Zbrush - How to Sculpt Faces

1. Intro: Do you want to learn how to sculpt faces and ZBrush? Learning anatomy can be difficult. The human face is highly complex with a lot of different bones and muscles underneath. Finding all that information may seem like a huge undertaking, but the truth is, you don't need to spend hours learning all the names of the bones and muscles in order to get good at sculpting faces. This course is designed to show you all the most important features of the face and how they relate to one another. In each lesson, we'll go over how to create the various pieces like the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, and how to connect them altogether using basic proportions and guidelines that you can continue to use in future projects. We'll go over the shapes and forms for every piece, as well as the basic anatomy of the human skull to create a base for the head that we'll use to build piece-by-piece, giving you complete control over how you handle your sculpt. Even if you're a complete beginner, the lessons in this course goes step-by-step so that you can see every decision we make and follow along. As we progress through each lesson will slowly build up our character face by blocking and the most important shapes, we'll go over basic proportions and how to line things up before merging everything together to create a final piece, you will need a current license for ZBrush and a computer to run the software. You can sculpt using your mouse, but even using a simple digital tablet can greatly improve your accuracy and stability when sculpting, I hope you're ready to start learning. Let's get into it. 2. Custom UI: Hello everyone and welcome to this course. In this course we are going to learn how to sculpt faces in ZBrush real quick. If you are a beginner in ZBrush and you're not familiar with the user interface checkout my class at ZBrush for beginners. It's a two-hour class that goes over all of the main functionality of ZBrush. It'll take you through things like sculpting and a lot of other important things just to get you up and going with the program if you haven't used it before. For those of you that are already familiar with ZBrush, we're going to get started. The first thing that we need to do is set up our user interface with some brushes and a few other things. When you first open up ZBrush, the lightbox should already be open. You can just go to project and select a DynaMesh sphere. And that's what I have open here in order to customize our user interface, the first thing we need to do is go up to Preferences, Config, go down and turn Enable Customize on. You'll see that when I turn enabled customize on, it sort of opens up the borders around my canvas to give me some space for docking any buttons or brushes or anything else. The first thing that I'm going to do is go over to my brush menu here on the left. Grab this little wheel icon and click and drag it over to the right and it will dock it on the right. This is my Brush History menu. And if you haven't already used any brushes, this will probably be empty. So to select your brushes, your brush menu is over here on the left or you can hit B on your keyboard to bring up your brushes. The most common brushes that I use for sculpting our clay clay buildup. And of course the Move brush and other brushes like polish and Damian standard. So what I'm gonna do is just go into my brush menu, select one of those brushes and it will appear here in my brush history. And I can go back to my brush menu and select the next brush clay buildup. And you see that it pops in here on my history. So I'm just going to go through and select the brushes that I want to use. Those brushes will populate over here on my brush menu. Now that I have these brushes all in my history, and I have already turned on Enable Customize. I can hold Control and Alt and click and drag any of those and dock them anywhere on my user interface. You can put them at the top, put them down here. You can even put them on the side over here if you want. If you play something and you accidentally place something where you don't want it, you can hold Control and Alt click and drag it into your Canvas and drop it there and it will disappear. And then you can just replace it with something else. Once I have all my brushes the way that I want them docked at the bottom. The next thing I'll do is go to the right, click on my brush menu and it will collapse it. If you want to get rid of this menu, you can click on that wheel icon one time and it will go away. And of course, to bring it back, you can just go back to the brush menu and grab it from here. Once I've closed my brush menu, I'm back to my tool menu on the right. I want to go to Geometry. Go down to modify Topology. I'm going to find the button that says delete hidden, hold Control and Alt. Click and drag it up here anywhere on your interface and you can talk it there. The next button that I want to find, if I scroll down and find the visibility menu, is this button that says Hide part. If I hold Control and Alt, click and drag that up here, now I have hide part and delete hidden. And those two buttons are used pretty frequently and I use them a lot of my projects and you'll see why later. The last thing that I'm going to dock on my menu, if I go back to my geometry menu and go down to the DynaMesh menu. Dynamesh is something that we'll use a lot in this project. So just hold Control and Alt, click and drag that up here next to these buttons and drop it there. And we're also going to drag this resolution slider for DynaMesh right up there next to it. The last thing that we're going to use is Z remeasure, which is just two spots down below the DynaMesh menu. And we'll grab the Z remeasure button, put it up here at the top. And I'll also grab the target poly counts slider and drag and drop it right next to Z remeasure. You'll see in later videos when we use those and what they do. Once you have your User Interface setup the way that you want it and all your brushes set at the bottom. Go back up to Preferences. Turn Enable, Customize off. And if you want, you can save your user interface as a file on your computer and load it up later. Once you've done all of these steps, make sure that you click on Store config, and it will actually store this user interface so that every time you open ZBrush, it reloads your user interface the same way every time. This is just a fast way to set up your user interface to save time rather than having to go and open up all of these menus and you want to find a certain button. You can dock any button or any brush from any menu anywhere on your user interface. And it saves you a lot of time and speeds things up in the process. In the next video, we're going to talk about the human skull and what's underneath all of the muscles because it's important to understand the foundation moving forward when you're sculpting faces or characters or anything like that. So I'll see you in the next one. 3. The Skull Parts And Names: Welcome back. In this video we are going to go over the basics of the human skull. So in ZBrush you can go up to the light box, go to Tool. When you click on tool, there is this little skeleton models down here by Ryan Kanzleien. And if you open that up, it will give you a human anatomical model with all of the muscles and bones in the human body. This is actually a really great reference if you're looking for any kind of muscle reference. And it's the entire human body. I don't believe that it's every muscle in the human body, but it is the most important ones, the major ones that you can see underneath the fat and the skin. So if you want, you can use this as reference for your artwork. The best thing about this model is that there is a skeleton underneath all of these muscles. So if we zoom in here, hold Alt and click on the skeleton. This is the top of the skull. I'm going to turn on poly frame so I can see the wireframe. And if you go into solo mode, it'll just show your skeleton. This is an excellent representation of the human skull. This model is super-helpful for reference, or you can go on Google Images and lookup references for the human skull. So the human skull is made up of a ton of different bones and we're not gonna go over all of them. But I did highlight in color, I made poly groups out of all of the most important parts that I want to talk about. The first is this big yellow area, which is your forehead, and that is called the frontal bone. The frontal bone, of course, travels all the way down to the top of the eye sockets and there are more bones, but we're just going to call this the frontal bone for now. Notice how this connects to the top of the eye sockets and creates this kind of shape. How on the inner corner of the eyes here, it's lands up and out to the right. And there's this high point right here that travels down and write it over this way. So there's sort of this shape that comes up here to this high point and then down and over to the outer corner of the eye, right over here. This whole frontal bone connects to this top portion of the eye socket. So that's something important to remember. And you'll see what I mean when we start sculpting our face. Next is this little bone right here. This is the nasal bone. So this is just the top part of the nose of course. So this shape here kind of comes down at almost a straight angle and comes straight out. And this is all bone and the rest of the nose, as you can see in this model, is cartilage that comes out from that bone. These are just things to keep in mind. Next is this part here that connects to the teeth. And just for brevity sake, I'm just going to call this the maxilla because that is the part that actually connects to the teeth and there are more bones in here, but this I'm just going to call the maxilla. The maxilla, of course, is the rest of the nose cavity here. And it comes down and forward. See how this sort of angles at a forward angle before the teeth come out here. And this maxilla also comes and tucks down behind where then you would see your gums attached here and all that. And it tucks underneath this next bone that we're gonna talk about, which is the zygomatic. The zygomatic is this cheekbone. This is one of the biggest bony landmarks on your face. It's the widest part of your face and you can actually feel on your own face. And you can write here below this lower left corner of your eye, just feel that cheekbone and feel how it kind of sticks out where the bone is. So this is the widest part of your face for most people, you can actually see and feel the bones sticking out there. It's important to remember the zygomatic because it's the bottom portion of the eye socket and how it connects over here to the maxilla. And just noticing the shape of the eye socket. How it's sort of a rounded shape from this lower corner going up and in with this nice round shape for the eye sockets. And the zygomatic does travel all the way back here to where your ear hole is in your skull, which lands just about the center of the skull. That's also connected to the temporal bone. We just need to know that in the temple area over here, that soft spot behind this corner of your eye is your temples. And this is the temporal bone that connects to the zygomatic. And that's where your ear is going to be. Very last. Of course, there's the mandible or the bottom jaw, something to pay attention to when you're sculpting your jaw for your character is the angle of the jaw. So it's really important to note that the jaw is never a 90 degree angle. It's never down and straight over. The natural shape of the jaw comes down from right next to this ear hole and it lines up with the ear, comes down to this sort of angle and there's a soft curve for this corner and it comes down at about 45 degrees. Then of course there's this Chine which is nice and flat in the front. So if we actually look at the skull from the bottom, you can see the shape of this jaw has almost this boomerang, sort of horseshoe shape to it. And it comes down and forward and has this nice sort of square flat line in the front like that. So this is kind of a heart-shaped to get correct. But all of these pieces connected together and you'll see when we start sculpting our face, that we work on each of these pieces just a little bit at a time to try and bring out the overall shape and proportions of the face. One of the most important things that I always like to emphasize when I'm talking about sculpting faces, is this little ridge right here connected to the outer corner of the eye sockets. So we have the zygomatic that comes down here across this way. And the zygomatic forms the bottom half of this eye socket right here. And it connects right around this corner somewhere. And you'll notice how this corner goes in. And you can see it here from this three-quarter view. It goes in toward the forehead and then it curves back and up in this sort of ridge that goes backward into the sculpt, this shape of the outer corner of the eye comes up in like this, and then back toward the skull again where it sort of connects your whole skull or your eye sockets, sort of like a pair of goggles on the front of your face. This little ridge is called the temporal ridge. The temporal ridge comes from this outer corner of the eye socket, curves in this way and then back toward the skull and creates this little ridge. And you'll see that in the next video when we start sculpting our face. And I'll show you how to create the temporal ridge and why it's so important. These are just some of the basic bones in the skull. I don't want to go over all the specifics because we're not here to learn the anatomy of the skull, like learning all the names. I don't think that that's going to be very helpful. I'm more just talking about the shapes. And I will include an image in the project files for this course. So you can download the free reference guide if you'd like, and it'll have the names of these main bones, it might just be helpful to have that on the side just so that you can refer back to it. If you're not quite sure which parts connect where or the shapes underneath. In the next video, we're actually going to start sculpting a face. And I will talk about all of these bones underneath as we go, but we'll take it one step at a time and I will see you in the next one. 4. Starting The Head: Welcome back. In this video, we are actually going to start sculpting our head. I have just started with a DynaMesh sphere in the light box. So you can go up to the lightbox, go to project, and select DynaMesh sphere from there. And I will just open up a new project with a sphere and DynaMesh already turned on. If those of you that don't know what DynaMesh is, if you go and turn on your poly frame button over here so you can see your geometry. Dynamesh just acts as a way to sort of recalculate your topology on your object. So if I were to take my Move brush like this and stretch out my geometry and you'll see that it's all chunky and it looks really bad now because I have DynaMesh turned on. I can hold Control, click and drag outside of my object, and it runs DynaMesh and recalculates the topology on my object. You can see that it's all very evenly spaced. Now, this is really good for super high detail objects. It's not good for topology if you're looking for game art and stuff like that because it's really dense. The geometry is very dense, but for sculpting, it's really great. You can also use DynaMesh. If I were to grab my Move brush and drag these parts up and drag them over and overlap them with each other. Now when I hold Control click and drag, it actually merges the two pieces together. So DynaMesh will merge any pieces that are touching as well. So that's a great way to take two objects and sort of fuse them together very quickly. We're gonna go back with control Z. And I'll turn poly frame off. The next thing that I want to talk about here is dynamic perspective. With dynamic perspective turned on, it gives us sort of a skewed version of our object. And you can see it better in a real sculpt with some detail on it. But generally with dynamic perspective turned on, it's going to baled your object toward the camera. And with it turned off, you get a true representation of what your object looks like from the side, front and back without distorting it based on the cameras. So I like to leave that I make perspective turned off while I'm sculpting at the beginning of any project, it's always, always, always a good idea to get some reference images, either from Google Images or from a royalty free sites that you can use for your projects. And the way that we import those images into ZBrush so that we can just have them on our screen is we go up to the Texture menu and select Import. You find the image that you want. I'm going to include this image in this project files for this course. For this course, you can use the skull reference that I'm about to show you. Once you click Import, nothing happens. So what you have to do is go back up to texture. And you'll see it down here in this list of textures that you have available. So you can click on that image. And right below that to the right is the Add To Spotlight button. So when you press that, it pops up on your screen and you get this little wheel icon, which is your menu. And you can click anywhere on the image and move it around. And you use this menu here to control your image and what it looks like and where you put it. So there is this little icon for scale. So I'm gonna click and drag it to the left, scale this down. And then I'll click and drag my image over to the bottom left, where it'll just stay. And that'll be my reference for what we're about to do in this video. The last thing you have to do is when you have the spotlight active, you have to go up to brush, go down two samples. You have to turn Spotlight Projection off. So by default it's turned on. And by turning it off, what that means is if you wanted to sculpt on your object, the spotlight won't interfere with your sculpting. If you have protection turned on, it won't allow you to sculpt through the image. Just make sure to go up to brush samples and turn that off. If this wheel icon is still here, press Z on your keyboard and it will go away. And if you want this image to disappear completely, hold Shift and press Z and the spotlight will disappear completely. And to bring it back, you just do the same thing. Hold Shift and press Z, and then press Z one time and it will bring up this little wheel icon. So z makes that go away. All right, so now we're set up to get started. We have our reference image in place. So let's get started. The first thing I'm gonna do is hold Control and Shift on my keyboard and go up to where my brush usually is. And this changes by selection icon. So now I can select from these trim brushes and I'm going to select the knife rectangle tool. Now when I hold Control and Shift, I have this little cutting tool that cuts into my object. This is the one that we want. We'll hold Control and Shift, click and drag about a fifth of the way in here. And just cut off that side with symmetry turned on. And if symmetry isn't on, just X on your keyboard and it'll turn it on. We've cut off both sides and that's going to make it easier to make this temporal ridge like we were talking about in the previous video. So we're going to rotate over to side view and hold Shift. And it will snap to side view like this. Now if we hold Control and click and drag our mask out, we want to mask off the lower left quarter of this object right here. Then if I hold Control and click outside of my object, it will invert my mask. Then I can just take my brush and hold S on my keyboard to change my brush size. Or you can hold space to change your brush size here. We're just going to make our brush size really big. Find the middle of this and just drag it straight down. And that's going to create the back of our jaw and the front of our face, and our chin here. It might be a little too low, so I'll bring this up just to type it. Something like that. Looks fine. Now if I hold Control and click and drag out here, it will clear my mask. And I can hold Shift and just smooth the whole thing just a tiny bit. And that's going to bring this natural angle of the jaw to me a little better. You notice the back of the skull here has a lot of different shapes in it, but it generally comes down and around to this back part that's furthest back and then comes down and in here to a point and then up and in. So it's sort of a complicated shape, but that also lines up with where the jaw goes. So I want to bring this back part of the jaw up a little higher. Because you can see here this bottom part of the skull lines up with the bottom of that cheekbone. So all of this should be lined up together at the bottom of the skull and the back lines up with that cheekbone and where the nose goes as well. So we're going to bring this back part up from the center, from the sides. And then just smooth it out a little bit. Hold Shift, smooth it down. I'm going to grab this and bring my chin forward just a tiny bit. And I'm just using my Move brush, not doing anything fancy. We're going to move this just a little bit. I want the front of the face to be flat for now, down into just that change shape. And then we'll get the shape of the jaw right here. Just a little bit. Like we said in the previous video, the angle of the jaw is not 90 degrees. It's more of like down and forward sort of angle for the back here. And then forward and down at about a 45-degree angle, something like this. And it's different for everybody. So just depending on the type of person that you're sculpting or if it's a cartoon character or realistic character, it'll probably look different, but use your best judgment there. Next, we need to get the general shape for the skull, correct. So we're going to snap to our side view and hold Shift while you're rotating and it'll snap to a side view. And I'm gonna make my brush size really big and grab the middle of the back part of the skull edges, pull it back a little bit. And then I'm going to do the same thing for the top of the skull. Pull it up just a tiny, tiny bit. Now, notice the shape here. It's sort of an egg shape for this part of the skull, if we don't include the eye sockets or any of the bottom jaw or any of that. This is sort of an egg shape. So we want to try to match that. So this furthest part back here, I want to bring this down to a point like that. Make sure that I have my point back here. That's the furthest back on the skull. And then in-between the highest point and this farthest point back here, make sure that that transitions nice and round and smooth. We can smooth this out. As we go. We're just creating a general silhouette. And you can use this little window up here for your silhouette also that helps you just see if the shape is correct, a little bit easier to see what that silhouette. We can even bring the jaw up and in if we need a little more. This is the general shape that we're going for, flattened the front of the face. We have our basic angle for our jaw. And then the back of the head where it goes farthest back, transitions up to the highest point at the center of the skull at the top, which kind of lines up with the jaw. And where that comes back. We get to move our job back a little bit more. Something like that. That looks good enough for now. Next we need to talk about the temporal ridge, where that corner of the eye socket comes in right here and then backing up and toward the skull. That's what this line is going to be for us. So we need to identify where our eyes are gonna be in our head. So I'm gonna grab my damien standard brush. And that's under B, D, and S. I guess it's the shortcut for that will make our brush size pretty big. And As a general rule for faces, the eyes are usually right in the center of the face. So like right around here. For my damien standard brush, I'm gonna go a little bit higher than the center and I'm gonna carve in because that's gonna give me a natural shape for my eyebrows. For the brow bone which is the top of the eye sockets, carve in like that and then just smooth it a tiny bit on the bottom and on the top. Very likely. We're already starting to get this eye shape in here. Now we can take our Move brush, pull these corners of the brow out. That already starts to shape that temporal ridge for us. Now I'm going to pull the bottom out as well, and that's going to be our zygomatic or underneath at the bottom part of the eye sockets. Just pull this down a tiny bit. A lot of this just comes from studying reference in a lot of art classes that I took. And we would just sit there and draw the skull for a couple of hours. And eventually you just sort of learn these shapes and learn the placement and the proportions of where everything goes. So I'm trying to sort of explain my process of how I learned the placement and proportion for all these parts. Now that we have are Our cheeks and our eyebrow, our brow bone here sort of in place. I'm going to grab the clay buildup brush. And if you hold Alt on your brush, it's going to make it subtractive, so it's going to carve into your objects. So hold Alt and then just very lightly carved circles here where the eye sockets are supposed to be. Notice how close together the eye sockets are not like the eyeballs. Because later on when I show you how to create the eyes in the eye sockets there a little farther apart than the eye sockets. So eye sockets have a little space between them, but they're generally closer together than the eyeballs. If that makes sense. Now, I've carved in this shape here, I have a little bit for the nose in the center, I had a little bit for the outer corner of the eye socket. Now I'm just going to use my Move brush to shape outer corner of the eye. So I'm gonna pull the outer part out here. Pull the bottom part down a little bit. I'm trying to match this round smooth shape at the bottom of this eye socket here as it comes over and n here toward the nose, the nasal bone. Then from this corner right here on the nasal bone, it should travel up and over to a high point right here. And then from this high point it goes down and out toward the outer corner of the eyes. Something along the lines of that. That's not bad. Then we just get into the general shaping of the cheeks. Right here. The zygomatic is what follows the bottom of the eye socket. And it is also the widest part of your face. So that's a very important part to remember and to get down. For this front here, I'm just using my Move brush to flatten this part down a little bit. We're not going to sculpt the skull entirely. I just want to do this structure for the eye sockets because it's very important when you're creating a face to get this structure correct and to sort of understand the underlying shape there. Now we can just drag with our Move brush is really, really low polygon density, which is making it a lot easier for us if I turn on polygon fill. Because now you have less polygons to work with and you can get your shapes a lot quicker. I'm going to drag the corners of the eye down a little bit more. This is looking pretty good. This is okay for this shape. We've got this bottom part of the eye socket. The bottom outer corner is over here a little bit extended out and it comes up in N at a nice round angle, can even bring this in a little more. And then up to this high point here in the eye socket, and then down and out to this outer corner up here that connects to that temporal ridge. A temporal ridge comes in like this from that outer corner of the eye. Just be sure to be checking from all angles. Looking here, look at the compared to your reference image here. We're not trying to get it 