Designing a Character Bust
In the previous two chapters we have been
working with ZBrush primitives to start our sculptures. While sculptures
started from ZBrush primitives can be rebuilt into animation-ready meshes
using the ZBrush Topology tools, in some cases you will want to start from
an imported mesh instead. You may have a generic head or body model, or
perhaps a generic animation-ready base mesh is used for all the characters
in your pipeline. For more information on remeshing your finished sculpture
to create an entirely new edge layout, see Chapter 7, “Transpose, ZSphere
Rigging, Retopology, and Mesh Extraction.”
In this chapter, we will import a polygon mesh from a third-party
modeling package. It will be a relatively simple humanoid head mesh from
the Pixologic website. The mesh is from a selection of meshes modeled by
Ang Nguyen and made available for free. Please check the accompanying
DVD for these models. In this chapter we’ll create two character busts.
I’ll walk you through the steps involved in designing and sculpting the
primary and secondary forms; we’ll talk detailing in the next chapter
when we cover alphas and texture stamps.