Sculpting Mimi (Patreon)

I think I'm about 3 hours into sculpting Mimi's head, and I'm still asking myself whether it looks like her. It's the eyes that are throwing me off. I wasn't happy with them when I drew the model sheet, so of course I'm not happy with them in 3D. And since the whole point of this is to get comfortable with Zbrush, I could do the same as I did for the model sheet - erase the eyes and start over.

Since this is the first I've touched Zbrush in about a month, after only playing with it for a week, naturally I still haven't built up instincts for how to do things, or what brushes to use. I've seen a lot of artists use the clay build-up brush, so that's mostly what I use, unless the standard brush feels a better fit.

Even just prepping the base model for sculpting is something I'm still learning. One '10 tips' post recommended only using Dynamesh for the model's silhouette, and then subdivisions for the rest of the process. It doesn't explain why - Dynamesh rebuilds your mesh based on an adjustable voxel resolution. If you need more detail, you have to remesh your model. With subdivisions, you just add another layer of divisions.

One problem I was running into while using that "Dynamesh first, then subDs" approach, was there would be little bumps or divots that no amount of smooth could remove. Looking at the wireframe revealed the cause - triangles on the base layer. When subdivided these become quads, but the way those quads flow causes a pinch.

The fix for those pinches appears to be Zbrush's Sculptris mode. What this does, is it increases or decreases the surface detail based on the size of your brush. Large brush = less detail, and so on. It got rid of those bumps, and it may make it easier to redo Mimi's eyes.