100% accurate. We just want the foundation. We just want the shapes to be there because we're going to layer a bunch of stuff over the top of this anyway. So we don't need a ton of detail for this. Of course, at any point you already have DynaMesh turned on so you can hold Control, click and drag, and it will recalculate the topology if it's too stretched out on your object. And you can do it like that. Next. Now that we have these eye sockets and these cheeks sort of formed the way that we want them. We need to shape the back of the head and the top of the head. Correct. So that the rest of the head looks proportionally the way that it should when you're looking at a head straight on like this. But temporal ridge, as you'll notice here, it comes in a lot further than this outside part of the skull. It's because you need more room for your brain inside of your skull there a good way to get that to come out is if we rotate and hold Shift to snap to side view, I'm gonna make my brush size really big and find the center of my head right about here. And then halfway between the center and the back, like right about here. I want to grab it with my Move brush, this sort of an angle and just pull that out. That already creates that shape for you right here. Now this does mess up our angles for the top of our heads, we're going to have to go back and just readjust this a little bit. The forehead is also slanting back too far. So what what I wanna do is halfway between the top and halfway between here, right about there. I want to grab with my Move Motion, just move it forward. And then gently. One more time. We're going to create the hairline, which is right, is called the widow's peak. Sorry. It's hard to sculpt and talk at the same time. We want this forehead to match the angle a little bit here. For this. We don't want it to be back slanted bag like this because that's not correct. We want it to be forward a little bit more. Then from this point right here, the widow's peak or your hairline is somewhere right around between the middle of where the top of your brow is and the top of the head. So it's right around here, like center spot here. So for our skull, we're going to call it right about there. That's gonna be our widow's peak. And then between the widow's peak on the top of the head, I'm going to make sure that it transitions nice and smoothly. Top of the head should just line up right around where the jaw is. And then we just follow that curve back. And there's another point right here that matches up with the widow's peak here and here. There are all these points that eventually you just learn are there. And you can use these as a map for yourself to kind of guide the way that you shape your skull. There's the widow's peak here, top, highest point of the head right here, 1 here. That sort of matches with the minute the widow's peak on the other side. And then it comes down and back to the farthest point back in the skull, which then comes down and in to this lowest point in the back of the skull that lines up with the bottom of the cheek and the ears. It's kind of a complicated shape, but like I said, eventually just by doing this more, you'll eventually learn these shapes and learn little shortcuts for yourself, whatever makes the most sense to you. But this is the way that I do it when I'm thinking about a face and how I want it to be structured. We're already getting that temporal region here, which is nice. I think the back of the head is out. Now we need to look at the top of the head. This isn't the right shape. I don't have a reference here for the top of the head, but what we can do, well, we want it to be an egg shape. So what I'll do is grab these sides, not up here, but I want to grab it like right there. I'll do a little bit further down towards the sides and pull it out. And now these back corners can be pushed in a little bit. I'm trying to create an egg shape. General egg shape. For this one, I'm looking down at the top of my head. I'm just getting my brush size really big. And we can rotate around our head to, to see like the angle right here. This looks a little too low. So we can grab in-between there, pull that out more, and just go around. It's a little too tall, which will affect our forehead, which will affect this. You're just going to have to play with these shapes a little bit until you get just the right shape that you're looking for. An excellent book for reference in general is the book anatomy for sculptors. And they have all kinds of reference images of the skull and the head. And it's a great book for translating 2D to 3D. I would highly recommend that book is, it's definitely taught me a lot about sculpting and about just using reference all the time is how you learn the fastest when you're trying to learn new shapes and learn how to make something in 3D. But that's an excellent book. I highly recommended autonomy a lot about the skull and about the face in general. Now we can even pull these sides and the back out a little further because we want that to really stick out like our reference image here. That's close enough for now. We're going to grab our clay brush, actually our clay buildup brush. Now I want to talk about the zygomatic for a sec because it's the bottom of this cheekbone here. And then it's the widest part here. Comes down like in this reference image, how it's sort of like swoop shape comes down and back. We can carve it in like that from the side if we're looking at where the zygomatic goes, you can see it in that reference image right here. It comes up and back and goes straight back to the ear hole. Where your ear lands on your head. So it comes up and back like this, this sort of shape. And the ear hole is right behind where the jaw connects up into the skull, which is right about there. Somewhere around there. This is the zygomatic coming over. Now we're actually going to sculpt it on a little bit. In the front. It kind of has this shape that comes down for the teeth, for the maxilla. And then the maxilla goes underneath the zygomatic. The zygomatic come down, connect right about here. And it sticks out further. If we even grab our move brush just to give ourselves a reminder, we can just pull this in like that. If we look at it from here, that cheekbone, the zygomatic really, really sticks out. And of course there's muscle and fat and skin on top of all of this. But it's good to know this because this is the structure for your eyes and for going into the mouth and the nose and all that stuff. This is the kind of stuff that really helps when you're just not sure about the placement of things, you can always refer back to bones. And bones will tell you where everything goes. Alright, so we're not going to sculpt the whole school, but those cheeks are extremely important and that zygomatic and how it comes up and back over to the ear hole like that is just really important to keep in mind. I'm just using my Move brush to kind of push these things around. Next we have the temples. So this part is already kind of pushed in right here on the temples, but you can grab your brush and just kind of pull it in and a little bit right there at that behind that corner of the eye, up into the forehead there. Now let's just make sure that our jaw looks okay because now that our ear hole is right around the center here, we need to line up our jaw correctly. So I'll grab this back corner of it, pull it back and make the chin just kind of that's fine right there. You want this to still be flat in the front. One of the last things I want to do is I want to pull forward where the mouth is going to be. I'm going to smooth this down. When you're placing the mouth on your character. It's generally 1 third of the way down between the bottom of the nose and the bottom of the chin. The mouth woodland about right here. And the shape for the mouth isn't a straight line. It's actually got the lips are comprised of three parts, which we'll get to when we talk about the lips and creating the mouth in one of the later videos. But you can start with a V shape in the middle, wide sort of V. And then two wings that curve out and down. That's a really good foundation for starting the mouth. Because it's going to give you the sense, the shape of the top lip and the shape of the bottom lip. The top lip is made of three parts and the bottom lip is made of two parts. That's how they fit together and it creates that shape. Then we'll just take our Move brush and just grab the front of the mouth and pull it forward. And we'll grab the chin and bring it forward as well. And if we look at our chin from the bottom, I'm just going to pull it out so that I get that horseshoe shape, that sort of boomerang shape was talking about in the last video. And already, now we have a really solid foundation for our skull, for our character's head and face. And from here we're just going to put on all of the major pieces, like the nose and the mouth and all of that in the ears and everything. This is going to do it for the foundation for our head. And in the next video we'll go on to the nose and I'll show you how to append in new sub tools to create the different parts of the face as we go. I'll see you in the next one. 5. Starting The Nose: All right, welcome back again. In this video we are going to sculpt the nose and I'll show you the structure moving forward. And we're going to put it together piece by piece. The very first thing that we need to do is get some reference. So if you go to a website called Unsplash.com and you type in, knows. This is a royalty-free site that allows you to use any of these images commercially or for your projects with no attribution or anything like that. But if you can credit the authors, I'm sure they appreciate that. But typing nose and just scroll down here and there's a few images in here that I'm going to use as reference like this one for one, you can see this side of the nose here and where the angle is lining up with the eye. And sort of this corner here. So this is a good one for the profile. And these are all different noses, but some of them give you a lot of information. So this picture, in general as a reference image is not the best if you wanted it to sculpted face. And that's because for features are very soft. Even around her mouth and her chin, and her cheeks and everything. Everything is very smooth, so it doesn't give you a lot of detail. And as a reference image, you always want to be able to see the details in the face. You know, like where the eye sockets are, where the brows lineup and how the nose looks at everything. But as a nose reference images is actually works pretty well because you can see the parts of the bottom of the nose. And we're gonna talk about that in just a second. I'm gonna use this as my other reference image. Then this is going to be my last reference image, again from a three-quarter side view because it shows a couple of things that I want to point out as well. I downloaded those images and then we're just going to hop back over to ZBrush. And I'll go to texture import. And I'll import those images. And you can import multiple images at a time. Just hit Open, and then they're all opened in your textures here. Click on one, click Add to spotlight, and then we can scale it down. Move it over here. If I just want to get rid of some of this picture, like I don't need, I don't need the whole face in this image. So what I can do is click somewhere down here. This little red line and green line are lined up. And if I click on this extend horizontal, it will collapse my image in the direction based on where this guideline is at. So if I want to get rid of some of the image, I can click over here and go like this, collapse it in this way. Click over here so that my green line is about their collapse that in. And then same thing with the vertical. Find the extend vertical. You can collapse the image down like this. Now, just the nose is showing because I don't really need all the other information in the picture. I just want the nose. Scale that up a little bit. That's our first image, will go Texture and we'll click on our next image at that, scale it down. I will do the same thing that we just did. Click over here somewhere so that these lines are lined up and click the extend horizontal, collapse it in this way. And then we'll stand vertical and collapse it up like this. We have this. I'll trim a little bit at the top as well. Let me have this texture. We'll add in our last image. Texture. Click on the image, and then add to spotlight, the mole scale this down. Same thing. I'm just going to click up here off a ways and then extend vertical so I can trim this down the bottom here. And then way over here. And we'll do this for the sides. You just sort of have to play with this until, oops, and accidentally cut off a little too much. The nice thing about having the spotlight as you can push Control Z. If you accidentally chop this off too far, you can hit Control Z and it will go back. So long as this little menu icon is open, you can use Control Z. Scale this up. I think I want this the same direction as my other photos. So I'm gonna click, flip horizontal mirror, horizontal button and it'll flip it the other way so that it's facing the same direction as these. I'll just click the image and move it around. Put a where needed here. Great. Now I'll press Z on my keyboard and it will get rid of that little menu icon. And then I can go up to brush, go to samples and turns spotlight projection off, make sure it's not highlighted. And then it is turned off so that you can sculpt on your object. Now that we have our reference setup for our nose, we're going to append in a new sub tool. So we'll go over to sub tool on the right and open our menu. Scroll down until you see Append. Click on that. And we're going to append in a cube. So click on cube 3D and make sure you turn solo mode off so that you can see it. Now we have a cube. I'm going to hold Alt and click on it. Press W on my keyboard to bring up my gizmo. And if you click on the little yellow ring and drag left, it's going to scale your object down. And we'll rotate and hold Shift to snap decide view. And then I will just use my arrows to move this around. And I have picture, you have symmetry turned on. We're going to scale this up so that it's more of a rectangle like this. And I'm going to scale this down to about that size. And this is gonna be the bridge or the base for our nose. Like this. As we mentioned in a previous video, the cartilage for the nose connects to the bone of the skull where the nose bridge begins. So I'm going to have to pull this out just a little bit further. On my original object here, I have solo mode turned on to click to solo. So if anybody wants to be able to switch faster between solo mode by simply left clicking one time. You can go to Preferences and go to edit, and then allow click to solo. That's how you turn that on. I like to use click to solo because it just, it's a fast workflow for me. Some people don't like it, but I do like being able to just turn it on by clicking one time. That is how I'm gonna be using solo mode on and off here. So hold Alt and select your skull. Then we'll just pull this nose bridge forward a little bit more so that it's like that. And generally the nose bridge is right around the center of the eye sockets here. That's like where the bone comes forward. Now we can hold Alt and click on our nose. Our cube here, which will be the cartilage varroa nose and sort of get it into place. Now, this is where sculpting your face is going to become tricky because using reference we'll get you only so far until you realize, you know, what type of face you want to sculpt. And it's entirely up to you. And you can smooth this down. You can look at reference and create any type of face that you want. And unless you're doing like a complete likeness sculpt or something like that. You you want to stick to the general guidelines of how the nose is put together. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, every face is different. Every nose is going to look a little different. What I'm doing here now is I selected my face and I just grab my Move brush and just pull it forward a little bit more so that the front of the mouth and all that is going to line up better with the bottom of this nose here and the cheeks to coming up into the bridge of the nose like that are all going to line up. We're going to try to just align all of our parts up kind of like a bunch of Legos and just make everything fit. A bunch of pieces that fit together. So just looking at it from the front here, general proportion wise, the bottom of the nose lines up at the bottom of the ear. So that's the ear hole here and the bottom of the cheeks here. So maybe this nose tip can come down to about the bottom of where that zygomatic is. That's a good spot, just a general spot for it. Now the next thing we need to do is put in the other parts of the notes. I like to construct the nose out of four parts. There's the bridge like we just made. And now we're going to go back over to append under sub tool. And I'm going to append in a sphere. So now that we have this sphere hold Alt and click on it to select it, I'm going to rotate and hold Shift to snap to side view. And then if I press W, it brings up my Move Gizmo here, or you can do the same thing by up here there's Draw mode and there's move mode. You can press move mode and that brings up or gizmo, it's the same thing as pressing Q for draw mode or W for move mode on your keyboard. Press W, and we'll scale this down and move it forward. Scale it way down. Zoom in. This is gonna be a tip of our nose. The nose is comprised of these four. I mean, there are a lot more parts to the nose, but I like to break it down this way because it's easy to remember. There were four parts, the bridge, the tips, and the next we're gonna do the two wings of the nose. Those are our four parts. So we have a bridge, tip and wing, and wing. Then we go back over to R sub tool menu here on the right. Go to append, and we're just going to append in a sphere again, same thing. Hold Alt, Click on it, shift, snap to side view, press W, move it forward, scale down. Now, we need to make sure that we don't have symmetry turned on because we're going to take this and push it off to the side because this is gonna be the nose wing. Move it into place here. Just get it in like this. And now I'm just going to grab my Move brush. I'm gonna try to just sculpt this in the shape that I want. So this is where we start sculpting. Now we are taking the parts of the nose. And if I go into solo mode, you can see kind of more what I'm doing here. Trying to make this sort of like a bean shape that wraps toward the front of the nose. And actually this is probably the geometry on this is probably way too high. Yeah, It's way, way too high. So it's even making it harder for us to work with. So if there's too much geometry, you can also go the right menu, Close your sub tool menu and then open the geometry menu, go to 0 measure and just hit Z Ramesh. And zebra mesh will recalculate and make these polygons much fewer if it's not small enough. If, if poly count isn't low enough, take the target poly count slider and slide it all the way to 0.1 and then hit Z again. And it'll give you as few polygons as possible. I like to do this because it really makes it easy to just get your shapes and you can get sharper edges. Sharper shapes, which is really nice when you're starting out for sculpting. Because it allows the foundation to take form much, much quicker. We're gonna use this to fill in the sides of the nose too. It's just sort of like, like I said before, like a bean shaped like this. Will sculpt on top of this later to make it look better. But for right now, we just want to get the parts in place. Now that I have this in place where it'll help me a lot more as we go up to Z plugin and I want to mirror it to the other side. So Z plugin, sub tool master, select mirror, make sure x-axis is checked and hit Okay. And that will mirror it over to the other side and then press X to turn on symmetry. And now you have it on both sides with symmetry turned on. Now you have both wings going at the same time. And that'll just help you with the proportions. In general. I'm having trouble figuring out the shape for this because the nose tip is not the right shape. So hold Alt, Click on your nose tip. Brush that really, really helps with this is gonna be the polish brush, actually the H polished brushed to be specific, so that's under the H and it is H polish or P for H polish. Make sure you turn on symmetry. And if we look, the reason I wanted to use this reference image, because it shows you the shape of the nose tip, see how it's this V shape. And you can kind of see it right here. There's a little bit of a V-shaped going on. You can barely see it on her nose, but this one is a really good representation of that. This nose tip has this V shape. And it's sort of like a bulb that sits at the end of your nose. And if you take your H polish brush with symmetry turned on and just flatten it down like this. It's going to create that V-shape for you. Now you can take your Move brush and just pull this, squish it down a little bit and sort of mold it into the tip of your nose, will leave them pull it back in like that. Now if you haven't sculpted a nose before, noses in general, something to keep in mind is that you're always going to have a bottom facing plane for the nose. And what I mean by that is you can separate into two, the nose tip can be separated into two halves. There's top half like this, this whole section. And then there should be bottom half like this, like that. So there should be a clear definition between this is the top. This is the bottom. When you're looking at a nose from the side, it's always going to help establish the shape of your nose so much quicker if you have a top and a bottom plane. And it's sort of this 45-degree angle going down and then 45-degree angle going up to create those shapes like that. Then you've already got your bridge and your tip in place. Now you just have to adjust the wings and the nose wings can be really tricky because it's kind of a complex shape. From the side view. If we look at our reference image like this one here, you have this sort of shape here. The carbs around and up into the face. This I'm just using my Move brush. And this is really low, low poly, so it makes it really easy to move around. The nose tip is going to stick out further than the nose wings. Depending on the kind of knows that you are looking at for reference. You'll have to adjust for that. Now, these wings come forward and they have this sort of like boomerang shape to them like this. They come up and forward and that connect in the middle of the front of the nose. Like this. And if you look at anatomy, charts are pictures of the nose. Some of them actually outlined this where there are the cartilage for the two nose tip, nose wings, excuse me, come forward like this. They connect in the middle and it creates this sort of unique shape for the nose, where you have that bulb on top like this. Then the two wings come up and forward like this. And this is sort of how the nostrils are shaped like this. Let's just going to take a lot of time just kind of playing around with this to get it to look just right. Now obviously this nose is really big, the angle is steep. I might even just click on my nose bridge, press W on my keyboard to bring up my gizmo and then just use my rotate tool. Make sure that when you're rotating using the gray ring instead of the red rings that your snapped to side view. So hold Shift while you're rotating it snaps the side view. We can just move all these parts and use these gray arrows. Then we can just move each part like this to sort of get them back into place the way that we want. Cool. Now I can grab my face here and probably even just pull this back away from the nose a little bit. Maybe just smooth it down. Just smoothing down the front of the face very gently. So that the nose that I'm making can just kind of take up the face a little more. It looks like I can even move the bridge up. Now I can just take my brush and just start shaping the bridge of my nose how I want it. I can, even if it helps you, you can also just continue that up into the forehead a little bit. Some noses have where that nasal bone comes forward sometimes right here where it connects. There's a little bit of a bump there and that's because that's where the cartilage connects. Some people have that type of nose. Some people that's a smoother transition where it's just a straight line. It all depends. You're just gonna have to play around with it until you find the angles that worked for you and the style of face that you're trying to make. I'm not gonna spend too much time on this. I'm just giving it a generalization of what it, what it could look like. Another thing that's important in the nose with his nose tip is that you get this kind of bump that's right here between between the nose bridge in-between this little wing here there's generally this little bit of like, I guess it's fat or something like that that sits on top of the cartilage. But it kind of bridges the two together. Sort of like that. You get this little bump in there. And will sculpt on top of all that later. Once we, once we establish all these shapes, you can put more detail or whatever, but this is just the structure of the foundation. We just want to make sure from the side view that our nose wings go up and over and down toward the front, toward the tip that they meet in the front like this. We might even want to bring the back part up a little bit higher, out, a little bit more towards the sides like this. Just keep looking at reference, look at different phases, look at different noses, and see the differences and how you want yours to look. Because every nose is different. The more you do it, the better you're going to get at it. We'll worry about how the cheeks and all that connect to the nose in a later video. But for right now we're just focusing on the nose. Just trying to line up those four parts correctly and get it to look good. One thing that I like to do sometimes, if there's nose is looking too pointy, is I'll take the inflate brush or BI for inflate and find your inflate. I guess n is the shortcut for that. You can just inflate the tip of the nose more toward the top, not on the bottom. If we just inflate up here a little bit, this helps kind of accentuate that bulb on the end of the nose a little more. If we look at our silhouette here too, we can kind of see what we're doing in real-time. I can even grab my Move brush and move all these back. This is the nice thing about sculpting with multiple pieces like this. Is it. You don't have to destroy all your detail. If you mess something up, you can just go and move the parts around. And it allows you the freedom to mess around with this as much as you want until you get it right. And this just gives you something to play with. And a little more control over your sculpt. Eventually, you want to move on from doing this and just sculpt the nose all as one piece. That's fine too. If that works better for you, then just do that. But this really helped me learn all the pieces and how they fit together. So that's why I'm showing you this method. Then very last we're going to have to create some nostrils in here. So it's easier to create nostrils when you don't have a bunch of separate moving parts like this. But I can still show you how I would do it. I would take the nose tip like this. And we have our wings here, which creates the outside of the nostril. And then we're gonna grab the clay buildup brush and then hold Alt and carve in