One-On-One Character Sculpting course

The Art of Toy Characters: Digital Sculpting Essentials

Here is a detailed description of what you will be learning during this course, broken up into 10 weeks.

Week One: The Power of Simplicity

In this week we will start by learning the basic controls inside ZBrushm from rotating, panning, zooming around our sculpts, understanding how to move seamlessly around your sculpts is one of the core skills that you need to learn so it becomes like second nature.

We will learn the main four brushes that we will be using 90% of the time during this course, we will go over IMM primitives which is the main tool that I use for any of my sculpts.

You will learn how to sculpt two simple characters using IMM primitives.

And finally, we will go over understanding shapes, we will go over five different characters to analyse and break each one into the building blocks that make those characters.

Assignment Week One:

I want you to choose three characters and break them down as I showed in Lesson 09, and if you feel comfortable you can choose one of those characters, the simplest one preferably and start blocking them using the techniques and tools that I showed you.

Week Two: The building blocks of the body

Now that we are acquainted with ZBrush we will start this week by customising ZBrush and making it feel like home, we will start customising the UI by adding a couple of buttons and brushes that we are going to use frequently which will make our life so much easier.

Then we will start by sculpting a body, using all the techniques that we learned in Week one but now we are taking them to the next level, once we have the body standing it’s time to give it a head, and we will start by sculpting a simple head using IMM primitives, and once we have that head ready we will make some edits so we can create three different head shapes by tweaking the initial shapes that make the head.

Once we have all the building blocks now we can start playing with shapes so we can change that body shapes to a new scale and style.

Finally, I will showcase three characters that I sculpted and show you how I blocked those characters using the exact same techniques that we discussed in the lessons.

Assignment Week Two:

I want you to start blocking your own character or if you could like you can follow along and sculpt the character that I am building.

Week Three: Let’s Dynamesh

One of the strongest tools inside ZBrush is Dynamesh, it works like magic, now that we have the blocking of the main elements ready it’s time to merge some element so we can go those nice beautiful shapes. We will learn about subdividing inside ZBrush and how we can use that with Dynamesh.

We will go over all the elements and see which of the pieces we will be merging and dynameshing and which we will keep for the next stage.

And then we can start sculpting a lion head for our character, we will be using a couple of new tools and brushes.

Finally, I will be showcasing a couple of characters to show you the progress on real projects to see those techniques used on designer toys.

Assignment Week Three:

I want you to start sculpting the head for your character or you can follow along and sculpt the stylised lion head that I am working on, and I also want you to use Dynamesh on the body that we created in the 2nd week.

Week Four: Let’s dress up

We have a body and we have the head blocked in, it’s time to put some cloth on that body we will be sculpting a full outfit, letterman jacket, hoodie and pants, we will start by blocking them and overlay them keeping in mind how they need to be layered.

We will also be learning about the dynamic subdivision and see how that is different from the classic subdivs.

And finally we will go over some characters to show you the progress on how I deal with clothing on different projects.

Assignment Week Four:

You will need to sculpt the clothing for your character or you can choose to follow along and create the clothing for the character Leo that I am working on.

Week Five: Hand sculpting mastery

It’s all about hands this week, the most dreaded subject for any artist, from painters, sculptors toy designer, why do you think there are so many character with their hands behind their back or in their pockets?

We will start by blocking what is known in the classical animation work by Mittens, it’s all about breaking everything down to it’s simplest shapes, we will go over some examples from animation books and character design books, I want you to understand what are the building blocks for a hand and what makes a hand look meh and what makes a hand look relaxed and realistic.

We will start by sculpting the hands for Leo, but then we will be jumping into creating a couple of different types of hands, from skinny long fingers, to creepy ones, to super cute tiny ones.

This week’s showcase will be sculpting different hands and also going over some characters that I sculpted for toys.

And before I forget I will be teaching you how to pose a character holding a spray can, you can’t call yourself a toy designer if you haven’t sculpted at least one character holding a spray can.

Assignment Week Five:

I want you to sculpt the hands for your character or the hands of Leo and I also want you to sculpt two extra hands in different styles.

Week Six: Intro to Footware

Well it’s about time we got to the cool items right? In this week we will be talking basic shoe scultping, we will be sculpting different types of shoes and we will start with simple ones and take it up a notch with each one we do after.

And then we can give Leo some nice boatshoes, I will be teaching how to blocking the shoes from primitves and then I will be showing you a beautiful techniques that makes creating shoes so much fun, we will go over the hard way and then I will show a simpler way which involves a plugin.

And like each week we will go over some shoes that I did for different characters

Assignment week six:

I need you to sculpt the shoes for your character, keep them simple, please don’t choose air one jordans (have patience we will do that in week Seven)

Week Seven: This is for the Sneakerheads

Now let’s get serious about footware, shoes are very important I mean look at Spiderman into the spiderverse, do you think it would have been this cool without those Nikes?

We will take everything we learned in week Six and pump up to the next level I will be showing you how to sculpt realistic shoes we will start by adding some nice details to the boat shoes then we can delight ourselves with some cool Mini Nike Air Jordans, then we will be sculpting the Fear of God Shoes.

I will be teaching you how to use the curve tool and we will scratch the surface on Booleans.

And remember what I told you about Extracting in ZBrush, well now it’s time to work like the pros.

And like each week we will go over some shoes that I did for different characters

Assigment week Seven:

I want you do add some details to your shoes or follow along and add details to Leo

Week Eight: Beyond the Form Mastering Sculptural Details

In this we will start by adding details, we will sculpt Leo’s mane and make it look epic, we will dip our toes into using custom brushes. We will add some wrinkles to his face to make him look older and meaner using the dam standard brush

And I will also show you how you can create your own curve brushes and how we can use them to add details to our characters like stitching to the clothing and the shoes.

We will also be adding metal buttons to the clothing using some IMM brushes found in ZBrush and we will be also looking at adding a zipper.

Assignment week Eight:

This week I would like to add details to your character or if you followed along with my characters I would like you add details to Leo.

Week Nine: From Rigid to Natural

Let’s make Leo feel alive a simple tilt of the head an arm pose and a hand holding a cup of joe can take our charcter from static to expressive.

We will look like why we kept the clothing in Dynamic subdivision and why it’s important to master sculpting using low polygon count.

And finally I will be showing you how to model a cup of coffee to go using one of the most underrated and the hardest tools inside ZBrush the might ZModeler (I am kidding it’s not that hard)

Assignment Week Nine:

Pose your own character and keep it simple, sometimes less is more. If you are following along please pose Leo and I also want you to sculpt an accessory for you character be it Leo or your own.

Week 10