculpted From a Sphere
In order to truly understand the fundamentals, we are starting off from a sphere instead of a base mesh. This makes it a lot more challenging, and you'll get a better understanding of how to truly sculpt a human head, instead of simply moving proportions of a base mesh around.
Taught by Industry Professionals
Your instructors, Henning Sanden & Morten Jaeger, have worked on some of the biggest movies in the last decade, from Guardians of the Galaxy, Pacific Rim and Pirates of the Caribbean - as character modellers. In this tutorial series, they will share their secrets to sculpting good faces, and providing tons of useful advice along the way too. They are also the founders of FlippedNormals.
As with anything rewarding, this also requires a lot of hard work. To be a successful character artist, you need to have a solid foundation in a lot of fields, which takes time and dedication to learn.
Whether you're a beginner looking to become a character artist, or you've been trying to learn character art for a while without much progress, this article is for you! The foundation for all character art is figure sculpting, so that will be the primary focus of this article. Everything else, such as topology, UVs, shading, etc., is secondary to figure sculpting.
We've created a huge library of character courses that are perfect for artists wanting to become character artists. These tutorial series and resources aren't 100% needed, but they are one huge shortcut for learning how to sculpt
We highly recommend this course for everyone who wants to learn how to sculpt. The tutorial series contains everything we've learnt over the last 17 years of sculpting. Learn what appeal is, understand gesture, block out your sculpts, sculpt stylized characters and a lot more concepts you won't learn elsewhere.
We're going to teach you all about the human body so you can create really cool characters. We'll make the tricky stuff simple, so even if you're new to this, you can still learn a lot. We'll teach you about bones, muscles, fat, and skin, and how to use them to create 3D characters that people will love!
Understanding the anatomy of the head and face is incredibly important for character artists, and we built this anatomy bust to help you learn head anatomy easier. It's a unique take on the face anatomy, as it focuses far more on the fat pads of the face compared to the tiny face muscles. Facial muscles are important for expressions, but for a static face fad pads are far more important. I personally use this tool for all my face sculpts, from realistic faces to creatures.
This is an incredible tutorial series by Christian Bull that covers a lot of fundamental sculpting and anatomy concepts not found in other tutorial series. We recommend this tutorial series once you feel comfortable sculpting and want to take your work to the next level.
We made this masterclass for intermediate to advanced 3D artists who wants to learn how to make a full character bust, start to finish. Everything is shown in realtime, from the first concept sculpt, retopology, UV, texture painting in Substance Painter, to doing the final pores. We also cover skin shading and rendering in Blender. We highly recommend this course for anyone who understands how to use 3D software and wants to improve their character workflow.
A 3D Character Artist is someone whose primary job is creating characters and creatures. This tutorial isn't industry specific and applies to anyone who wants to do character art as a career or seriously improve their skills. Whether you want to work in games, film and VFX, or figurines, this will be useful to you.
Get as much exposure to character work as possible. Go to museums, look at statues in town, and put your favorite characters as phone and computer wallpapers. You'll feel inspired and you'll learn even when you're not sculpting.
You should now be at a level where you can start doing your own projects and have fun with the characters! You've been doing figure sculpting for a while and have a decent understanding of anatomy. It's time to take a character from start to finish!
The ultimate goal is for you to create your own awesome personal projects! You're now at a level where you should be able to make really cool projects without worrying about basic figure sculpting mistakes.
The goal with exposing yourself to character art, is for your brain to get used to this new world of making characters and to constantly try to improve on your work. You won't have ZBrush around all the time, but you'll often see people (characters) and animals (creatures), so you'll have plenty of opportunities to observe and improve even when you aren't sculpting. L
Lack of observation is a huge issue. By exposing your yourself to characters and creatures, you'll gradually get an intuitive understanding of how they work - both regarding mechanical anatomy, but also in terms of how people behave, fashion and designs.
ZBrush is only sculpting package being seriously used and it's dominating both games and film. For people who can't afford the full version of ZBrush, ZBrush Core is a stripped-down version of ZBrush. You can also sculpt using Blender, but the sculpting tools are nowhere near as good as ZBrush and we recommend moving to ZBrush eventually.
You need a tablet for sculpting, as it offers far more control and freedom than a mouse. A mouse will destroy your hand and arm in the long run. Wacom and Huion makes good tablets. Don't worry too much about which tablet you're getting, as you can always upgrade as you're getting more advanced.
The most common issue we've seen when it comes to beginners of figure sculpting is that the body is treated like a potato, where you carve certain features, only hinting at anatomical features. We cover this in-depth in this video, which will explain the issue better than text ever can.
Once, I watched a video about bosses from Bloodborne and the narrator talked about how Berserk was an inspiration for the creator; then in a different video I heard about Berserk again, and I thought - what is that? I searched for it and found out there was an anime which I then watched and fell in love with. Guts is the name of the protagonist. I had already done fan art before, of a game called Little Nightmares, so, I decided to do a piece inspired by Berserk. There is a lot of images of Guts, so finding references was not difficult at all. I mostly found images of his face, these 2 were my favorites and the most used ones:
From there, the process of trying to figure out how Guts looks to me began. I spent countless hours changing every part of the face, and also looking at the reference of real people, selecting parts of them, and sculpting. This project is pretty much a Frankenstein. The hardest part was the expression; it is not very complicated but it was tough to make it look realistic. Again, I was still learning anatomy while making this, so it was my practice.
All the micro skin details are made with the help of the awesome displacement maps from TexturingXYZ. The maps come with different versions of detail in the RGB channels, 3 textures in one file. I used Mari to project them onto the mesh.
The hair was created inside Maya using XGen, a very easy tool to use. The character has a unique hairstyle seen in most of the drawings, so in order to transform it into something more realistic, so to speak, I kept guides similar to the reference. All of them end up in clumps, and the hairs at the forehead go forward. I did a smooth transition from front to back so that it didn't look too much like in the drawings. In the modifiers, I used 3 versions of clumping, 1 cut modifier to remove even length, and 3 different noise modifiers, the last one for stray hairs. For the eyebrows and eyelashes, I used similar modifiers: clumping, cut, and noise, not as complex as the hair.
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