like this. And then we'll switch to our nose wing and we'll carve in like that as well. And then even here it looks like this is the the bridge of the nose That's kind of hiding in here. So we'll hold Alt and we'll carve that away as well. So you're already getting a little bit of a nostril shape. Now you can just grab your brush on the nose tip here and just pull that down a little bit. If you want to get super into the correct shapes here. These wings curve back in, in like this. This is the shape of it from the bottom. And it curves back and up and into the nose like that. And that's what creates that nostril shape. This is a really complex shape, but it's something that you can practice. And that's why I like using these separate parts because then you can really tweak this and really figure out the shapes one at a time. And we're just going around, just adjusting this with the Move brush, trying to make it look good from all angles, little too wide, bring it in like that. The shape of these wings comes down in like that and it does the same thing on the bottom too. So I'm actually going to grab the tip of my nose and bring it in like this, kind of hide it. And make sure that I have this nice bridge right here where it's going to attach to the upper lip, which we'll do later. Then I'm just going to keep messing with this wing because the wing then repeats the same pattern for the bottom. Just a little bit different. The geometry is really low on this, so it's actually really hard to get this to be the right shape, but this is kind of what I'm talking about. The nostrils are shaped by the wing tips coming in from the middle, wrapping up and around and out. And then sort of wrapping in side and up like this. And then the outside comes down a little more like this. A lot of work. But I'm just doing this to show you the structure for any of you that haven't sculpted faces before. This is the kind of stuff that is going to just push your knowledge a little further and help you understand why faces look the way that they look. And it's really just about understanding what all the pieces are and how they fit together. Because the face can be broken down into specific number of shapes, or as many or as few shapes as you want, you can make it as complicated as you want or as simple as you want. I'm just trying to break this down into simple shapes as much as I can. And we've got our nose tip like this. I'm just going to widen it out with my Move brush. And then I'll grab my H polish brush, will flatten the bottom, flatten the top a tiny bit. Trying to maintain that upper and lower half of my nose appropriately. And I'm gonna try to get this line to line up with my wing tips a little better. If flattened that all down and I will take our Move brush, just pull it up a little bit and smooth it will shift. Just smooth it. We're already starting to get a shape that looks like a nose. If we click on the phase or if we turn poly frame off. Now we have all of our parts here. We have our tip, two wings. God nostrils, got a bridge. Now it's just up to you to play with the shapes and get something that you like out of your shapes and sort of adjust it until it looks the way that you want it. And the great thing about this method is it's non-destructive because you can just keep messing with all the parts. Just remember to look for the shape of these nostrils. And the shape. Oops. Just be on the lookout for the shape of these, these wings. And that's how the nostrils are formed. When you get these wings in the right shape, like this, It's got a hook shape that comes down and in from the inside of the nostril. It comes out and up and around this way, like this. And then comes down and around to this part where it connects to the face here and then cuts up and in to the inside outer corner of the nostril as well. It's kind of a complex shape, but I guess that's about as simple as shape as I can make it like that. If at any point your nose just isn't looking like it's sitting right on the face like mine looks like it's way too far forward. What you can do too is just press W on your keyboard and snap to side view by rotating, holding Shift. And then just use the gizmo to rotate and move these. Since you've already sculpted them, you don't really have to really sculpt them. You can just move them around, replace them until they fit. And look a little bit more proportionally correct for your face. And same thing with the face. Move the face around, move the parts around. You get it sitting just the way that you want. That is gonna do it just for this video for the nose. And later on we'll refine the shapes and when we merge things together and we'll talk more about sculpting and detailing in a later video. But in the next video, we're going to talk about starting the mouth and how to connect the nose to the mouth and going down into the chin and all of those parts and how they connect. I'll see you in the next one. 6. Starting The Mouth: Welcome back. In this video we are going to sculpt the mouth. I want to start out by saying that in the last video I noticed some proportional issues and I want to do talk about that for just a second. So this little silhouette box in the corner, I'm just going to drag the corner of it to make it a little bigger to kinda show you what I'm talking about. So when you're looking at the face in general, you want the forehead to kind of be in line with where the chin and the mouth lineup and my chin and my mouth on my face are way too far forward. Now that might be the case for some types of faces, but for as a general rule, we can just stick to this guideline for now and then we can adjust it later. Because I don't want to have to go back and change a bunch of stuff. So I'm gonna try to line everything up. Right now. I'm just taking my Move brush and just kind of moving the front of my face back and n So that that mouth and chin line up a little bit more with the foreheads, but it's more of a line going down here to line everything up. So just pulling them out forward a little bit so that it does still have that forward arc. Because right after, right underneath the nose is where I'm just gonna press W on my keyboard to bring up my gizmo here and just hold Alt and tap on each one of these pieces that I made in the last video. And move them back. I want to make sure that the bottom of my nose lines up at the bottom of this cheekbone, which means that these are too low. So I need to bring these pieces of higher, something like that. Then I can even rotate these if I want to adjust the angle as long as that there is a bottom plane of my nose as well. There's got to be that bottom plane and that top plane. And I could even take my polish brush and just smooth down this part of the nose so that it looks more sculptural. You get the idea. But this video is about sculpting the mouth will find the nose later. So just wanted to address that issue. Where now if we look at the silhouette, the forehead lines up more with the mouth and the chin here. And it looks like the bridge of the nose can even be rotated a little bit more like this. And I could probably bring the eyebrow, brow line here forward a little bit more. Because if we look at a skull, There's always this down and forward sort of angle to your nose coming from your brow like that. We're just going to quickly shape that anyway. Alright, we'll go back and fix that later. But now the silhouette looks a lot better. This looks more proportionately correct for a face and I can go in and adjust that nose later. In this video, we will talk about sculpting the mouth. It's easy to get carried away when you're sculpting a mouth or anything. If we go back to unsplash.com, this is that royalty-free image site. They have all of these royalty-free images that you can use. Or you can go onto Google or Google images or Pinterest and type in lips or type in mouth and look at reference photos because it's always important to use reference when you're sculpting something, especially for the first time. So this will be good practice. The thing to avoid is try not to just sculpt big, beautiful lips all the time. Look for different types of photos of people that looks like on here. They only have photos of models. Not everybody has big full lips, some people have smaller lips and all faces are different. And everybody is going to look a little bit different and everybody's mouth is going to be shaped slightly differently. But if you look at good reference where the person isn't trying to make a face like this isn't good reference because obviously they're, you know, they're kissing a window so you can't really see the shape of their mouth. But if you just look at a reference with a person making neutral face and try to get the shapes of the lips. That's what's important and the shapes surrounding the mouth, that's what's important. So what we're gonna do is walk you through how to make the mouth all is one piece and then we'll do the chiton next. We're gonna start by appending in a sphere. So we'll go over to R sub tool menu. Scroll down on the right, select append and pick a sphere. Now you have your sphere hold Alt and tap on it, will snap to side view. Press W on our keyboard and move it forward. Move it down, and then we'll scale it down. Now this sphere, what we're going to have to do is turn on DynaMesh. And I've put my DynaMesh button up here. And the resolution I want to set to something like 60 or 80 or something like that. Dynamesh is just going to reduce the geometry a little bit and make it a little more even so it's easier to sculpt on when you're making lips. It's really important to remember the top and the bottom lip are different. So first we're going to scale this down a little bit here. I'm going to scale it in on itself in this direction and then push it back so that it's just a piece sitting flat up against where the mouth is going to be. I'm gonna sculpt my mouth on top of this. And I'll even, even sculpted, sorry, scale it out this way to the sides so that we have this nice oval shape like this. So it's a little bit flat and it's oval in the front like that. So now we can just take our Move brush, make sure you turn symmetry on. And we're just gonna pull the corners. Make our Move brush really big and just pull the sides of this back so that it's wrapping around the face. This part I'm gonna pull up so that it's tucking in behind the nose. And this part, I'm just shaping this to the front of the face really quickly to start so that we have a nice foundation for the mouth. Now these corners, I'm going to pull down in this direction and from the corners of the bottom corners of these nostrils here coming down and around because that's the natural shape that the face that the mouth is going to take when it's on the front of the face. And we'll talk about that a little more in detail later. For right now, I'm just going to kind of smooth down my face here so that it's not sticking forward. And then I'll switch back to the mouth here and will smooth it out so that it's a little flatter, little more round, a little more wrapped around the front of the face here. Now that we're here, I'm gonna turn poly frame off. I'm gonna grab my damien standard brush and start drawing the line from my mouth. So the general rule for where the line of your mouth lands on the face, if you're talking about just general face proportions, the eyes are always right in the center. The bottom of the nose lines up with the cheeks and the ear, which we haven't done yet. Then the line for the mouth is about a third of the way down between the bottom of the nose and the bottom of the chin. So about a third would be right about there. Looks about right. We can always adjust that later. We can always move the chin up or move the mouth down. That's the nice thing about using multiple pieces like this to build your model. Because then you can practice pushing the pieces around until the proportions are correct. The mouth, the top lip is made up of three parts, and the bottom lip is made up of two parts. So to begin, we start drawing this little V-shape, like we've talked about in the first video. Then from the middle, from the top parts of here we're going to come down with too little wings like that. This is a correct mouth shape in general, and this is where the lips meet together. So it's easy to see you how the top lip is made of three parts. There are two side parts. One here, one here, one here, one on each side, and then there's one in the center, so 123 and then the bottom lip is too little fatty pads 12. The way that we sculpt this using our Damien standard, we're just going to really carve in this line here. And this is called the cupid's bow. The cupid's bow is that line that makes the shape of your mouth. And it actually is shaped like a bow naturally. And that's why they call it the cupid's bow. So the cupid's bow is different. There are many different types like this is a general example, but there's also a flatter sort of Mouse shaped like this where they keep his boat as much shallower. And some people even have like almost no cupid's bow where their mouth is almost a straight line like this. And it just depends on the type of lips that that person has. So it's going to create a lot of variation in the way that your mouth looks. The final sculpt depending on the angle of this V-shape and the angle of these wings when you carve them in. So just something to think about as you're going next, what I'd like to do is with the daemon standard brush, if you're holding Alt and you carve, it will carve up on top of your mesh. It'll create a nice little ridge for you like that. If we're holding Alt, we make our brush size a little bit bigger. And we're going to just trace the upper part of this line and go down for the top lip. Now if we look at reference images of the bottom lip, we noticed that it doesn't just come around like this. It's not just it's not just a round line like this. The lip actually comes down and connects like this. So the shape is more down and n and then straight across. Almost like a geometric like a trapezoid or something like that. Also at the bottom lip, we, if you look at the reference images, you can see that it doesn't connect to this outer corner of the mouth. It's not like all the way out to here. Instead we want it to connect right about here. Come down and then across like that so that you still have a little bit of the upper mouth folding over the top of the lower lip. So the next part is where it gets tricky. It's actually trying to get this to wrap around the face. And now we grab our move brush. I'm just going to grab the corner and pull it back. What that's going to do, it's going to do two things. It's going to create this pulling back, so it wraps around the face and it's also going to create this sort of pull on this part of the skin. Because this part beside the mouth actually comes forward just the tiniest, tiniest little bit. It's really subtle. And that's actually even too much where the skin pushes in. Where this part goes back and in toward the face. This part comes out just a little bit. You can almost even just from that top lip carve a line like this that comes out, hold Alt with the Damian standard brush and just carve out and up and then smooth it down a little bit so that the skin is pushing forward right here. And that really forces this shape to make the top lip come out and over the top of that bottom lip. Now this is really low resolution and it can be really hard to get your shapes correct if you're doing low resolution. So if you're ever having too much trouble getting the detail right, you can always turn off your DynaMesh resolution or go to geometry. Dynamesh. And then just crank your resolution a little higher to something like 100 or 120 or something. Just smooth out a little bit and then hold Control and click and drag. The thing with DynaMesh is it can ruin your detail if your resolution isn't high enough. Right now, my active number of points is 4,600 points, which is pretty low. But also I don't want to get I don't want it to crank my resolution up to like 300. Because then I'm gonna start getting up into the 20 thousand points. And if I get, if I get up to like 100 thousand polygons, That's too much, That's way too much, and that's not what we want. We want to keep it as low resolution while we're sculpting as we can until it doesn't support the shapes that we're trying to make anymore. And then we can go a little bit higher. So right now 20 thousand is okay, we'll just leave it there because this will allow us to do a little more detail. Now I'm just going to smooth out my edges here because DynaMesh kinda made everything they'll crumple. Now I'm just taking the Damian standard and really carving in further underneath that top lip so that it sticks out even further. Getting the shape of the top lip is kind of hard. You have that V-shape and you have this and it's different for everybody. So there were always going to be these two high points right here. And these two high points are what are going to connect to the bottom of the nose. Now I can already tell that my mouth is either too small or it's too far down because it's too far away from my nose. I think what I'll do first is press W and then I'll scale the mouth up. Because generally the corners of the mouth are going to line up with where the eyes are on my character, which we haven't done yet. So we don't have that landmark to kind of compare to. But I can already tell that this is lining up a little bit better than before because before it was pretty small. I'm just going to scale it up. I think that looks good because now the corners of the mouth, they're gonna be right around where the eyeballs so that in the skull. And that looks better than it did before. I'll press Q to go back into Draw mode. Now I'm just going to, now I'm just going to take my Move brush and sort of tweak this a little bit. So I'm just going to bring this in. When you're looking at the mouth from the side, the top lip sticks out further than the bottom lip. I'm gonna try to the mouth is kind of at a it shouldn't be sticking straightforward. So in other words, it shouldn't be like this. It should be facing down and forward a little bit. Just a little bit. The top lip sticking out more than the bottom lip. Now I'm going to shape this again, how I had it before, pull this in with those corners. The reason I want to shape this the way it is right now is because later we'll get into putting the fat on the face to fill in the face more. And this line is going to kind of trace along with what's called the nasal labial fold. Excuse me, the nasal labial fold, which comes from up here on the face and travels down along the side of the nose and wraps around the mouth down into the chin. And it's much more prominent in really buff, really buff people that work out a lot because their faces really chiseled. And you can see that it's much more prominent where that line comes down and wraps around their mouth like that. I'm just trying to get this placement of this part of the face kind of set so that it proportionally lines up with the rest of my face. It looks okay. Then we'll do the chin and all that in just a minute. So after I've taken Damien standard and carved in and really defined that upper lip sticking out more. Now I can hold Alt and trace the upper lip again. Come down like that. That doesn't look quite right. I'm going to go a little higher. It sticks out a little too far. So I think I'll take my H polish brush. And I'm going to trace this line for the lips. Somebody's rubbing their engine really loud next door. I apologize for the noise. So I'm just gonna take H polish and run this along the edge of those lips to kind of flatten down that edge so that it's not sticking out quite so far. You can do this with the Move brush or even though the clay brush. And just sort of sculpt this down a little bit. But I like H polish because it keeps it really smooth and flat and even there, that's a little bit better. Now we're starting to get that top lip shape like that. You can take the Damian standard card over and down and at the corners I'm just going to flare up like that just a little bit. Animals smooth it down. The philtrum is this sort of shape that comes down from the nose. This pattern like a little like a tall diamond shape like this. And if we carve this down, this is supposed to be sunken in. I can already tell that this person would have a really long face, so this is too low, it needs to be even higher, which means that my jaw on my face needs to be higher as well. This is just a constant adjustment going back and forth. Or maybe I can just scale the mouth up even more, just give them bigger, bigger lips. Somehow I keep making the mouth smaller and smaller. We're just going to have to keep going back and forth. Playing with this. I'm looking at reference, of course the whole time we just need to be looking and making sure that the proportions of our face match up with realistic proportions. That the philtrum is this. It's almost like two lines that come right from this bottom part of the bridge of the nose here, down to each high point on the lips like this. You can use your brush to kind of get this to look right. This is too harsh of a transition right here. So I'm going to smooth this, smooth all of this like that. You eventually get this little concave shape in there. The lips kind of connect like this in the center. Like that. The line shouldn't just come down and separate the lips like that. There should actually be a nice connect right here where this line of a lip comes across, connects there. And then right here again is also connected. Some 3D artists, they like to really outline the lips even more by taking just the standard brush, making it fairly small. Then not drawing on this line of the lipid just above it. Just drawing a nice line like this. Then it creates a little more fullness and also creates an outline for the lip line like that. Now that we have our top lip sort of shaped here, I'm going to start doing our bottom lip. So I'm gonna grab my damien standard brush again. And we'll smooth this out a little bit because we already worked on the top lip a lot. So I'm going to try to bring this N by smoothing it down so that it's not sticking out too far. We have lots of room to work with. So this is good. This is sticking out further, That's good. Now from about here, hold Alt on the Daymond standard brush and drag down and then straight across. Now, depending on the type of mouth that you're sculpting, you can either do what we just did. Where you come down and in and then straight across or come down and in and then curve up ever so slightly into the middle like that. Because sometimes people's lips have this little curve kind of bubble shape to them. After we draw a line to connect our lips here, that's a little too small. Looking at my reference here, once we have this connected here, now I'm gonna grab the clay buildup brush. And I'm just going to earlier I was talking about how the top lip is made of three parts and the bottom lip is made of two. The top lip has this centerpiece that comes down just slightly in the middle like this. This is a really exaggerated example of it. But the middle piece comes down like this. And then these two side pieces just using clay buildup are like these too long, little fat pads. Like that. This is pretty extreme for the center so I can smooth that down, just hold shift and smooth it. Or grab my Move brush. Since we're still working with a relatively low amount of geometry, It's not hard to move this around if we had a 100 thousand points right now, this would be it would be too difficult than our sculpted start to look lumpy, which is not what we want. I'm just filling in a little bit of the fat pad there on the lips, on the top lip. And now we're gonna do the bottom. So the bottom lip is only made of two parts with symmetry on. You really only have to do this one time. Just do one quick pass all the way across and make sure that you're getting roundness, that it's filling in the roundness of the mouth like this. That in the middle there is a little bit of a divide. You can just leave a tiny bit of a like a little line down the center of the bottom lip like that. That should be fine. I can see that it's sticking out a little too far. Not quite even all the way across. And I wanted to be even all the way across. I'll just smooth it down and then just raise sculpt very lightly. I'm just trying to stay within the boundary of that line that I drew with my damien standard. Like that. Great. So very quickly now we have a mouth on the front of the face. So the next thing we want to do is create our chin. And the bottom lip has these two areas here on this side. And it has these fatty pads that come down and out in this sort of an angle down and off to the sides. And it's different for every phase because everyone has different size lips. So we'll just have to look at reference to kind of get this correct. But I'm just going to build this up with the clay buildup brush like that so that it sticks out like that. You just want that subtle of roundness coming out from both sides of the lower lip like that. Then we can take the Damian standard and not on the bottom of the lip here, but just below it, you want to carve a nice little upside down, see sort of shaped like this. And this is going to further accentuate that those fat pads on the sides of the mouth that curve around and down. We want this shape, because this shape is going to go right into our chin, which we're going to append in a new piece for. So I put my append button up here, but you can go to sub tool, append and append it in another sphere. Will grab that sphere, move it forward and down and scale it down. This will make this about the size of that little shape that we carved in there. It should be fine. Already. I can tell there's gonna be proportion issues with my face. So I'm going to grab my main head here, grab my Move brush, and just pull the chin up a little bit because I think it's too long. The head is just too tall. And I'll move the corner of the jaw back just a little bit like that. Now I'll grab my sphere, move it here. This is going to be my base for my chin. The chin, if we look at reference, of course, comes forward only a little bit. Depending on the kind of chin that everybody's chin is a little bit different, but it's basically like this kind of shape that comes out right below the bottom lip here. And that's where the jaw. Now I'm just going to move these pieces until they fit together. That straight up in there. You get this little knob shaped that sticks out the front of the face like that. That's how this bottom lip connects to the chin. These fat pads come out from the bottom lip and wrap down and around where that chin area is. Now this chin isn't just one piece. There's also fat and stuff in the face around these areas too. So what I'm going to do is hold Control and Shift and press D on my keyboard with much NP selected. And what that did is it duplicated my gin piece rather than appending in a new sphere and reshaping it, I just hit Control Shift D on my keyboard and it just duplicated it. So now if I press W on my keyboard, turn symmetry off and just move this over to this side. Now I just have a piece right there. So this is a fast shortcut for just now I can scale it down and just kinda move it and force it into whatever shape I want really quickly with my Move Gizmo, I want to create a piece that's like this to help shape my jaw. Just using the Move Gizmo. It's going to line it up with the angle of the jaw like this little bit. And then we'll go up to Z plugin, sub tool master, select mirror, x-axis and hit. Okay, and now it's on both