Zbrush Week, day 1 (Patreon)

You ever try to learn something several times, fail each time, only to find out you were approaching it the wrong way? That's me with Zbrush.

When I first tried Zbrush, I'd seen two ways of sculpting characters - creating a base mesh with Zspheres, or modeling the character in a program like Maya, and bringing it into Zbrush for detailing. With the introductions of Dynamesh and Sculptris, I'd see artists instead start with a sphere, and shape it into a full character as if it were clay. NONE of these techniques worked for me. But blocking in a character with simple shapes? I wish I'd tried that much sooner.

For these first steps into ZBrush, I'm working on Aeolus's Davey. While I wanted to stick to Zbrush to force myself to learn it, I cheated when it came to his hands.  It's always tricky getting the finger placement & lengths just right.  I can't tell you how many otherwise excellent sculpts I've seen that needed to be adjusted because the character wasn't capable of making a fist. By blocking the hands in in Maya, I could have quickly verify that the fingers could indeed close properly.