Tips for sculpting characters?
Looking for tips on how to sculpt characters. I suck at it right now, and would like to improve. Any suggestions? thanks for any help you can give.
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I desperatly need help with this as well as there are no tutorials on the subject in the beta (even though I guess there’ll be some in the final game). :)
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My tip, just do it :D
I really can't figure it out myself. I turn on older Kareem streams and try to mimic what he does, and to some extend, it helps .
But if anyone got "the golden advice"....please help me aswell -
The only way really is to just keep trying :)
That said, I'm going to write down a few things I've learned so far:
- Use the mirror setting, it makes it easy to keep symmetry which is almost always what you want.
- Make sure you turn off "keep upright" and grid
- Get comfortable with how the "scope in/out" feature works (on groups and sculpts) as you'll be jumping between different body parts a lot. In particular it's a bit confusing how body parts automatically become "groups" if you move more than one sculpt into them. Sometimes you'll need to scope a number of times to get to a sculpt.
- Learn the Move controllers if you have them, it makes sculpting way more intuitive. There's a tutorial that covers the basic interactions but I think it's not available unless you've done the basic ones first.
- Get used to pressing L2/R2 lightly to make small adjustments, this is totally necessary for precision placement.
- Keep moving the camera. If you sculpt from the same angle for too long your sculpt is not going to look how you think :) Try to find the most comfortable camera placement for what you're doing at the moment.
- The Kareem method of sculpting by smearing and cutting layer upon layer is amazing, but so far it's too advanced for me. I stick with stamping individual shapes, sometimes adding, sometimes subtracting, and usually with some blend. By creativity and thinking ahead you can make surprisingly organic looking sculpts from a few shapes, and they are easy to tweak later. But this is a matter of taste, I'm sure there are other ways to sculpt too.
- Don't try to get things placed perfectly at once. It's usually easier to stamp them down roughly where you want them and then move them around by (lightly) pressing L2/R2 until you get them right. You can also resize the shapes, or even switch to the stretch tool to change their proportions.
- Be careful with the looseness settings on the shapes before stamping them; you can't change them individually later (AFAIK) so it's usually best to set them to fairly detailed. Otherwise some smaller details may become too fuzzy. You can increase the looseness of the entire sculpt later if needed.
- Start with an idea. To me this makes it much more fun, since I have a goal in mind. It also guides the choices you make along the way. It may be that you get another, better idea along the way; then go with that, but don't start from a blank slate. I know that at first, before you know the tools, it's really hard to even come up with ideas, so you may have to spend some time doing random shapes. But pretty soon it will make sense.
- Don't be afraid to experiment; The best way to learn is by failing and trying again. You can't ruin anything since there's always the "undo" button. You can also save versions of your character now and then if that feels safer. But it's easy to get too attached to your sculpts; if it doesn't turn out how you wanted, consider to start over instead of tweaking it further. You've probably learned something and the next try is likely to be better!
Hope this helps, and good luck! -
I don't know if it was mentioned in the essay below, which was all good advice up to where I read to, but my advice would be to work with the lines that connect all the puppet together. For example place a belt over the line connecting the belly and the bottom. Keep it simple to start with, paint in sculpt mode and keep going. If you want to blend out the lines I have found that placing a sculpt ball with blend mode on in the exact same place on both the parts you want to connect. between the lines such as an elbow.
Also feel free to dissect other people's work. That's the best way to learn anything in dreams.
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