sides. And I can just turn on symmetry. And in just a couple of steps, I've already got a piece right there to help shape I character's chin. Now I want to shape this other piece a little bit more. The more pieces we added this, the more it just becomes like building blocks for our project. And it's nice to just be able to play around with all the pieces like this, because now I'm just holding Alt, tapping on each piece and using my Move brush to kind of get everything to fit together. These parts on the side can be a little smaller. They don't have to be so big. And I want to smooth them down so that they're not huge. And I want to try to preserve the jaw line, the line of the jaw. So try not to destroy this nice angle of the jaw here. I can even pull this forward more. Use these little pieces to kinda help fill in this space here. We're just using these to fill in the space between this bottom chin and connect it to the jaw a little better. We can even use like a triangle shape like this to just fill in that space there. For now, I think that's fine. This just represents some of the fat and the face and how it sits near the mouth and connects everything at the chin. Now I can just pull forward this bottom part of the bottom lip here. And already it's starting to fit together pretty nicely. If I look at my silhouette here, this guy has got a pretty big chin. So we're just going to do that. Pull the chin back a little bit. We'll fix the angle of our jaw here so that it's not so always using this silhouette. I'm always trying to evaluate the angle of my face and it already looks like everything is slanting backward a little bit. If I really want, I could even rotate my whole head like this. If I feel like everything is slanted back to var or just isn't sitting in the right place. This looks a little more correct. Then we'll just kind of adjust these pieces from there. Cool. So now we've got a basic mouth shape and our chin. We've got these little connecting pieces for the bottom lip and how it wraps down and around into the chin. And then these to help us guide the line of the chin into the rest of the jaw. This is pretty good for now. We just want to make sure that we can keep our resolution low. Around 20 thousand. That's high enough. I don't want to go much higher than that because we are going to refine this stuff later to we can always go back and refine after we've blocked in all our other pieces for our face. But for now I think this looks pretty good. I'm just going to leave that alone and we'll go back and refine the other surrounding pieces in another video. That is how you get the start for your mouth and just remember to practice. Just practice this. Create a sphere, smash it down. Try sculpting a couple of different types of lips. Try making a different shape for the cupid's bow and just play around with it and try different styles because no mouth, no two mouths look the same. It's easy to get in the habit of just sculpting the same thing over and over and over. But it's good practice to try sculpting different things from time to time. Not just sticking to the same, not just gulping the same reference image over and over again essentially. So there are some subtle forms in the mouth like this corner here, like I said, comes forward a little bit so you can grab your brush and yank that forward, smooth it down a little bit. It depends if it's male or female. There are differences from male anatomy to female anatomy just based on the placement and how much fat there is in one place versus another place. So those are also things to look for. But just keep using reference and keep practicing. And eventually you'll, you'll sort of stuff just becomes second nature. And you'll start seeing the relationships between different parts of the face and how they connected to one another. And that's the point, is just finding sort of a shorthand for yourself to be able to connect all the pieces and create essentially shortcuts for yourself. So that is gonna do it for this video. And in the next video, we will do the eyes and the cheeks, and the eyebrows and all of that. We're going to fill in all of this part of the face and start connecting all those pieces. I'll see you in the next one. 7. Eyes and Cheeks: All right, In this video, I want to go over how to create the eyes and going into the cheeks and surrounding area, around the mouth and how all that stuff sort of connects. And real quick, I noticed that as we go the proportions of our face are always going to be changing depending on the how we add our pieces and sotto as the face fills out, we start to notice these things and I immediately noticed that my head is way too tall. One of the reasons I keep dynamic perspective off is because if I have dynamic perspective turned on, my camera angles pretty close, It doesn't make my head look like it's too tall. Even from the side angle doesn't look too tall. But if I turn dynamic perspective off from far away, I can see my head is just too tall. It's way too tall. So I'm gonna grab my Move brush, move it down here, kind of right on the sides of the center area here. And then these two high points on the back corners here, move that down and then look at it from the side. So between the widow's peak and the high point here, I'm just going to grab that and pull that up. And then on the opposite side that down the back-end. Just trying to maintain this silhouette as I go because it's going to save me a lot of trouble later on if I just noticed these things. As we go. This is looking silhouette here is looking a little better. Little more proportional. Going to use my Move brush to kind of keep all these parts and check again, making sure that I have a forehead that kinda is not flat but just slightly slanting back and I have that point right here where the hairline is in-between there up to the highest point here. I can just smooth it a little bit as well to help create this shape. I'm going to smooth down this temporal ridge here. We have our eye sockets and we have our cheeks, our zygomatic. We need to put some eyeballs in these sockets and then we'll create the eyelids and all that around that. So let's go to append or go over to sub tool. Go to append. Independent as sphere, will select that sphere, press W, scale it way down and grab one of these corners here to move it over, snap to side view and put it right in the eye socket like that. Before I go much further, I want to go to Z plugin and go to a sub tool master, mirror x-axis and hit. Okay, now that's on the other side. So press X to turn on symmetry so that they both move at the same time. Let's scale these down. I'll use this little checkmark icon here, and that'll move my gizmo to the center of the eyeball. And I want to place them about this is where it becomes a style choice. Do you want your character to look stylized, which is not realistic, or do you want your character to look more realistic? So if I wanted this to be realistic, your eyeballs are not that big inside of your head. Your eyeballs is probably about that big. In the human face, something like that. If I wanted this to be a stylized character, I can make the eyeball is a lot bigger. Something like this. More animal-like or more cartoon like or whatever. When I put the eyeballs, I think I'm gonna go with more of a stylized look just because I do enjoy a slightly stylized look for MS. Goals. When we put the I in the eye socket like this, we don't want to see where the bridge of the nose connects. Here. We don't want the bridge of the nose be right in the center of the eyeball. We want the eyeballs to be slightly lower. The center of the eye to be slightly lower than that bridge there. You can see in reference to also, how far for the eyes are. You want them to be in the eye sockets like this so that this top brow is sticking hanging out in front of it so that it's not just you don't want your eyeball all the way out here or they'd be popping out of their sockets. So you want to push them back a little bit like that. That looks fine. The general rule that everybody has for eyeballs is that they sit about one eyeball distance apart from one another. So if I take a snapshot like this and just move this that's about one eyeball distance apart from each other. In case you're wondering how I did that, I just press Shift S on my keyboard and what that does is it takes a picture of whatever is in your Canvas and leaves it there. And then you can press Control N to clear that picture. Like if I wanted a picture of my whole sculpts, could just move this over here and hold Shift press S, and then it takes a little screenshot. And then I can move this to a different angle, zoom out, press Shift S, and then it leaves a little screenshot of it there. We can take multiple angle pictures of our sculpt like this. By pressing Shift S suggest. It leaves your, leaves your sculpt, a little picture of it there. And then when you want to clear all these, these are just pictures. You can move through them and just push Control N and it will clear your Canvas. Anyway. We want these to be about one eye distance apart from each other. And that looks, it looks okay for right now and we can always change it later. So for now that's gonna be good. Really my eyes like that. I want to create the eye lids for these. So I'm going to hold Control, drag my mask out over the top half of the eyeball. And I'm gonna go over to the sub tool. And I'm gonna go down to extract, which is all the way at the bottom of the sub tool, this tool extract. And if I hit extract, it pulls out. Pulls out this thickness, which is pretty good. It's set to 0.02. I'm going to leave it at that right now because I think that's nice and thick and we want something thick to help fill in this space. So 0.02 works. If you move your camera, the extract disappear. So hit extract. And then if you like, the thickness, hit Accept over here on the extract menu. And then it creates it as its own sub tool on the side. And I'll just hold Control click and drag out here to clear your mask. And you've got this nice thick extraction like that. Now just to quickly create the bottom eyelids, going to hold Control Shift D. And that's gonna duplicate by eyelids. And then I'll press W on my keyboard. Use this little checkmark icon to go to the center of my mesh. Go to unmask center button. Then I'm just going to hold shift and rotate this a 180 degrees. Oops, sorry. That's not working. 180 degrees. While you're rotating. If you're holding Shift, it snaps in increments of five degrees. And it tells you the degrees right below the gizmo there. So all you have to do is just flip it around till it says 180. And I'm like, Oh, then you can just grab this and pull it down. Now we have a top lid and a bottom lid that we can start shaping and using for the face. I'm going to press Q to go back into Draw mode. The nice thing now is we can just pull these down and then hold Alt and tap on our upper lid and pull this up. And already we've got eyelids on the face. We'll leave that alone just for right now. I don't want to get too crazy with these because we need to put a little more fat on the face in order to fill in all this space around here. So here's where I can take my original head shape and start sculpting on top of it to fill in these spaces and start to make this look more like a face. So the first thing I want to do with this is go to my sub tool menu and hit Duplicate or just hit Control Shift D, That's the same thing. And it duplicated my head. So I have a backup one in case I mess something up. I can always go back to this. I'm gonna hide my original one which is on top and that one has all my Undo History in it. We'll use the one that I duplicated because we're going to start sculpting on it. Eyes are really tricky. It's difficult to get this whole area to look right. And I liked to sculpt the eye sockets first because it really creates the structure of this whole area. The corner of the eyes going into the cheeks and all that stuff is really difficult to kind of understand it first if you haven't done this before. So I'm gonna start out by looking at reference. Of course, always be looking at reference images of people's faces and look at pictures that are close in on their eyes and just see how all of these pieces fit together. So I'm gonna grab my face here. I'm going to just use the clay buildup brush and start filling in this space inside of the eye socket around where the eye is supposed to be? Just a little bit. And I want to fill in the back too because I don't want there to be a hole in there. I just want to fill it in. And just going in and out of solo mode to see what I'm doing. I'll fill in the back. Like this. Cool. This is gonna give us more to work with. Just fill in this space here. The shape of this eye socket is a little off. If I look at it from the side view, this back corner here should be higher for the back, a little bit further back. So there should be this kind of an angle for your eye socket from the side here. And this cheek can come forward more. We're just going to make it constant adjustments and just pushing and pulling these parts around. I'm gonna grab right here below the bridge of the nose and bring that down. And we'll put some pieces on top of that later to fill in that space. Now we're starting to get the natural curves of the face in here. We're getting this curve of the forehead down into this inward curve of where it connects to the nasal bone, where the nose bridge attaches. All of that. And if we look at our face from the side, our cheeks should come forward into the nose. Like this, something like this. Now we have the freedom to kind of play around with this and get this to look exactly the way we want. So I'm going to take my place clay buildup again. I'm gonna hold Alt and carve in so that it reduces the geometry here. Because I really want to emphasize that eye socket shape. I don't want to lose that shape. I want it to stay really prominent. And then go into solo mode on her face here and just keep filling in this eye socket board. Because in your eye sockets There's lots of muscles and tissue and stuff that fills in all the space. Kind of holds your eyes in place. I went too far. Now I can just hold Alt and carve in with my clay buildup to kind of carve away at that. If it's too much. That looks okay. Now I'm gonna take my Move brush and I want to really start shaping the corners of the eye. So what I'm doing now is on either side of the nose bridge down here, I'm gonna pull it back and in, in toward the inside of the head like this. And this will set me up for where the eyelids come down to and connect to create that inner corner of the eye and the outer corner of the eye as well. So I'm gonna pull this back corner of my eye socket back even further like that. For right now. It looks okay. Now let's grab our top eyelid. Go into solo mode. And I'm just going to grab the inner corners here and just pull them in like that. Then pull it down to try and create this nice angle. I want a lot of thickness sticking out from the eyeball. You can see the eyeball here that's still masked. I'll clear my mask on that. You can see the eyeball here. And this upper eyelid, I want this to be this eyelid to be sticking out quite a bit. Because I really want that thickness for the eyelid going to create a shadow on the eye. And it's also just going to look more believable if you have a slightly thicker eyelid coming out from your eye. Now on the main face part, I need to pull back in the socket a little bit more with my Move brush. One thing I don't want to lose is the shape of this outer corner of the eye sockets because this is bone and you can feel that on your own face. I just want to make sure that it's there because that's really going to help me frame my eyes better. That shape. It looks like an alien face. It's pretty, pretty normal phase to be going through. Everybody talks about the alien phase. When you're sculpt looks like an alien. Let's talk about the eyebrows for a sec. The brow bone is actually a little bit of a protrusion like this on the skull that comes up and out like that. And up along the top of the eye socket. The Skoll actually sticks forward just a little bit like that. You can smooth it down. I'm just using the clay buildup to just kind of show where that is. A little bit of a bone. It comes up and over like this. And the eye socket kind of wraps around and underneath into it like this in the bottom. So it's almost like here's one shape and then this shape goes over the top of that. Sort of like that. It looks angry right now, but that's because I'm trying to just give you an extreme example to show how those parts connect. And now I'm gonna take my clay buildup and behind this corner of the eye, I'm just going to carve in and carve up because this is going to create the shape of the outer corner of the eye coming down to this zygomatic that we made earlier. And all this, I'm just holding Alt and just carving away at this very lightly. Because this part where your temple is is sunken in a little bit more and your eye sockets sticks out just a little bit. This is all very rough. So we're just gonna keep playing with all this until we get it the way we want. Smooth down that. Brow that I was showing you there. But there is that brow shape. There's just a slight bit of bone sticking forward here that comes up and over. And then this eye socket sort of tucks in toward it and tucks underneath it. I'm going to smooth this inner corner. I'm going to pull my main head piece here. I'm just pulling the inner corners of this I in to give more room for this eyelid. Let's grab the bottom eyelid. Go into solo mode, and I'm gonna grab the center here in the middle and pull it in towards itself like that out. Now, we can adjust our eyes, can move them in, scale them up. And this of course, just depends on how stylized or how real, realistic you want your character to look. A general rule with eyes from the side like this is that the top eyelid sticks out further than the bottom eyelid. So you want to bring this bottom eyelid back in n. But you still want it to be sticking out from the eye. Eyes are tricky because they're very important. They're one of the first things that we looked at when we look at a face. It's really important that we make the eyes look appealing and make them look nice on our character. So for bottom eyelids, if we look at reference images of an eye. For example, if we get backup here on this royalty-free site, on Unsplash and we type in eyes. If we go back to this royalty-free image site, Unsplash and we type in eyes. It's gonna give us lots of examples for reference images. And I wanted to talk about the shape of the lower lid and the shape of the upper lid. So you have this inner corner of your eye here where the eyelids connect. This little little soft tissue in here called the caruncular, I believe because the curriculum. And so this sort of holds the eye in place in this corner here. And then the lids wrap-up robot up and around down. And there's no there's no soft part here on the other side. So the bottom lid comes up to this little high point right here. Then travels down and over and wraps around the other side of the eye. So we want to try to create that shape. The inner corner of the eye comes up to this high point and then down and over. Then this part of the upper eyelid comes up to a high point. Right in the center. Up here. There's actually two high points that comes up to here, and then up to here and then down and over. So 1 here, 1 here, right around the center, and then down and over. We're going to try to recreate those shapes and just always be looking at reference when you're doing this. So when we grab our top lid, we have this space here for the caruncular comes up to one high point, up to a second high point. And then we're going to make it come down over this outer corner of the eye. Just trying to keep our geometry nice and straight without it looking, you don't want it to look lumpy. You don't want all these lumps sticking out everywhere. So just trying to use our Move brush really subtly and just keep everything lined up. And then this bottom lid. So we're gonna pull up this part here so that it has kind of forces that shape that I was talking about, how it comes up and then down and over. We want this little piece up like that. Trying to avoid it using my, I'm trying to avoid smoothing because smoothing is going to mess with the geometry and make it so that this is no longer nice and sharp and crisp on the edge, but you can smooth it. It just, I prefer not to when I'm doing this because then I'm just focusing on using the Move brush and just trying to push all these shapes in the right way. We want our eyes to be about half-closed. Now that looks okay. Something like that. That looks fine. I can even go into solo mode here and just push the top down a little bit. That's fine. I want this to stick out further. I really want to emphasize those lids. Make sure that the top lead is sticking out just a little bit more than the bottom lid. But I also want that bottom lip to be nice and thick, just going to look a little better. The next thing I want to point out is the inner corner of the eye is lower than the outer corner of the eye. This outer corner here can wrap around, but I do want to try and get a little bit of a diagonal angle between the inner and outer corner going out and up. This, I can bring these up a little further. Something like that. So that it's a little lower on the inner corner here. If you want, you can go to your eyeball here, hold Control Shift and press D to duplicate them, and then just move them over, scale them down, and move them out. Because what we'll do is use this as the caruncular. I'm just going to scale it on itself this way so that it's flat like a little disk. And then scale it down this way. Like this. Go to unmasked mesh center here so that my gizmos right in the middle, it makes it easier to move. I'm just going to rotate around and just it right into that corner right there, and just rotate it so that it's sitting up. Now we have a space, a placeholder for that caruncular. And it helps really show the shape of the eye. And really give us a little bit of a placeholder to work with here. Transitioning all these pieces like the eyelids into this corner of the eye in here is kind of difficult. So you're just gonna have to play around with the shapes. I'm gonna grab my clay buildup and my main head piece here, I'm just going to sculpt it in that it looks more like this as all connected. My eyelids are too thick on the top or I should say it's too big. It's taking up too much space here because the space normally would be filled with your eye is inside of the socket. So either the, either the eyebrow is going to come down further and cover up some of that eyelid down here to this corner of the eye socket. Just make sure that you're preserving the shape of that eye socket as much as possible. Because it's important the way that it wraps around the eyes and the way that the eyelids tuck into it, That's a really important shape. It's kind of tricky to get it right, but, oops, I'm using smooth. So this is something to just kind of have to play with it until you can make it look a little better. Make it look believable. We're not going for perfect, we're just going for believable. Sticking to some general rules until we get to the place that we want. Then we can push the boundaries from there. Cool. Now my cheeks are just looking really big because of where I've set the eyes and the rest of the face. So I'm gonna grab my Move brush and just pull in the zygomatic. And also as a result of that, I'm gonna pull in the temporal ridge at the top, just slightly and smooth down the forehead. There we go. Now the cheeks aren't so huge on this face. I can even bring this in on the sides a little bit more. Just trying to look at it from front back, side and just making sure it's not too wide on any side corner of the eye socket on the bottom. All right. I think for right now that's fine. We're also going to have to put in some placeholders for some of the other fat on the face. All right, so we're just going to fix this inner corner of the eye. I'm gonna grab my caruncular piece and move it further down. Grab the bottom and the top lid and move them further down. Move the outer corner a little higher. I'm going to tuck the bottom lid underneath the top one. For now. Just because that'll be easier for this top lid to transition into this part of the face over here. Be sure to look at your eyes from the side. Bottom leg should be just just a little bit further back from where the top lid is hanging over. Our line is like here. Yeah, it's a little looks good. So the bottom lead is a little further back. We really want to emphasize this shape. On the bottom lid. Comes up to this high point and then down and around the eye. Wraps around like that. Great. I think this is a good place to stop for this video. And in the next videos I'm going to talk more about the placement of the fat on the face and filling in those places around the eyes and the mouth and all that stuff. I'll see you in the next one. 8. Fat Pads Of The Face: Welcome back. In this video we are going to go over the fat pads in the face and the placement of all of those pieces. We're not going to do all of the fat in the face. Just going to talk about some of the stuff surrounding the mouth and the nose and the cheeks and sort of how to do that. So this is where on top of the muscle you have little pads of fat in your face that sit in some areas. There is one large long piece that sits on this part of like along the side of your nose and comes down and around the mouth. That's sort of cover up some of those muscles for the mouth. There are pads that sit right below the eyes, on the cheeks here and here, and in front of the eyelids. We're gonna try to create those with separate sub tools to be able to mold this face however we want. So I immediately noticed again some proportional issues since in the last video, I changed around the shape of my head to make it smaller. So already the jaw is a little different now, the ear is way too far back on my head. Your whole should be right around the center like a line with that top highest point of my skull here. Something like that. And that immediately makes it so that my jaws the wrong shape. So I'm gonna move this around with my Move brush, move the center, move the corners. I got my job until I get the jaw to make it look the way that I want. Move the back of the head as well. So just doing those constant proportion checks to make sure that everything is lining up correctly. If we had a neck in here, it would make it easier for us to see just all of this space would be filled in, so it would make it look a little more natural, but the silhouette was looking pretty off, so I wanted to fix that. Alright, so this is looking a little bit better. And our ear hole, which we'll deal with in another video. You should be right about there just behind this line for the jaw. Zygomatic comes up and down and back. Right about there. Right where our ear was gonna be. Cool. We got our proportion checks done. We're ready to move on to the next part here. So I'll start by messing with these cheeks. I think these gx are a little too low. I'm gonna grab my main head piece and the Move brush and just kind of push these up. Make them a little bit smaller and smooth them down. So they're pretty, pretty bumpy. Just from sculpting on top of everything here. There is a lot of muscle here connecting to your mouth. And then on top of that there's fat. So when we put in these next pieces, it'll make the face look a little more proportional. So I'm gonna go to append or sub tool. Append. Will append in a sphere. Hold Alt, Click on that sphere. And same thing we've been doing here. Just going to move it forward, scale it down. And I'm going to move it over to one side and then go immediately to Z plugin subtotal master and hit Mirror on the x-axis and hit Okay. Now I've got one on each side. I'm just going to turn on symmetry and press Q to go back into Draw mode. So now we've got these two pieces that we can use for the nasal labial fold. Nasal labial fold is that thing I was just talking about a minute ago. It's that part that connects up here near the bridge of the nose is fat pad that comes down and wraps around the front of the face. Like this. This is what creates that shape from your nose transitioning into your mouth when you smile, this gets really deep, the crease right here. That's what that is. It's the muscle underneath, but the fat on top is what gives it this unique sort of crease shape that folds around your mouth. I'm gonna grab my cheeks on my main head and just pull those pulses per back to make more room so that it doesn't look too big. So we've got this. This should connect. Above this. Right in the center of the bridge of the nose is a good place to connect to that. It should be a nice round shape, shouldn't be angular. I want it to be very soft because it is fat and fat is very soft. Now we're just playing with what are the shapes that we can create in this face? Do I want to pull this forward, make this more round? Do I want this to be really prominent and stick out a lot more? Which brings me back to talking about the mouth a little bit. The mouth should come out from the face and not just be straight flat against the face. So I can even grab the mouth with my Move brush and pull it out a little more. Push the top end. I'm pulled the ellipse out and forward more. Grab the corners of the lips, pull them back and in toward the face. That will allow a lot more roundness for these shapes to all line up. Now I'm just going to grab this. Is Olivia folding n here. Pull it in. Just for the sake of this tutorial, I'm just going to have this come down, grab my Move brush and just pull it down. I just haven't connected down here because that's kind of where the shape ends. It's all just I don't believe that this is all one piece. I think it comes down to about just below the bottom lip, somewhere around here and then there's more fat in here. But just for the sake of this tutorial, I'm just going to make it all one piece. It'll represent both of those areas at the same time. Looking at reference, you can see that this nasal labial fold here, depending on the type of face, it's more or less prominent. It sticks out further on some people. And you just kind of have to move these shapes in with one another to kind of get that balance. If I have it like this, I looked at it from far away. It looks like it's sticking out pretty far. But the lips are still coming out and forward from it. And that's a really good way to frame the mouth on your character to make sure that you're getting the right shape there is this nasal labial fold, just getting it in place. It can even come down over like this. You can see it on yourself. If you smile really big, your mouth tucks into this. So look at your own face for reference. There's always, that can always be looking at your own face. If you need some kind of if you just can't find pictures that are expressive enough or that show enough detail of that. And just look at the shapes there and try to analyze what it's doing. It starts here at the nose. It comes down and wraps around. And in some people are really sticks out here on these corners. And then wraps all the way down towards the chin. That's going to be our first The next set of fatty pads here that we're going to add, we're going to append in a new sphere again. I'll press W, move it forward, scale it down. Then I'll move it to one side. Go back up to Z plugin again, mirror x-axis it. Okay? Same thing we've been doing this whole time. I'll turn on symmetry, move it back, move it down. And I'm just going to scale it in on itself this way. And scale it down on itself this way. I get kind of like little capsule shape like this. Now if I grab my Move brush with symmetry turned on. Let's move it further closer to the face. This is gonna be below the eyes. Below the eyes, There's also some fat that sits, oops, I'm gonna push the center down. So it's this sort of shape first and then move it up. It sits like this on the face, but it wraps around below the eye. Smoothing it down. Remember you can also use DynaMesh, can go up here, DynaMesh, turn that on just to reduce the geometry, make it so that it's easier to move around and sculpt with. Of course, that if you can't find DynaMesh, it's in geometry menu under DynaMesh here. Just keep your resolution. Load is something like a 100, somewhere around a 100. Smooth this down so it's smaller. This is going to fill in the space. Let's grab our cheeks here. Smooth down the cheeks on our main head. It's a little, little too prominent. Sorry about the noise. There's a lot of loud cars driving by. All right. Now I'm just changing all my angles and just looking around my face, trying to put in this fat pad here. This fat is also going to fill in the space below the eye into this inner corner of the eye here. Now if you want, you can also just duplicate this piece. Press Control Shift and D on your keyboard and then press W to get your Gizmo and move it up. Hold Shift, snap to your front view here. And then hold shift and rotate it 180 degrees, and then move it into place like that. You can also use this same piece just with the Move brush to fill in that space above the eye, just below the eyebrows, below the brow bone like this. Then you can use your brush to kind of transition the brow shape down and into that. What I'm doing is just using it as a placeholder to show myself like, okay, this is how close I want my brow to be. My my eyelid like this. Something like that. You don't want it to be two separate pieces. This is a kind of a placeholder method where I don't want this extra piece in here because if you look at your anatomy, you don't have to fold, you don't have the eyelid. And then a fold and then your eyebrow, It's just the eyelid and the eyebrow. The brow bone, I should say. Like that. Depending on if it's a male face or a female face, there's gonna be a lot of differences there. So for example, a female face is going to have a much rounder, smoother brow bone, then a male face. A male face. You tend to get this sort of look. You get this really prominent brow that sticks out and forward like this with guys with male characters in general. And this corner of the eye socket right here comes in really sharply because the brow bone is much bigger on the skull. That's why that's what creates the shape. That more masculine sort of shape is very, very prominent in the brow bone. Whereas for females, It's very soft, it's further back. It lines up with the I lit a little more and it's very round. I think. A lot of the shapes on this face are already going toward a female, feminine, softer kind of looks. So I'm just going to keep going with that. I'm taking my face here, smoothing it down, just kind of moving the sides in and just doing some adjustments. Mostly going to move in the jaw because it's way too wide from the bag. It looks way too wide. The bottom looks pretty it's a pretty big jaw. There we go. Trying to keep all these shapes and check like that. Okay. All right. And our cheeks are still the widest part of our face, so that's good. We're keeping, keeping true to that. This upper corner here above the eye socket is the wrong shape. So I'm going to carve in behind it to try and really emphasize this shape here. Because the corner of the eye socket should come out to here and then come down here. That's a little too too much. But you get what I mean. Now, we're really starting to look like a face where it's really starting to take shape. All of the pieces are starting to come together. We're starting to see the fat on top of everything. And it's filling in the places that we look for. When we see a person, when we see a face. Now I'm just going to slowly start pushing around these pieces until they look proportionally better. I shouldn't have, I probably shouldn't have put this up here. This part on the upper browser. I'm actually just going to go delete that, hide it. Hide it for now because I don't need it. You need to hydro sub tool is this little eyeball icon will hide or unhide any ones up tool. I can grab this fat here that's underneath the eyes. Grabbed my face, pull the cheeks and more. We're just going to be constantly playing with all these shapes until they fit together. Get the brow to cover up the upper eyelid just enough so that it looks like it's tucking into the skull. Because your eyelids fold up and back. So there's a very definitive crease right there. We want to make sure that we have that. Now proportionally. My whole head is changing. This is too wide in the back, so I get a mesh that down a little bit. The back corners of the skull come up like this. I'm going to fix that. Get this round shape in the back like that. Pull down, this meets with the bottom of the cheeks. They're still too wide. There we go. Smooth that down and move it in a little bit. Getting the shape of the skull is really, really difficult. It's not easy. It's constantly adjusting. But that's totally normal. In any 3D projects. You're just always going to be adjusting as you go. Got to make changes. That's what's nice about doing this method is you can afford to make mistakes. I'm just grabbing each piece and moving it around to sort of fix my proportions. Cool. I remember when I first started sculpting, I was trying to sculpt the entire face all as one just from a sphere. And it was so frustrating because I, if I messed up one thing proportionally, I had to go back and read sculpt the entire head. And it just took me hours and hours and it was so exhausting. And at the end of it I usually didn't even have something that looked good. So using this method has been really helpful. Just showing me, you know, it's okay to make mistakes. Now you have all the pieces and you can move the pieces around and it saves you. It just gives you so much more control over your sculpt. So I've been using this method when I practice faces because it just, it makes the whole process a lot less frustrating and just gives you more control. You feel like you're actually making progress instead of having to keep going back and re sculpting everything and changing everything every time you make a mistake. Because the face is really just so complicated. There are so many pieces, so many moving parts, and they all fit together to make one complex shape. I'm gonna pull this nose forward or the face because I would really want that inner corner of the eye, the eye sockets to be in the right place. Could even pull these eyelids out more. Pull that caruncular out more. There we go. Now I'm facing another problem that is unique to faces. I have to I have to make sure that the eyes are not too wide and that there's, you know, there's no. Because if we look at this from the front, this corner of the eye is almost the widest part of my face right now, which is not correct. And if we look at reference and we look at pictures of the skull and the face from the front, the back part of the head here comes out a little more. There's a little more space. Which means that I messed up my skull here somewhere. And I'll have to yeah, something like that. That's a little better. Which is also why it's good not to sculpt with dynamic perspective on, because when you have dynamic perspective on, it looks like this is the widest part of your face, which is not correct. So you get a distorted view of your objects alternate off. But there should be more space of the back of the head coming forward just a little bit. When you're looking at the face from the front like this. Pull down, pull in shape that eye socket more rarely trying to preserve that eye socket because it's so important. Going into the cheeks. Now I can start playing with the cheeks a little more, pulling him forward using the Move brush and just smoothing it down. All right. The next fat area, There's this one below the eye. The next one is going to be this on top of the cheeks. Rather than appending in a new piece. I think it's safe to just take my clay buildup and just sculpt on top of my cheeks. Since I already have that shape established there. Same thing for the rest of this part of the face. There are fat pads in here. But rather than appending in new sub tools and trying to move them all individually. I'm just going to sculpt this in. I want to sculpt it down in the direction that the muscles are going to go. For the cheeks. I want this all to fit together very nicely. I don't want this to, I don't want to create this big thick transition at my face to be shaped wrong. I want this to be really gradual, really, really gradual. And this cheekbones sticks out more on the side, but here it's relatively flat so I can come from the nose, sculpt down and over like this to kind of follow the labial fold. Because that comes over the top of this cheekbone like that. That's going to help add to that shape there. Smooth this down just really gently. And you start to get you start to see it. There's also muscle on top of the jaw here, so we can carbon a little bit of muscle here going down this way. And very gradually you just get this nice soft transition from the cheeks down into the mouth and the rest of the face. So we just grab our move brush, push that back a little bit. Move this. If we look at our main phase again, there's this fat under the eyes. I'm just using the clay buildup brush to kind of add onto it. This I'm actually going to pull this down so that it transitions into the rest of my face. A lot smoother, like this. There we go. So that it's covering up some of the bottom of that bottom eyelid. But it's also filling in this corner of the eye and also transitioning this outer corner of the eye a little smoother and transitioning down into our cheeks a little better like this. When it comes to learning anatomy. We don't always have to learn the names of everything. Sometimes that can be more of a hindrance than it is a help. Because then you're focused on the thing and not focused on the shape. So get this bottom eyelid shape correct. Trying not to smooth. Character is going to look very sleepy. Eyes are very closed. All right, that's looking. It's looking. Okay. I'm gonna switch back to my main face, grabbed my clay buildup brush. If you look at a lot of like supermodels, they have huge cheeks, gigantic cheeks, super prominent, sticks out. So it just depends on the type of character that you want to do. If you want this to be. You can start here. Do that nasal labial folds kind of follow that shape here. And then come down and around and follow the zygomatic over this way and then up and back. Because the zygomatic is this shape here. It comes up and then down and back to the ear. Like a pair of goggles on your face like that. That's the general shape that you want to stick to when you're carving in your cheeks and putting them on your character. You can do this and smooth it down. Take the H polish, even, smooth down the tops, and then smooth down the bottom. If you really want to emphasize that cheekbone can even grab Damien standard and smoothness down and follow that edge that I just drew like this. And that creates a makeup brush size really big. And draw that line down over up and back. Now that because we've been following these general proportion guidelines for the face, now we get to start playing with these shapes and just seeing what works and how it looks and doesn't look convincing. Does it look good? Is it bad? Now we can start playing with proportions and playing with shapes. And really making this character stand out as something different and unique looking. Also from a three-quarter view. You want your eyebrow to come in. This is that this is that corner of the eye socket and the zygomatic where they meet up and how they're shaped. From a three-quarter angle like this. From the eyebrow, the eye, the angle should come in like this, like a boomerang shape in here and then out to this part of the cheek. It doesn't have to be super dramatic because not everybody has really broad cheekbones. Some people have much smaller cheeks. So it can be really subtle. It could be like this, something like that. But that's one thing. You also want to be keeping an eye out for. The shape of that cheekbone coming up and in the meeting that corner of the eye socket coming out and up to the eyebrow like that, a three-quarter view like that. Then of course the cheeks here. If we go back, the cheeks here are also coming out just a little bit. Push this in a little bit. Now our shapes are really starting to transition and fit together. Bottom of the cheek should come out a little more. This is too thin. We don't want the character to look emaciated. When I'm moving on this side, I'm looking at the other side at my three-quarter angle to really make sure that the shape looks correct from both sides. It should go in and down and out. And then it should come in again. And this part of the cheek sticks out just a little bit. Right here. Just right there. You can see that in reference images to looking at photos or of people in general from this angle. It's not just a straight line from here down to the chin. It pops up just a little bit because there is some fat in those cheeks. Now, I'm running into an issue here where it looks like my eyes, my eyes feel too far apart. So I'm just going to mess with these this little fat under the cheek or under the eyes. I mean, maybe we'll move the eyelids in a little bit more. Maybe even move the eyes in a little closer to each other so that it sits differently? Yeah. It looks like I just had this all kind of slightly off. I'm just grabbing my Move brush, just moving all these parts over. That creates more shape, sorry, more space for this. Between the outer coordinate, the eye on the side of the face was an issue we were talking about earlier. The most important thing when you're sculpting any kind of face character is to look at the relationship between all the parts and how they fit together. So the general rule of the eyes are always in the middle of the face, the mouth as a third of the way down to the chin from the bottom of the nose. There's a triangle shape. From this inner corner of the eye goes down to the outside of the nose wings. So actually these nose wings should be further out. This face, the inner corner of this, I should match up with those corners of the nose right there. That's another little cheat. It all depends. Everybody has a different face, everybody has a different knows. But these are general guidelines that have helped. Kind of give me some quick shortcuts to finding if the proportions are correct. We're just going to keep playing with this until it looks right. Our character's face is starting to really look like a face. Now. I think this is a good place to stop for right now. Just keep playing around with those shapes and pushing and pulling things around. Try and get soft transitions and curves and angles. And look at reference photos. Always be looking at reference and trying to just figure out the angles of the face and how everything fits together. We talked a little bit about the skull and how all those pieces fit too. But understanding of the skull is very important because it's the foundation for the face and those landmarks are all built-in to the skull. It's important to also just study the skull and how it holds all of the parts of the face. That is gonna do it for this video. In the next video, we're going to start the ears and kind of block that in and we'll go on from there. I'll see you in the next one. 9. Starting The Ears: All right, Welcome back to this video. We are going to talk about ears this time. If we pull up our reference website here again, we can type in ears and it gives us all kinds of pictures of different people's ears. Ears are kind of tricky. It's kind of a weird shape to try and get right. There's a few reference photos on here on Unsplash that work really well. And we can see all the major shapes that we need in our ear right here. You have this part right here that connects to the actual head and that covers up the ear hole. You have this shape that comes around and creates the outside of the ear. Then you have this shape that's right inside of the middle that comes out and pushes out toward the outside of your head. So this inner peace also connects to the ear lobe. So the outer piece comes down and around and connects to the ear lobe here. This inner peace also connects to the ear lobe and then connects right below this piece that covers the ear hole. So there's really just four main pieces that we have to remember. This piece here that covers the ear hole. This outer part here, this inner part here. Then the ear lobe at the bottom. So we're going to try to reconstruct that in ZBrush by just using this simple technique of just looking at the simple parts. And I'll explain the shapes as we go. We've got our head here. First thing we need to do is append in a new shapes so we can work on the ear. I'm going to go to sub tool append down here. We'll do sphere. Will do a sphere. Let's select that sphere, press W and move it over to one side. Let's scale it down. Before I get too carried away, I'm gonna go to Z plugin, subtotal master mirror, x-axis and hit. Okay. Now I've got two, got one on each side. Press X to turn on symmetry so that both are moving at the same time. You've got both ears. On our skull. Our zygomatic bone travels from below the eyes, up and back and then down and back to where the ear hole is in the ear hole lines up with the jaw, just behind the jaw, like right there. This will help us sort of place our ears and ears are weird. It's, it's difficult to get this shape correct. A quick way to get this cut in half the way we wanted just to hold control. And with our gizmo up, just scale it in this direction. And it will cut that object down like that. It's kind of a quick trick for just if you want to shave something down really fast, hold control and scale it in a direction that will cut it. Again. Press W to bring up your Gizmo hold Control scale in this direction. I don't know why it's choppy like that. And it will cut it like that. So it's scaling and trimming at the same time. Now, we can go to our geometry menu and turn on DynaMesh. And that will DynaMesh the ears and make them a lot easier to use skeleton. If I turn on this year, we'll be able to be able to see our geometry a little better. I'm just going to smooth this down. It's nice to start with a half sphere like this because then all you have to do is push it into the head like that, line it up so that the top of the ear is right around the eyebrow. Bottom of the ear is right around the bottom of the nose. I can even scale it up on this axis and just kind of get it in that general spot. Then I just wanted to tilt it this way so that it's pointing forward. Something like that. We can change it later. Also want to angle it down and in so that they are sticking out at this kind of an angle. If it doesn't look right, you can also just take your head, grab the Move brush, maybe pull the sides of the head out more. And try moving the ears out a little bit more as well. You get it to where it looks somewhat believable like that and we can adjust this as we go, but I want the sticking out a little more right now so that, so that we can get the shapes in there first and then try to try to place it. Like our reference image was showing us. We have the outer peace that wraps all the way around and down into the ear lobe. And then we have the inner peace. Then we have the piece that comes out here that covers up the ear hole. And then we have the ear lobe at the bottom. That's really all we have to remember. Then we can just be staring at our reference image here. I have that on my other monitor right now. And I'm just going to use my Move brush to push this back into this sort of like big wide round shape. Now, ears have a couple of angles to them. One of them is this back angle between the lowest point and this point here in the middle. I'm gonna grab right in the center there and pull up and in a little bit to create a line right here. And then same thing, I'm gonna do that, same thing on the other side. So I get this. Shape of the ear lobe at the bottom. And I'm going to bring this corner that's sticking out in so that I get this really nice round curve like that. Now that we have this shape, ears are generally, they have these very sharp sort of change in angle. 12 parts. There's the front of the ear here. It comes up to a point right about here, up to a high point at the top. Then there's another point right back here that comes down to this here. So it's very geometric. There are a lot of these angles and everybody's ears are a little bit different, but you can see that shape in all years, how the cartilage bends at very specific points. So that's what you want to be looking for. Some people's users just really round. Some people have these really big corners that stick back really far. So it just depends on what reference you're using and how you want your ears to look. So same thing with earlobes. Earlobes are all different. Some earlobes are attached at the bottom. I want to bring this ear lobe forward so that I have this kind of shape, almost like an egg shape. And this ear lobe is its own kind of floating on its own. But some ear lobes attach directly to the head, like this. But that back angle and some of your lobes are free-floating, they just hang down like this. And there's more fat in that ear lobe. Just depends again on the reference. But I'm using that reference from Unsplash, so it doesn't show the ear lobe for that one, but I'm assuming that it's just gonna be a free floating hanging your lobe. We're just gonna do that. So we're getting this shape here now I want to start creating the major shapes. I'm gonna grab my standard brush. Actually, no, I'm gonna grab my damien standard brush. And I'm just going to carve in right along where I want the edge to be that main piece. And now something to note here, this main outer piece comes in and connects like that, like you can see in our reference image. I'm actually just going to import that reference image so that it's on my screen all the time. So I'll hit Import. Find that reference image, go back to texture. Click on that image. It add to spotlight. Will scale it down here. I got to trim away some of this extra space around it and go just like that. We have a nice reference image lined up for our ear. I'm going to place this over here. Press Z to make that go away. And then I will go up to Brush Samples, enter in Spotlight Projection off so that I can sculpt this outer corner of the ear here. It's wraps up and around and down. But it also comes around and down and into the inside of the ear, right here, in front of where the ear hole is. So that's a specific shape that we really have to try to add into our ear here. So taking our Damien standard, I'm just going to try to follow this curve and come around to about three-quarters of the way down, right about where the ear hole would be. So we'll start in here like this, curve up. Oops, that's too thin. I want to leave space for this outer edge of the ear. Will come down to about there. Like that. Because we want this to be carving in at that sort of angle. Because then you also can do this now up so that we're creating that outer edge of the ear. And I'm just going to smooth this part down. Smooth, all this smooth, and then just keep using my damien standard to really define that shape right there. Cool. So we have that shape now. I'm just going to trace over it one more time to really get it down in there. Now I'll grab my clay brush and hold Alt so that it's going to subtract. And I'm just going to flatten out the inside very gently so that I'm carving into the ear. Which leaves this part sticking out. Just what we want. Since we already have our clay brush. I'm going to turn up my DynaMesh resolution. I'm at 5 thousand active points, so I'm going to turn up my DynaMesh resolution 200. And then I'll smooth out really quick and then hold Control click and drag, and it will read item mesh my object. Now we have a little more resolution. So I can get in this inside of the ear a little bit easier. We'll even take our Move brush and just kind of shape this around a little bit better. Cool. That's looking okay, now, I'm just going to pull these corners a little bit to try and give this a little more shape. One thing that I'm noticing too is this outer piece that comes around and up and down. It angles up and in and follows this second piece that we're about to make. So it comes down this way and then comes up and in and then down again. So it's kind of a tricky angle. It's almost like it does this. And then that comes down and into the ear lobe like that. That we get this kind of shape wraps around down and then comes up and then down into the ear lobe lake that we can even pull this back corner of the year and the year up. It's really just about trying to understand this in 3D. When you're looking at a reference image, It's hard from one angle. But if you're using multiple angles, that can make it a lot easier. But I've done this many times before, so I'm just trying to explain my thought process along the way. The ear lobe is not gonna be this thick, so I'm gonna grab the back of my ear and just use the Move brush to push it in really gently and smooth it. Push it in, smooth it. So that the back of our ear lobe is not too thick. Almost smooth all this out so that the agenda, very, very soft transition. We have a little bit of an ear lobe there. Cool. Now I can see because of the shape that I made, my ears don't line up with my head correctly. Now, I'm gonna press W on my keyboard. If you're gizmo isn't straight up and down with the world axis. If it's moving diagonally, you can hold Alt and tap on this little back arrow and it will reset your Gizmo to be aligned with the world again so that it's straight up and down. Hold Alt Tab on that little arrow there. So I need to move this down so that the bottom is lined up with the nose and the upper part is lined up with the brow bone like that. Now that I have a general shape for my ear, there's a really good rule to follow when you're doing faces. Whatever the angle of this jaw is right here, that's going to line up. The ear is going to line up with that angle of the jaw. So my ear is not going to be straight like this. It's not going to be sticking straight like that. It's actually going to line up and go with the angle of my jaw. Like that. Push these anymore. The shape for this is not quite correct. So I'm going to rotate it. It's hard hard to get this just right. That's looking more correct. So we'll leave it like that for now. Maybe described my Move brush and pull this part down. Grabbed my head, push this part in because it's not supposed to stick out in front of the ear like that. That's starting to look more believable. Grab my Move brush, pull this, push this down. Got to kind of finagle all of these parts together. Let's get back to sculpting. We've created this outer part that wraps around if you want, you can grab the clay buildup or standard brush and just really emphasize that part even more as it transitions down into the ear lobe. Like that. If you want, you can carve in to the inside of the ear or even more so that there's more concave shape on the inside, just a little bit more like that. So we're left with this little space and this nice little ridge underneath for where this outer part of the year comes around. There's this that tucks into the ear. Want to sculpt that in? Then there's this part that covers up the ear hole. And for now I'm just going to make it like a little bump shape like that. Really basic kind of shape. And then grab my Move brush and just pull this whole part in that it's connected to the head. This doesn't have to be perfect. As long as the ears are in generally in the right place, it should be fine. It looks like I lost some symmetry. One of my ears is more sculpted on than the other. Something went wrong there. So I'm going to show you how to fix that. I'm going to turn symmetry off. And I'm going to mask the ear that I want to keep, which is this left one? I think I must have turned symmetry off at some point. So I'm going to get rid of this right one and then re mirror it so it turns symmetry off. And then I'm going to mask this ear. And earlier in when we set up our custom interface, we had the hide part and delete hidden buttons. Those are up here on my interface. But if you can't find them, you can go to visibility. Press Hide part, and when you do it's going to hide anything that is not masked. So now it's hidden. If you want to show that part again, you can either press Show part or you can hold Control and Shift and click on your canvas and it will show it again. I'll press Control Z to go back. That's also a handy trick for hiding parts like that. You can hold Control and Shift click and drag this green box over the part that you just want to show and it will hide everything else. That's another way to do that. Now that this is hidden, I want to delete anything that I don't want that's hidden. I would find the delete hidden button, which is under Geometry, modify Topology, and delete hidden. So now that that's gone, it's gone forever. Be very certain if you ever want to delete hidden, that you want it gone for good because if you do, it's gone. You can't get it back. Anyway. Now I can just go up to Z plugin, go back to subtotal master, mirror x-axis and hit Okay. And now these look exactly the same. I'm going to make sure to turn on symmetry. Symmetry is on. Yes, great. Now they're both back and they look exactly the same. Don't forget to save your project. Also from time to time. Make sure that you're saving regularly, especially because he was crashes. Probably should have mentioned that in the first video. Alright, so we're gonna move our ears forward a little bit, which means that we also need to know we're not gonna do that yet. We need to fix. We need to get this inner part of the ear going. So I'm gonna grab my damien standard. We notice that this piece, it branches off into two pieces. There's one going this way, one going this way, and they took underneath this outer part. So it's like a fork right here. And then it travels down into one piece that comes around, connects to the ear lobe and creates that shape. For Damien standard, I'm just going to hold Alt. This first one tucks up underneath there. So I'm gonna hold Alt Carver line this way. Maybe my brush should be a little bit bigger. Carve out this way down forward like that. That's too much. Maybe we'll use the clay buildup brush for this. We'll just create one path that comes around this way. Up and over. Like that. It looks like I got these shapes a little bit incorrect so we can fix that as we go. I have this one line here, which is this line right here. Then I want this other part of that forked shape to come in from right here. Like that. Now I'm getting this shape here and this shape here. And I'm just going to smooth it very, very gently. Now the thing about that specific part of the ear is that that part sticks out. If you look at your ears in the mirror, you can see how that part actually sticks out. Some people that's really prominent in it sticks way, way out in their ear, sticks out like outside of the ear. Even. It's just a matter of playing with these angles, playing with the shapes now to try and get this outer ear lobe, I'm sorry, this, this outer section of the ear to line up properly with this inner part, because sometimes the inner part sticks out really far. It just depends on the reference photo and this is from the side view. So it's kinda hard to see. But from the front view, if you're looking at a reference photo or if you look at your own ears, you'll see what I'm talking about. This intersection. Just using my Move brush to kind of shape that. But that intersection sticks out really far on some people. And I'm just using Damien standard to kind of shape that shape there and really carve in the Azure on my outer part. So that it really gives some depth to my ear. Just always be changing your camera angle. Always be moving around and looking at it from different angles. Because if you do it just from one angle, that's not going to look right. You gotta get it so that it's sticking out at the right angle. Here's our strange, sometimes this part moves in. This part moves out. And it just depends on what sort of reference photo of your using. Just understanding the shapes there. Alright, so another way of that, I'm going to fix this a little bit. So this part should come down in here. This outer part needs to be higher up, connect in like this. And if we look at the way that this tucks in here, the way that this tucks in here. This other forked part goes straight over and in like that and tucks and bind it. We're just trying to get those two shapes to kind of fit together. Let me have our outer piece here. Comes down into that ear lobe. And I'll grab my Move brush and just pull this up because it looks like this inner part curves down and around and then up and then down and over. Trying to get that specific shape in there and get these just sort of line up with each other. Now it's almost like looking at a drawing. You're just trying to, just trying to line up all of the landmarks in relation to one another. Cool, farther away, That's starting to look like an ear, starting to take shape. That's what we want. We want this to start to pull the ear lobe back further. Pull this whole front of the ear back even more. Go into solo mode here and really try to tune this up. Because that is not the right shape. To smooth out the back so it's not sticking out so much. They're great. And these are your lobes are pretty big. We can make them smaller. I'm just smoothing down, smooth, smooth. Those smaller. Which means now we need to adjust the angle of this year to match up with that line of the jaw like that. That's looking better. Now the jaw should come up to the ear. The ear sits behind the jaw. Like that just a little bit. There should be further in. Then maybe angled out a little bit more like that. I'm trying to get that angle so that the ears face out and over a little bit more like that. And then grabbing with my Move brush. Oops. I accidentally changed from my brushes. I have my Move brush. And just trying to pull this ear lobe out more. Alright. So this is pretty, pretty loose. I can just take my damien standard and now I can try carving in to really bring out the outer peace, the inner peace, and how they all connect. This. It looks like I didn't leave enough room. Grab my Move brush. I didn't leave enough room for that piece that covers the ear hole. I'm actually just going to take my damien standard and just carve in because we see our ear here. This piece comes back and N right here. And then directly below that is where the hole is for the ear, but it's inside. Tucked away inside of here. I'm going to grab my clay buildup brush, make my brush size is pretty small and just hold Alt and carbon a little bit of a hole in there. Maybe smooth it out a little. I don't want it to be complete. Hold on the object there. But just so that there is that depth in there somewhere. And then use my damien standard to trace around these shapes. They fit together better. Smooth it out. You can also DynaMesh. If your geometry is getting too stretched out. There we go. Now we're getting this fork shape here on the inside, comes around and down. And I think that that pieces little too thick, so I'm going to push it back. I'm trying to get the angles of everything a little more correct. Got our outer shape. The outer part is a little thick. So you could even grab your inflate brush and hold Alt and drag that along here and it will deflate the mesh, make it a little thinner. Just be really careful when you're doing that because you could deflate the whole thing on accident. You don't want to make this more believable. I need to grab my standard brush and just create some thickness along the top edge of this ear. Like that. And then maybe grab my Move brush again. Squish this up and out on itself so that that outer edge is not quite so thick. I made it way too thick on my ear. That also stretched out all these shapes inside of here. So, but that's good. It's leaving more room to work with. I'm just gradually working outward. Smooth all this, smooth all this. Maybe read DynaMesh, hold Control and click and drag outside here. Now I have more space in here to be able to create this shape for the outer part of the ear that comes in. And then we can create this little piece that guards the ear hole right here, which basically connects to the head. And we got to rotate it a little bit. Here. Draws looking kind of funny. Always adjusting, always changing these pieces around. Alright. I think that's good enough for the ears. We don't need to get super detailed. But we got all of our major parts in there. We got the part that covers the ear hole here. This part here. We got this outer peace that comes out and wraps up and around the outside down into the ear lobe. And then we got this inside piece here that forks together, connects here and wraps down and n like that. Just make sure that that part is also sticking out. And if you want, you can also grab your brush and pull this upper part of the ear back even more so that, that looks like it's sticking out more. That's another way to do that. The last thing I want to talk about is connecting the back of the ear to the skull because there is some volume there. And just, it's a quick and simple way to sort of create this upper edge of the ear is to trace with your Damien standard brush just along here. And create a line, a guideline for yourself. Because that's going to create that edge of the ear. It could even carbon in town like this. We're just trying to create a nice consistent edge like this. Like, okay, this is going to be my ears. Matures edge right here. Like that. Now you have this edge. I'm going to grab my Move brush and pull this away from the head even more. I don't think this is sticking out far enough. Yeah. There we go. The ears come out. There's a gap between the top part of the year and the head here. And it connects down toward more toward this part that covers up the ear hole. But all the years are different. You got to play with it until you get it right. I'm going to smooth that out so that it's a smoother transition. This now we have our ears in this shape here. The back of the ears connects to the head and there's quite a bit of volume there. So I'm going to sculpt on top of this with my clay buildup brush to get that nice angle going into the skull like that. And if I grab my Move brush again, I'm just going to try to get this ear lobe in a little more. I think that this skull shape can come down and out more. I think there's supposed to be a little less space. Yeah. We want the back of the ear to have this, this volume here where from the edge of the ear it comes down and over into the skull like that, that sort of shape. You can really try to emphasize that by just continuing to kind of create this nice little edge where your ears sticks up before it comes to the back part that transitions into the skull so that you really get this nice edge like that. And then the volume that connects to your skull like that. That's a very important thing to also remember just to keep an eye out for. All right, that's looking pretty good for now. We have some ears on this character and we can keep messing with this too as we go, just trying to get the shapes correct, Get the front of the year to come out more like we showed here. This partial come in a little bit more like this. Maybe the ear load needs to come back a little more. Now we've got the general shape in place. All the pieces, years or something that you're just gonna have to practice. Because they're really complicated. And it's just a really unique shape. All ears are different, especially animal ears. But that's gonna do it for this video. In the next video, we're gonna talk about going back and refining some of the other parts of the face. And going on from there. I'll see you in the next one. 10. Refining And Stylizing: Welcome back. In this video, we're gonna go over refining the different parts of the face. Now it's important, I want to note that in this video we're not going to try to make every single piece of geometry look true to life. I'm not trying to do a super realistic sculpt. In fact, I like more stylized characters for a lot of my sculpts anyway. So a lot of what we're gonna be doing is just using our simple brushes like the Move brush and Damian standard to just add a little bit more stylization and make our sculpt look a little more interesting so that it doesn't just look like a blocky blocked out face like this. And we'll get into that and I'll show you how you go about doing that. I'm going to begin with my main head piece here. The nice thing is, as we switch between any of these pieces, we can just hold Alt and click on any sub tool and just adjust it as we go along with it. With my main head, I'm going to start by smoothing down the eye sockets a little bit. I want this to be a female character. I want the skull shape to be more feminine. And I'm making sure to preserve this angle here for where the brow comes down and connects to this nasal bone here. And the eyebrows. You typically get a little bit of an indentation right in the middle. If I grab my clay buildup brush and I hold Alt, I can carve right in the center like this. And then I can build up this brow just ever so slightly. And then hold Shift to smooth it down a little bit. Right now I'm at a pretty low DynaMesh resolution. So I could just DynaMesh real quick to see how it looks. Then I will turn up my resolution to something like 120. So it's probably going to double my resolution. And then if nothing happens when you turn up your resolution, if you hold Control and click and drag outside of your object and nothing happens, just smooth on your object for a second or make any kind of change. Then read DynaMesh and it should apply your new resolution. This looks okay, 41 thousand points. I don't want my geometry to get too high because this is just a block out sculpt. I don't need a lot of detail anyway. I'm just going to gently carbon with my clay buildup here. The shape of this brow bone and hold Shift and smooth it down. And I just want to really subtle shape, I don't need anything crazy. I'm just very, very slowly building up that form. For the eyebrow, for the socket, and the skull, right around the eyes. Just very gently. I think that's enough and we can come back to it later. We can just keep refining as we go. I don't want to focus on one area too much for too long. Because then I start to lose perspective and I start to only think about that area instead of a whole face as one, peace. So next I'm gonna take my Move brush, grab the side of this eye socket and bring it in because it's not the right shape. And at this point just be looking at reference. Have some skull reference up and have some face reference up on your other monitor or on a screen somewhere where you can see it or put it in the light box like we were talking about in earlier lessons. Now let's take a look at our cheeks. So the zygomatic bone comes underneath this bottom part of the eye socket here and sticks out the furthest on the face. It's already pretty prominent on our face here, but it's a really gradual, really smooth transition and the cheeks push in down here, so I want to change that. And there are a couple of ways you can add some cool stylization to your characters cheeks. So by selecting your Damien standard brush and holding Alt, make your brush size big and just drag along that cheek and back. Which is that's a little too extreme, but you could even go below the cheek line a little bit and follow the line of the zygomatic going back toward the ear hole and then just smooth it down. Already. This is creating a much more dynamic look for my cheeks. Because now the high point or the farthest point out is dispersed between my original edge that I had and this new one that I just drew in with the Damian standard. I'm just trying to think about the forms on my face for this character and how much I can exaggerate those forms and how much I can get away with before it just looks like it's too much. This is a cool look. I like this look on. I'm just going to gently move it down so that it's not sticking out super far. It really, really pronounces those cheekbones. And now I have these natural shadows underneath, which just brings out more definition in the face. So it's things like this that I'm gonna be thinking about as we go about stylizing and refining the different parts of the face. So I also want to keep this box for my, for my silhouette here, fairly large in the corner. Because I'm gonna use this to see if things like from the side view here I can see that I need to take my Move brush and move the angle of his job back because it's not quite lining up correctly. My face is a little bit little bit off kind of all over. So there's just a bunch of little adjustments that we're going to have to make before this is a really, really solid piece. I'm going to move the mouth back. And because I moved the mouth back, I'm gonna move the other parts around it back as well. Jin those two supporting parts at the bottom, those fat pads at the bottom, I'll even move this main piece back and make sure I maintain that angle of my jaw. I'm trying to get my forehead to line up with the front of the mouth a little about a little bit more. And maybe I could even just bring the forehead forward. It doesn't take that much. When I move my forehead forward, I want to make sure that there's still space for this inner corner of the eye to be further back in the skull like this. And it looks like that's a good distance. Going back into the face. Grab this kind of mess with these fat pads under the eye here. Cool. That's looking better. Next, I'll just make sure that the shape of my skull overall looks okay, that it's still got that kind of round egg shape at the angle of my ear, lines up with the angle of the jaw here. Bottom of the ears still matches the bottom of the nose and the top of the brow here. Those are all in place. Let's do something about the nose next. Noses, our noses are interesting because you can just do so much with a nose. There are so many different shapes. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of squished down this tip by pulling it further down towards the bottom of the nose and bringing it in on itself. Then I can narrow my nose bridge as well. Bring it up. I want the bridge of my nose to be a little more prominent than this tip piece that I made. And I'm just going to slowly move all these parts around with my Move brush. Also with your nose. The way that I showed you to create these nostril wings in the earlier video is really important. But sometimes if you're doing a stylized character, you don't necessarily have to show this back part. This area here. It's not always necessary. Some people, when they create noses, they just let the nose sync directly into the face like this. And that's enough. As long as you're getting the shape of this wing, nose wing, correct. That's really all that matters. So don't stress too much about making sure that the whole thing is sticking showing like you don't have to have this whole thing showing like this. Otherwise it would look weird if your whole your nostrils will be way too far forward. So sometimes this is a good enough approach for some people, but that just depends on the style that you're going for. And you can compare it to reference, compare it to different images of characters or whatever it is that you're trying to sculpt, but that's just something to keep in mind. It really just comes down to a style choice for this. I think this will be fine if I let it just kind of merge into the face like this into the top of the mouth. I don't think it'll be a problem. And it'll still look. The shape of the nostrils is still very readable. And the angle of the mouth and everything looks okay. I think that's what's more important in this case. I'm just going to be moving this a little bit. And then I'm also going to take this nasal labial fold that's along the side here. I'm gonna grab my H polish brush. Make my brush size is fairly large and I'm gonna flatten down on top of this so that it's not bumping up. But instead it's a flat on top that it runs down. And along the face, nice and flat. Because if you look at that actual fold on your own face, it is relatively flat, but it just depends on your shape of your face. Of course. This can really accentuate lot of different. This fold around the mouth can really change the way that your face looks. It's something to really pay attention to. Where it attaches here, toward the bridge of the nose and how it folds around these creases and corners where these nose wings come up to the nose here. And just how thick it is or how thin it is can really change the way that your face looks. For example, if I wanted to make this really, really big and really prominent, suddenly your character gains a whole different. Look. If you make this really thick. And if you really wanted to play with the shapes, you could even at this stage because it's your sculpt, you can do whatever you want with it. You could grab this part and just bring it along underneath your cheeks if you wanted to fill in the cheeks more. That's the beauty about this whole method is you can, once you sort of understand the structure of the face, you can start to play with these parts and start to really make style choices and say, what do I want this character to look like? What does this, what does this character? Who is this character? I'm actually just going to hit Control Z because I don't think that's looking pretty good, but you get the idea. It just being able to make style choices like that, and being able to just manipulate, manipulate your mash however you want to get different results. I'm just going to smooth this down a little more. Let's switch to a different sub tool so I can see if it's blending in with the face. So it's kind of sticking out pretty far. So I'll take H Polish again and just flatten down on it. Just get this nice. Try to get these. This is what we're looking for right here. How it emerges in with the other parts of the face a little, a little bit better. A smoother transition. Now that it's down to a nice thickness, it looks like the thickness is okay, I'm going to shift and just smooth this out now. Then maybe we'll just move it forward using our camera angle to our advantage and just move it forward a little bit. The face like that. Now let's mess with this chin here. I want to bring in this chin since it's a female character, I will make the gentle little smaller, a little less prominent. Were a male character, the chin might be a little larger and have an indentation in the middle of some male. Characters have this cleft in their chin. It looks like that. But it just depends on female. Female characters can have that too. It's not just specific to male, but some Chen types are a little bit different. So something to keep in mind for this character. I'm just going to have this be a nice and round. And to create some stylization to it, I am gonna take my H polish and smooth this, sorry, flattened this. I can see here that I've gone too far so I can hold Alt and it will build up the clay on that spot. And then I can smooth it down to kind of create this unique sort of chin shape going down, which actually that's not going to work. Make my brush smaller, hold Alt and it will build up the material. And then also with that done, I can make my brush size really big, hold Alt and just go on this spot here and then smooth it down. This creates a nice unique sort of knob shape for my Gen like this. And creates a nice stylized angle to it as well. Same thing with these little corner pads here. I'm gonna flatten them down with H polish and then hold Alt to build up on top of it. When you're using Alt and H polish, it creates very nice, sharp, clean, flat surfaces like this. I love H polish for this so you can smooth down and then hold Alt and build backup. And then you suddenly have almost this hard surface modeling look because it's only creating flat geometry. Wherever you're smoothing or cleaning up your edges. I can smooth down and then hold Alt and build it up. And then same thing and just go work my way around my object and just use my H polish on a couple of places and then hold Alt and go over those again. And it will build up the geometry that I eventually start to get these nice, clean, hard edges around some of my pieces. And this is where it starts to become almost like hard surface modeling in a way. It's a little more, little more interesting to look at. Some people really loved doing hard surface. So I'll press W to bring up my gizmo and just move this in and rotate it using my gizmo to get it into place rather than trying to use the brush to get it to do what I want. Then I'll just grab my Move brush and just very subtly pull in those corners like that. The Milgram, our chins smooth it down a little bit so it fits him with those pieces. We'll grab these and just move this edge so that it combines with this part of the face and the jaw a little bit better. Cool. That's looking a little more interesting now. And we could do the same thing with all these other parts. I like taking my H polish and just smoothing down or sorry, just using the H polish to kind of flatten this down. And then holding Alt to build a pick-up and then smoothing with shift. And then you just take your Move brush, get everything into place here. So very quickly we've already established some really unique shapes on the face. And I think these bottom parts are looking a little too hard surface looking, so I'm going to smooth them down because it doesn't match with the rest of the dynamic of the face. But it still gives it a cool look. I'll make sure that that lines up at the bottom part of the jaw here and at the chin also matches up with that draw. Smooth this down as well. Now I'm going to grab my main head piece here and where the cheeks come in towards the mouth. I need to pull this out just a little bit. Because if this cheeks for sunken in like this, our character would look really emaciated. Usually if a person has kind of sickly looking at their cheeks are sunken in like that. So the cheeks need to come out just a little bit so that when you're looking at it from this three-quarter view, there should be just a little bit of a little bit of a bulge right there coming down from the cheeks like this. Smooth it just a tiny bit. Just to be aware that that's something to keep an eye out for. From a three-quarter view. This little Obviously the eye socket, the brow comes down and then comes in like that boomerang shape. And then back out for the cheekbone and then comes down here toward the teeth. And it should be just a little bit of a pop right there where the cheek stick out. Now. See a mess around with some of the other parts on the face here to the nose. I'm just gonna make the bridge a little bit thinner. Gave them make the nose bridge a little thicker. Let's keep it thinner. For now. Eyelids. I'll leave the eyelids alone for now because we've already spent enough time doing that. I don't want to have to move that around right now. Let's mess with the mouth first, I'm gonna take this nasal labial folds, move it back so that it's not overlapping with the corners of my mouth. I have it out to the sides like this. I want this to be a little more relaxed feeling. I'm going to bring down these corners here where it comes down from this corner of the nose down toward the mouth. I'm just going to have this angle that comes down and in a little bit like this. Otherwise the face might just look like it's tense or like it's making an expression or something. And then I don't want that. I want this to be a relaxed, neutral looking face. I'm losing some of the roundness from this, so it's kind of tricky. But of course later on, once we merge all these pieces together, we can always fix this whole shape. For now, I think that's a good place holder. So now we'll grab the mouth. And I want to make sure that I have these these corners of the mouth showing that this isn't going to cover it up. I want to pull this back out of the way a little bit, smooth it down there. Now we can actually see these nodes that I originally sculpted into my mouth here on the sides. And what I mean by nodes is it's kind of like a little placement of muscle or tissue right here in the corner of the mouth that kind of sticks forward. And you can really see it right here where this line of the mouth comes down and over the top of that bottom lip and how it kind of sticks forward right there. Not all mouth's do that exactly, but there is a pretty distinct little spot right here on the corner of the mouth that does come forward a little bit more than the top lip. The resolution on this mouth is pretty low, where it's at 20 thousand points. So if I read DynaMesh, it 27 thousand, so I'm going to turn my DynaMesh resolution up to something like three or 400. How about 400? That about doubled the amount of geometry that I have. And so you get a little bit of this artifact in here with DynaMesh sometimes. So we can just go in and just very gently smooth that out. When we start to get up over 50 thousand points, it starts, the geometry just becomes to be a little too much. It's almost more of a hindrance to have that much geometry. Sometimes, at least in my experience, when I first started sculpting, I always went for higher resolution right away, I would crank the DynaMesh resolution super high so that I can start sculpting in detail right away. And that was kind of a mistake. I shouldn't have done it that way. Well, I guess I learned the hard way. And I didn't realize that starting with lower resolution first is. Definitely better for you because it teaches you the actual shapes. And you're not really supposed to get into detailing right away anyway, it doesn't make sense to try and detail something if you haven't even created a foundation or a base for it yet. So that was just a mistake that I like I said, I had to learn the hard way. So now I'm just taking Damien standard and tracing the shape of the upper lip and the shape of the lower lip. Not trying to create a line for the mouth, but I'm trying to trace the shape of the upper lip and the shape of the bottom lip at the same time. I know that my bottom lip is made of two large fat pads here and here. And then it's divided down the center. There's not always such a huge crease down the center, but I like to put that in for stylization. I just think it looks nice. Then the upper lip is made of three parts. This middle section and then these two side wings, so the center part divides about here. And then these two wings that come down and over creates the cupid's bow shape in the mouth. Now I can take something like my standard brush. And right in the center of the upper lip, I could just start to draw a line and trace along the outer edge. And it will really make those lips pop like that. And then just hold shift and smooth from this side of the line. I don't want to smooth up here as much I want to smooth in here. Shift smooth like that. That you get this nice thick little border around the lips and I missed a spot right in the center. So I'm just going to fill that in. Just barely touched that and fill in it. Now with your upper lip, you have the philtrum coming down from the nose like this. And it sticks out and forward and connects to your upper lip. And the high points of the upper lip connect with those two lines for the philtrum here and here. Then of course, the center of the philtrum comes down and end. So you can hold Alt and carve that in a little bit, smooth it down. Something along the lines of this like this. Do you want those two high points of the upper lip to line up with those lines from the philtrum. The philtrum is usually relatively straight line. It's not going to be bowed like this. It should just be a straight, straight line down to those high points of the lip. And just work on a gradually, slowly and just kind of build up. Your shape of your lips is not correct. Make sure that you have this outward facing outward and downward facing upper lip like this. I like that 45 degrees angle like this. And then the bottom lip should be it's counter sticking in just a little bit further. Not sticking out as far. And even just pull it back a little bit with the Move brush. You get this nice compliment here like that. And just for this, I'll just put a little bit of texture with my clay buildup brush on my upper lip here. I'm not going to go straight down all the way across. I'm going to try to follow the curve as if there are cylinders laid inside of here. And instead of here, I want to follow the curve of where those fat pads lineup follow the curve as if there is a cylinder inside of here in this direction, going all the way to the bottom. Then just very gently smooth. And leave some of that detail on the inside, closer to the line of the mouth. And then it stands out a little bit more because then you get those deep shadows in there. Same thing for the bottom lip, curved down and around and out like this. Oops. Out like this. Smooth, this very gently. When you're doing your mouth like this, when you're trying to put details on the lips. Sometimes symmetry can just make it look very inorganic. So what you can also do is just turn symmetry off and just work one side. And then work the other side. And then smooth. It gives a little bit of asymmetry that you're not just getting a perfectly symmetrical model the whole time. There we go. Following that line and making sure that I'm not building up my formed too much. These lips are really big. So not all characters are going to have huge lips, but it's a style choice. Depending on how you want to do it for your character. And then I'm going to take my standard brush and just go along the outer loops, make sure that you have symmetry turned on for this. I'm going to trace this line of the bottom lip and I'm not going to start here at the corner of the mouth and come down because the bottom lip tucks in underneath the upper lip. So even want to come in just that little, a little bit here. So I want to start my line here, not here. And just follow along the outer bottom edge. Like that. Cool. Then of course below the mouth we still have those those two fat pads here and here on the sides. So I'm just going to add a little volume and see how it looks. Make them a little more prominent because these are the two shapes that sort of wrapped down and around the chin. They look pretty, pretty big. Actually, they look a little too big. So maybe I'll take my age polish brush and just flattened downward, sticking out too far. Then smooth it. There. There's still some roundness there, but it's not too round. I can also take my clay buildup brush and hold Alt and kinda carbon this sort of shape underneath the lip and then smooth it to really push and force that shape. Now you're really getting this the shadow here for this fat pad coming off the sides of the bottom lip like that. Then it transitions into the chin a little bit better. And really this is really all that the bottom lip is. It's just these two halves with all the fat and muscle that come up and meet right here in the center. These two fatty parts, It's almost like an extension of the lower lip. And every smooth that out. So it's a smooth error angle. You see how that really just creates this shape here. It's just like a big peace that juts up and in toward the center and meets to create that bottom lip. And it really does just wrap down and around the chin like that. If this isn't looking quite right, we can also just build this up here. Notice the direction that I'm sculpting. There are two ways that you can go. Like if you know that there is fat or fiber or muscle in a certain area, you can either sculpt along with the direction that the muscle fibers go. Or I like to sculpt across perpendicular to wear, the muscle or fabric fiber or any of that ligament or anything goes. It's just a style choice. But just be aware. If you know that something connects from a to B, you can either just draw straight from a to B or you can sculpt across it to build up more even forums that way as well. That's the way that I prefer, but you can do both. I've seen plenty of people do both and both work equally as well. Just be aware of where things are and where they connect. And that's the most important thing. I can even build this up here to bring this down into the chin. A little more, transition, a little more gradually into the chin like that. Cool. Now all these parts are in relationship of one another, are now connecting a lot better. I've got my chin here. I don't really need to do much to the chin. It's already got it's little knob shapes. I'm just going to leave that alone. Maybe for the cheeks we can hold Alt and just carve in underneath here under this zygomatic. Just slightly and then smooth it just to create a little bit of, a little bit of a plane change. Now I can see, because I'm doing all of this by John needs to be moved now so I can grab my Move brush. And I'm going to look at it from the back to make sure that I'm not making it too small. I'm just going to bring it in towards itself a little bit and then look at the bottom and make sure I'm still getting that natural horseshoe boomerang shape. Looks okay. Getting off center and the ears. So let's talk, let's talk about the years for a sec here. Make sure it's lined up with the angle of my draw. Maybe even more like this. Bring it down a little bit so that it matches the bottom of that nose. Could even move it in like this and I could even rotate them out even a little bit more. Snapped my camera angle by holding shift like this. And then just use my gizmo, the gray ring at the camera angle. Just rotate them out a little bit like that. And if you want, at this point, you can make your ears pointy. If you want, just grab the point here and just drag them back. To make other fantasy character or something cool like that. If you really want your brush to be able to drag the tip of that ear even further out. You can go up to brush modifiers. I'm sorry, curve and turn on ACU. Acu curve makes it so that wherever your mouse is touching, it's pulling directly from that polygon, specifically whichever polygon your brushes on, it, moves everything from that spot and makes much sharper points. When you're moving things. Accurate curve can make a nice raised points like this on the surface of the skin. It's also better for moving around strings of hair and things like that. Because accu curve is not moving everything within your brush radius at the same time it's focusing on the single spot that you grabbed from first. And that's how it prioritizes how everything moves. At U-curve is very useful for getting really more precise shapes when you're using your Move brush. Just be careful because you can also create these really sharp indentations like that. So it's very specific. You want to use it for specific things, not for everything. But that is also just something that's very handy. To be aware of. Acu curve. I don't think I'm going to make this character's gears pointed just because I've done a lot of stylized characters lately that have 40 years. This one's going to stay normal. The detail on the ear is pretty good already. We spent a lot of time on that on your video. So really all I'm gonna do is maybe turn up my DynaMesh resolution to something a little higher, 300. You can also find that in the geometry menu under DynaMesh resolution slider right below DynaMesh there. So I'll hold Shift and just smooth onetime real quick. Then that'll allow me to hold Control, click and drag and read DynaMesh. So up to 30 thousand points, that's fine. Now I'll take my damien standard and start just kind of getting in some of these deeper, deeper areas in the ear. Because I really want the shadows to stand out more. I'm just using Damien standard to kind of carve in some pathways here. And I'm looking at my reference, of course, I have for my ear. And just tracing all those major parts that we made. This outer corner, outer part here that comes down to the inside of the ear and wraps up and around the outside, and then down into the ear lobe. And then this inner part here that has those two branches that come down into a single part here. Just really trying to accentuate all of those little twists and turns on the inside like that. So when I look at it from farther away, it reads more like, oh yeah, that's an ear. Grab our clay buildup and hold Alt and carbon here. This part is starting to look a little thin like it got pinched a little too much. So I can either grab the inflate brush, which is just under eye, and just inflate that edge a little bit. And then smooth it down. Grab my Move brush. Or if inflate isn't quite working, you can also add on with the clay brush on the sides of it to make it a bulk it up a little bit more like Add-in right here. Like that to make it just a little thicker. Clay brush also does this thing where it can poke through your object like this. See how I sculpted there and it pulled through the geometry from the other side. That's because this is too thin. So if I sculpt up here, if there isn't enough space, it can pull through from the other side. So that's ever a problem if it starts doing that to you. You can also go up to brush, go to modifiers, and turn on I'm sorry, go to auto masking. Not an auto masking either. Where did it go? Well, there is a modifier that allows you to turn on back face masking, which is what I was looking for. And it's just a it makes it so that the clay brush is not going to pull from the other side like this. It's not going to pull and create a hole on this side of your mesh. I actually have back face mask up here on my interface already just in my custom interface. But I believe the shortcut was in brush. Under it is under auto masking. So under auto masking, there's back face mask. If you turn back face mask on like that when you carve or sculpts with clay buildup or clay on one side. It's not gonna pull the geometry through like that. So like if I were to turn back to his mask off and then use my clay buildup like this. Now of course now it's not doing it. But if I do something like this there, it creates a hole. Sometimes if the brush clay buildup or clay pulls too hard, but with back face masking on, it doesn't do that at all. It only affects the top vertices and nothing else. That can be really handy if you just need to thicken up apart, go over to brush, auto masking, turn on back face mask. Then you can just sculpt away on something that's thinner and it will only affect the side that you're sculpting on. And I won't create a hole in your mesh. Now I'm just going to grab my Move brush. Let's move this down to even it out a little more. Make sure this part is nice and even. And looking at our reference, this park should come up. I still have ACU curve turned on. I'm going to go back to brush. Curve, enter inaccurate curve off because I don't want those sharp points in their bring this up so it's nice and round looking. Yeah, something like that. Already we're starting to get a nice shape out of this ear. Now, once your to this point where you've sort of messed your pieces around and major character look a little more unique or stylized or however you want it to look. Now, you can really start to play with the shapes. Now you can really start to ask questions like, okay, is this a human character or is this an alien character with a different shape to brow bone becomes back to here. And maybe they have these protrusions in their forehead. And you can use Damien standard and just start creating shapes and things like this. This is the stage where it becomes really fun, where you can really start to ask questions like, well, what if this character was this or what if, what about their anatomy? Just from the basic understanding of anatomy that you have now from taking this course, what can you change about the basic anatomy like the zygomatic and the jawbone and the brow bone, or even simple things like changing the nose. What are some simple things that you can do to make your character stand out as more unique. Something that isn't necessarily human. If you want to sculpt creatures or you want to sculpt anything stylized at all. This is where style choices start to really come in. And you can just, you can really create some unique and interesting characters very quickly from this stage. Just by pushing and pulling a couple of pieces around. Already we've been able to create something that looks completely inhuman, like a semi alien race. So it sort of type of character just from a couple of lines. It doesn't take that much. And then just following the general anatomy to create unique shapes that are not ordinarily found in humans. And just experimenting from there. It doesn't even take that long. You can. The beauty of it is you can always just press Control Z and go back. And you can always just try and create something new if it doesn't quite look right. Something that I really love to do when I trace out big shapes with the Damian standard like this, is when you create a line in this direction. Take your clay buildup brush and trace along one side of that line, right down the center. Not on both sides, just on one side. And then smooth it. And it creates this unique sort of raised shaped like that. This is just a really fast way to create some really cool contour lines on a face or on a character. Something unique like that. Give this guy some horns. Even turn off symmetry and make it asymmetrical so that it looks more interesting to the eye like this. At this point. It really is just up to you to create whatever you, whatever you think is interesting. If you're just creating humans, of course, then that's great. That's kind of the point of we've learned human anatomy so that we can play around with the rules of anatomy that we know to create more unique things and making it still something that's relatable, that looks semi human. But also maybe, maybe not, maybe something that's just human enough to be relatable. But that's very far removed from being human. Anyway, you get the idea. And I think that's going to, that's a good enough explanation for for what I'm trying to get at. The point is now that you're to this place where you have all your basic structure in place, you can really quickly start to experiment with and use this as a template for the next time that you do a project or something. You have this face. It's already created. And then you don't have to go back and recreate an entirely new face. You can use this for the next couple of projects to just give yourself a starting point and just experiment with some characters and experiment with shapes and have fun playing with character concepting in 3D. That is going to do it for this video. And in the next video I'm gonna show you how to merge all these parts together. And then you can sculpt on everything has one single piece. I'll see you in the next one. 11. Merging And Final Details: All right, Welcome back. In this video we are going to talk about merging all the pieces of our face together and sort of finishing up our sculpt. And I'll show you how to go about doing that. So the first thing we want to do before we merge anything together is of course, makes sure that everything is the way that we want it. Because when we merge everything, obviously it's all going to be one piece. So if there's any large parts that are sticking out or that don't quite sit flush with other parts like this nasal labial fold here. I want to try to get to really, really line up with my cheek here and the sides of the face a little bit better so that when I merge it together, I don't have to go in there and try to fix anything so much. That's the whole purpose of having all of these parts as individual moving pieces is so that we get more control over our whole mesh, which is why we didn't start with sculpting the whole head as one piece from the start. That's good enough for now. We can also go in and just kind of do some adjustments. When we merge these together, there are gonna be some lumps and bumps that we'll have to fix, but we'll get to that. When we get to that. Once your pieces are all in place, go over to your sub tool menu on the right. Make sure that only the parts that you want to be merged together are showing like I have my copy of my initial skull here. And that's hidden, which means this eyeball is turned off, which means you can't see it. That's how you hide your sub tools. So hide anything that you don't want to merge together. This is a nondestructive process. So even if you accidentally emerged something incorrectly, we can always just go back and I'll show you how I have all my subtables showing that I want to merge together in our sub tool menu on the right here. Go all the way down, go down to the merged menu, and open it up. And there's the Merge Visible button. So click on Merge Visible. And right above your sub tool menu up here, where the simple brushes and all these other things, you get this merged version which is in a different scene of its own, with its own sub tool list and everything. You can switch back to your original scene that has all your original SAP tools over here. And note the number 15 sitting right here on this corner of this scene. Tells me how many sub tools are in that scene. That's how I can tell that that's my original scene. The one with 15 sub tools is the original scene I was working on. And then there's this one that was my merged scene. Now this is all one sub tool and everything is merged as one. Now, a couple of things happen when you merge all your sub tools like this. First of all, DynaMesh gets turned off and everything keeps its same resolution. So like my nose pieces and all that, this is lower poly than the other parts of the face and everything is a different resolution, but they're all one joined sub tool. So there's a couple of ways to go about dealing with that. The first thing that I want to do is I want to separate a couple of these pieces so that they aren't merged with the whole face. And the first thing is the eyes. A quick lesson in ZBrush, you can hold Control and Shift and you can click and drag this box on anything that is over. It will show just what It's selecting and hide everything else. And then you can show everything again by holding Control and Shift and tapping or left-click outside of your mesh. The same thing works with poly groups. So what we need to do is scroll down on the right here, go to the Poly Groups menu. And if we turn on poly frame, it will actually show us the colors of all of our poly groups. So if you're not familiar with poly groups, all it is is ZBrush giving, giving a part of the mesh its own color so that you can separate it and do you can control your mesh better with it. And poly groups are really quite the powerhouse of ZBrush. Being able to control poly groups makes all the difference. And it works in other 3D programs as well. Being able to make vertex groups essentially that's what it is. It's a vertex group inside of ZBrush that tells the model, hey, this is a different piece than this. If you hold Control and Shift and click on one poly group, it will isolate just that poly group and hide everything else. Then you can bring everything back by holding Control and Shift and tapping outside of your object. So if everything is its own poly group right now, I can hold Control and Shift, tap on any of those one poly groups. And it will just show that poly group and hide everything else. You can do that with the mouth or the ears, or the chin, or any of these different parts of the eyes. So here's where we run into this is why I wanted to talk about this. So my eyes are the same poly group color as this caruncular piece that we created for this inner corner of the eye. And that's going to create problems for us. The only way to fix this is by going to the Poly Groups menu on the right. Hold Control and Shift and tap outside your object to make sure that everything is showing. If you hit Auto Groups, auto Groups automatically goes through and detects if everything is its own, anything that's an individual poly island that's not merged with any geometry that anything that's its own separate piece or object that's floating, it will automatically create it as a poly group of its own. So by hitting auto groups every single piece, because none of these are merged yet. They are now their own poly groups. That means that each ear is its own poly group. Each eye is its own poly group. So there are individual like that. Now, a quick way to create the same poly group for some of these parts, like if I want both of my ears to be the same poly group and not separate poly groups. Hold Control and Shift. Click on the ear. And it'll show the first year. Now if you hold Control and Shift click and drag outside of your object and let go, it will show everything else. I'll repeat that. Hold Control and Shift click on the ear to show just the ear. Hold Control and Shift click and drag to show the opposite of what you had just selected. So now that you've shown the opposite, you can hold Control and Shift and click on another poly group. And what happens is it hides that Poly Group. Now you're in a subtractive select View. So now that I've hidden the other ear, both of the ears are hidden. I can hold Control and Shift, click and drag to show the opposite. Because these were the only thing that were hidden. It shows just the ears. Now the thing with poly groups is you can hold Control and click and drag and put a mask on your object. And anything that the mask is touching, you can hold Control, press W on your keyboard, and it creates a poly group just out of whatever is masked. You can also, if just these parts are showing and everything else is hidden, you can just without a mask on your object at all, just hold Control and press W. And it will just automatically poly group everything that's showing as the same poly group. This is kind of a lot of information, but this is a super-fast way to navigate in ZBrush if you're using poly groups. I'll do the same example with my eyeballs. Each eye is its own poly group. I'm holding Control and Shift tapping on one eye to show it. Now hold Control and Shift click and drag to show the opposite. So everything else is showing. Now I can hold Control and Shift tap on the other eye and it hides it. And then I can hold Control and Shift click and drag to show the opposite again so that both my eyes are showing. Now if I just press Control W, they are both the same poly group and you can just hit Control W again and again. If you want to change the color, the color doesn't matter. It's just a way for ZBrush to differentiate one poly group from another. You can press Control W until you get the color you want. Then hold Control Shift, tap outside of your messages, show everything. I do this with mirrored parts like this, like the eyeballs, the eyelids, and things like that. And it might seem a little annoying at first, but it's actually good practice just to go through and do this anyway, because it's going to give you the practice of just navigating ZBrush this way. Show the opposite, hide that part, show the opposite Control W, Control Shift Tab to show everything. So once again, if I want these little pads underneath the eyes to be the same poly group, I can hold Control and Shift, tap on the one on the right. Control shift click and drag to show the opposite Control Shift tap to hide that one. Control Shift click and drag to show the opposite. And both of these showing hold Control, press W, and now they are both the same poly group. Control Shift, left-click or tap outside of my object to show everything. I'm just going to go through very quickly and just do each of these pieces like that. And then he's Jin pieces of course. Drill, W Control Shift Tab to show everything. And I think it did with these two. So it's just a, a, a, some people think that this is kind of an annoying feature to have to deal with. But honestly, I think it's really powerful. And I think it's really unique in the way that ZBrush lets you deal with poly groups because it gives you 100% control over every single piece. As long as nothing is merged, which nothing is yet. Now that we have everything or poly groups set up the way that we want from this point. By the way, if you do all of this and you say you mess up your poly groups or whatever, you can always go back to poly groups and hit Auto Groups again and it will make everything its own poly group again. There are a couple of other, other options in here for grouping, grouping by normals and other stuff, but that's for other projects. We don't actually need any of those other options for this. Now that our head is all set up like this turn off poly frame, we can see that, yes, That's one poly group. That's one poly group. That's one. That's one of the ears or one. And I'm just holding Control and Shift and tapping on one and then tapping outside to show everything again. Tap on that to show it, tap out here to show everything. Tap on that to show that, etc, etc. Now that this is all set up, I'm gonna take this, go to my sub tool menu, go down to Duplicate. And then I'm just going to hide my original one and then make sure I click on my new one. That if I mess anything up, I still have this to work on. And we still have our original scene with all of our subtotals in it. Right back here with the 15 subtitles. But I'm working in this scene up here with just two sub tools in it. Now we need to merge everything together. I'm gonna turn poly frame off. And under our sub tool menu on the right, you want to go down to our, I'm sorry. If we actually want to go to the geometry menu and we're just going to go to DynaMesh. What's going to happen when I hit DynaMesh is everything is going to merge together into one solid piece and it's all gonna be the same resolution. So I need my resolution to be fairly high when I turn this on. So I'm going to turn it up to something like 400 and hit DynaMesh. We see here that did a pretty good job. And if we go in and just kind of smooth up some of these details, I think that's a good enough resolution. But the act of number of points that we have is, oh wow, it's 500 thousand. That's might be a little too much. So I'm gonna hit control Z. I can go back. I'm going to undo my DynaMesh by hitting Control Z. There we go. I'm gonna go back with Control Z. I'll turn my resolution down to something. We'll leave it at 128 and hit DynaMesh. That's too low. So you're just gonna have to play with the resolution slider until you get a somewhat desirable amount of detail. I think that's I think that's good enough. I don't I don't need 500 thousand points. I think this will be okay. So I'm sitting at an active number of points to 300 thousand by DynaMesh resolution was 320. But it's gonna be different for you because depending on how big, if your object is in your scene, DynaMesh effects it differently. My resolution was around 301 thing that I forgot to mention. If I hit Control Z and undo DynaMesh. What I wanna do is I want to hold Control and Shift and tap on my eyeballs. I want to split them from the rest of my mesh because I want to be able to paint the eyes later or do something with the eyes later. And it's really hard to do any detail on eyes if they are merged with the rest of the face. And a general rule in 3D is if it's not emerged piece in real life, than just make it a separate piece. Like if the skin isn't attached. Or like same thing for a piece of armor or anything. If it's not attached, just make it a separate piece. The rest of the face can be merged together because the skin attaches everything. But the eyes. I want to be separate because in real life our eyes are separate. They're sitting inside of your skull and they're held by all of the muscles and everything else that's in there. So hold Control and Shift. Click on your eyes and it should show the poly group that's both eyes. Mask both eyeballs. And now Control Shift tap to show everything. And now we're gonna go to our sub tool menu, go down to the split menu at the bottom and hit Split masked points. Now you see on my sub tool menu on the right by eyeballs are now their own sub tool and the rest of the face is its own sub tool. Now, when I have my main head selected, I want to go back to my geometry menu, go down to DynaMesh, set my resolution to around 300, like I had it before, and turned DynaMesh on. So now I might even turn it up a little bit higher. Just so that inner corner of the eye looks better. Yeah. Okay, That looks fine. Now if I go out of solo mode, my eyes are their own subject and I can hold Alt and click on them to select them. And they're separate from my face. Now that we have all these pieces merged together for our face, we can just go through our mash and just hold Shift, kind of go around and do a little bit of cleanup, get some of this artifact, some of these parts where it's really messy because DynaMesh does a good job, but it also leaves a little bit of a mess. We want to make sure that everything is merged looking correct. Take our Move brush. It's kinda move this ear lobe up where it attaches more. In our resolution is pretty high because we're up to 400 thousand active points, which is a lot. That's a lot. Not all computers are built equal. And blender and other programs sometimes start to chug a little bit when you start putting 500 thousand or a million polygons into them. So it's a good idea just to keep your polygon count as low as you can get away with. But for this, for sculpting and ZBrush, ZBrush can handle millions of polygons. So if you're just going to be using this in ZBrush, it's not that big a deal. You don't have to worry about it. All right, now we want to go smooth out the corners of this nasal labial fold coming down, down into the chin where these fat pads sit. All this should be smoothed. All there should be one part. Smooth out the bottoms. This make it look a little more uniform. I'm just going to try to create softer transitions between all of these parts so that it's not so harsh looking. It's not so angular looking, at least not right off, right off the bat. Because then in your own face, if you look at your face in the mirror, a lot of these pieces, they all transition together very smoothly. Remember you also have DynaMesh turned on so you can hold Control and click and drag to read DynaMesh at any point if you need to smooth down our nose very, very, very gently, I don't want to mess up the shape of that knows. I want to keep that little separation of those wings in the front because that gives us slightly more realistic look. I'm gonna grab my Move brush, pull down this bottom plane of the nose so it's sticking out and forward. A little more. Same thing right here where it attaches at the philtrum and see how I was talking about before. It's okay to just have the nose wings kind of disappear into the face like this and create this sort of half oval shape coming out of the face. It actually ended up looking pretty nice. Now I just need to take Damien standard carve in and around this nose wing base here. When you're carving around the nose base like this, try not to make it super round like this was something that I used to do a lot when I first started. But if you look really closely, There's a line that comes down this way and then it curves, carves out like this. It's almost like a point. It's probably not the same in all noses, but it's something that I've noticed a lot like when I look at my own nose in the mirror, I looked at several other people that have looked at this angle that comes down and then up like this. So it's like a V-shape. And it helps to create that angle of this nose wing and how it wraps around and how the nasal labial fold wraps around it like that. And kind of pushes it into the face like that. And just very slowly smoothing all that stuff out. So it's those kind of things that you want to be looking for. Little tiny details like that, like what are the angles of little shapes? And look at it from different angles. Don't just look at a reference photo from the front because that's not going to give you enough information for the side of the nose or for other parts of the face? I can just adjust the shape of my nostril here. Now that everything is merged, we can really refine, but it's also a lot easier to mess things up. Which is why we didn't start sculpting. Everything is one piece from the start. When you're at this phase, everything should be blocked in relatively the everything should be relatively close to being final. In terms of the foundation. You shouldn't have to move the cheeks around a lot. You shouldn't have to move the nodes around a lot. It's just little details. And you're not going for 100% physical accurate. You're just trying to get the shapes to read correct. Then focusing on smaller details like I was talking about that corner of the nose. Just a little shapes like that on the nose. There's also this section right here that's sort of like a triangle shape. Like this. This is an extreme example, but this is a section of the nose right here, this triangle shape. It comes where the wings come and meet in this bridge here. There is this sort of triangle shape here that you want to kind of just subtly, you can carbon right here. Let's move it down just very subtly. And you don't want it to be a perfect triangle like this. You just want to suggest that there is that shape there. Then your brain will pick up on the rest of that detail. From there. Next I'm gonna go and fix up the bridge of my nose because it looks way too even. What's a little too symmetrical. Also, my jaw is a little too big. The chin is way too far down. So first I'm gonna grab my Move brush, make it really, really big and pull this jaw up just a tiny bit, pulled his chin up, I'm sorry, tiny bit. And this draw, another reason that I try to avoid such a high resolution with DynaMesh is because you start to get this lumpiness to your sculpts like already I can see there's some lumpiness going on in the angles of my jaw here. It's really important to keep an eye out for these things before you merge all your pieces together. Because it's going to really help sell. Ear piece. You can identify these things before they happen. I'm going to grab my eyes here, turn on symmetry, go to unmasked mesh center here, and then just move them slightly. I could even scale my eyes down a little bit. I think they're a little too big. Just move them in. Maybe pull them forward just a tiny bit. Pull them forward a little more. From here. Zbrush is. Now you can really, really started to try. And if you wanted to start creating a likeness sculpt, or you wanted to start creating something that's more than just a basic character head. Now you have a merged face and you can really start putting some detail and on top if you wanted to put pores on there or put color on there or anything else. Now you can actually really start to make this a unique face. Something that's not just like a Lego face with a bunch of pieces on it. I'm gonna I'm gonna carve down on this part of the nasal bone with my clay buildup just barely to create a little bit of an angle like that. So there's a little bit of a bump and there's a little bit of a of a transition. It's not just a straight line. I tried to avoid straight lines. The organic nature of the face and all of its pieces. They flow together very naturally, very organically, very smoothly. It's important to just always be looking out for anywhere that you have really harsh sharp angles unless that's the style that you're going for. Of course. Now I'll just use my damien standard of carbon. That inner corner of the eye a little more prominently. Can even hold Alt and drag it along the outside edge of this upper lid to accentuate it more and same thing with the bottom lid. Hold Alt Damien standard, trace that shape of the eyelid. Just be careful that you that you are preserving the thickness of the eyelid to I'm also going to just barely trace along where that fat pad was. On the inner corner of the art from the inner corner of the eye down and out. That fatty pad that surrounds the bottom eyelid. I'll smooth it down so it's not puffing up too much. I don't want it to be puffy. Then I'm going to grab my clay buildup and make my brush a little bit bigger. And I really want to accentuate that nasal, nasal labial folds right here really, really gently and I have pen pressure turned on. So for me I'm just very lightly putting in this volume right here at the base of the nose that follows down and around like this. Be careful not to smooth out the corners of the eye while you're smoothing this. You can do this very, very gently. Just trying to create a little more fullness this face and give it a little more of a dynamic look. Before it was just really playing. There wasn't a lot of volume in here and all my parts were still very, it was very obvious that this was kind of Legos together. I keep saying lego but can't think of a better example like this. Now, this nasal labial fold creates a really interesting shape for the inner corner of the eye right in here. There is a space from the bridge of the nose to the inner corner of the eye to the eye socket. Like this. These are all in relationship with one another. So it's important to remember bridge of the nose should remain this kind of bridge shape. Very straight forward. It's not it's not carving straight right now for me. The way that the nasal labial fold attaches here on the sides of the nose to the bridge, wraps down and around the mouth, but also creates a little bit of space right in here that creates almost this triangle shape. From the inner corner of the eye. It kind of comes up to the bridge of the nose like this. That's a really exaggerated version of it. But all the skin that comes down from here kind of creates that pocket. That's right between your eyes. Here. On the inside like this. You don't want to carve it in that, it's not that harsh. So you could even it's really the shape of the nasal bone and coming down from the brow. So look at the skull and look at how it comes down and sticks forward. And that's the shape that you're trying to create from the bottom of the brow. Going forward, you can even just put on a little line right there, little line right there and just kind of card that in this is that shape that I'm looking for. It's like boomerang right here. That's where the brow becomes the nasal bone. And goes down into the rest of the nose. And the nasolabial fold creates part of that when it comes up and attaches to the bridge of the nose. And then that fat pad underneath the eye comes in and fills in this corner in here. Up to that point. All of these shapes work together to create what we see, what people will be perceived as a face. It's just important to be aware of all of these shapes and volumes that are all colliding with each other. Because that's really all that it is. And that's what the study of anatomy should be for artists, that should just be what are the shapes? How do they connect? What are the forms and volumes there? Eventually you start to get a face. If you know the basic anatomy of the skull, you can make it pretty convincing face. If you know the basic anatomy of the muscles in the face, you can make an even more convincing phase by just following the simple patterns of the face. See I crossed over one area there. I was trying to carve around this zygomatic. And instead I carved in and it cut into my zygomatic like that. That's something to be careful about. Just be aware of where all your pieces are. Zygomatic here, you can always build it back up if you accidentally squish it down too much. This is what I was talking about while the cheek is the widest point and then it comes down and around the mouth you have this little bit of pop that sticks out here on the sides before going down into the chin. I know this is a lot of information, especially if there are any of you who are watching these videos that haven't sculpted faces before. It's a lot to take in. But you've got to start somewhere. And it just starts by looking at books, looking at pictures, and just learning one new thing every day. What's something new that you didn't know about the face that you can learn today. One more relationship between two parts like the eyes and the nose, or the nose and the mouth, or the ears and the zygomatic, or the ears and the back of the skull. And all of these things are just information that are going to help inform your choices as you move forward. And just give you a little shortcuts in your brain. And show you a way to get from a to B a little bit faster every time. It's not about becoming the best face sculpture in the world. It's about just understanding the shapes and the forms. Because if you go to work for any studio or you go to work for any company, they're going to want to know your knowledge. They're gonna say, you know, how well do you know this thing? And if you have a really solid understanding of the face and the anatomy there, and they hired you to sculpt faces, then you're good. You you have the knowledge for the job, you have the tools. The tools is the knowledge. And just studying, reference. Studying from real life, studying from stylized, whatever it is that you're into, that you want to essentially be creating for yourself or for your work. Just studying a little bit every day. Eventually finding all of these shapes and how they connect. Like this. I would not have been able to do this a year ago. But over that year, I took time and just started looking at the face every day and just started asking myself questions like, what are the eyelids do when they're sitting inside of the the, the eye socket? And the answer is the eyelids. They fold up and behind the eye. Which is why we create them as their own object. Because then if we just trace this line with a mean standard, it makes it look like they're sitting inside and folded behind the eye. Because that's what I have. Let's do. Same thing with the nose. I was terrible at sculpting noses. I'm still pretty terrible. It's called diagnosis. But just how many pieces can I simplify this nose into? For me the answer was for one wing on each side, the tip and the bridge. And then I use that to just inform my choices from there. And whenever I study, reference or look at anybody else's work, I look at those things in relation to my own work. And I say, okay, what shape is this tip of the nose for that character? Can I take my age polish brush? Can I polish just the bottom plane of that nose? The nose wings to make it look more interesting. Can I do the same thing to the top? I'm going to do the same thing to the bridge along the sides, along the top. Let's do much. Eventually all of this knowledge just compiles into one final, sort of, well not final. Eventually all of it compiles and just makes it easier for you to see. Easier to get from a to B. Can even bring my cheeks down a little further with my Move brush. Now I'm just thinking about the lines in the face and where they guide my eye. I want to look at it from the side and my resolution is so high, so I'm starting to get it a lumpy lumpy sculpt, which is not good. I'll take my age Polish, try to polish that shelf under the eye a little bit so that it's not as lumpy. Then transition that back into that zygomatic toward the back of the face. But now I'm already starting to lose some detail here. So I'll have to hold Alt with my H polish to sort of connect to these shapes here. This is a challenge. It's hard to sculpt that high resolution like this without it just looking really lumpy. So yeah, you get the idea. You're just going to have to do a little bit of studying here and there. A little bit every day. And just keep learning. Keep exploring the shapes of the face. Keep exploring different types of faces. Don't just look at one type of face from one part of the world. Look at all different types and really just push yourself too. Try creating variation and learning the general rules. Because all of the things that I've shown you in these videos, the general proportions of where the eyes go and where the mouth goes, and how the nose sits on the face. And all of that is really general proportions for human DNA. But all phases are different because two people from the same area of the world can look completely different. And it's just because of minor variations. Eyes being slightly higher or slightly lower on the face and nose being a little bit bigger or smaller than mouth being a little bit bigger and smaller at the top lip being larger than the bottom or vice versa. The ears being a sticking further out or sticking further in or being bigger or smaller. All of these things are details to pay attention to. And that's what art is all about. It's how you perceive what it is that you're looking at. And eventually you get to a finished place where then you have character face, work of art, something that you made yourself. And the goal is just to be a little bit better tomorrow than you were today. You can do that just by learning one new thing every day. Anyway, that is going to wrap things up for this course. Thank you again so much for watching these videos. I really hope that you guys learned something from these lessons. If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to reach out to me on social media. Don't give up. It's going to get hard at some times because art takes a long time, it's a long process. But just don't give up on your art. Don't give up on yourself. Remember to just keep learning one new thing every day and just improving your art as much as you can. And just study and practice a little bit every day. Even 15 minutes every day is better than working for five hours, one day a week. Just be consistent with your practice and try to improve over time. And don't get frustrated with yourself. Just go easy on yourself and remember to give yourself a break. If you guys want more lessons on sculpting, check out my other courses. And again, thank you so much for watching these videos and I wish you luck in all your artistic endeavors. Have a great day, everyone.