I have been looking at sculpted 3d characters recently and am amazed by how good some of the works are. The level of details is just insane. I was just wondering how someone would learn to sculpt creatures, objects, and characters like these? I know practice plays a lot in almost everything, but I do not know which direction to take. I have practically zero background in sculpting and absolutely cannot draw, but sab_3d, the artist who made the skull, said she also had no sculpting background when she made it, so it made me a little motivated to learn. My only solid background is 3D hard surface modeling and texturing.
Hi,
great subject to discuss. I know this feeling, 3d is so complex with so many paths to master in different specialisations.
Just try everything you want and with more knowledge and experience you will understand which direction more attractive for you personally.
It’s all about exploring and learning new stuff. And if you already got basics it will be good boost for you to watch and learn workflows from masters. Just a month ago I done udemy course for full characters creation and I pretty happy with my first sculpting result:
I’m sure it’s not a problem if you completely don’t know how to draw, just one more thing you will learn in future. You already knew about 3d space, its a great knowledge for drawning also.
Hello! I’d say you already got a huge advantage. You already are a hard surface modeller, so your eyes are already used to see planes and blocks, which are the base for every shape out there. You just need to decompose what ever you want to sculpt in simpler planes and blocks until you get the right proportions, and you’ll have a very good start point to carve and smooth the secondary and tertiary details.
For the proportions, always use references, even if you don’t want to reproduce them exactly. It will help you as a guideline of what you want to sculpt and stay in proportions. Pay attention to distances between landmarks (i.e. in a face, the distance between the eyes, the distance from the nose to the chin and where the mouth sits there and so on). There are very good tutorials on sculpting in YouTube on proportions and common mistakes that are really helpful as well.
Learning the actual sculpting tools is just a matter of practice and experiment with the different brushes, see how they react and try to see if it fits your needs. Most of the time you can get by with the simpler brushes.
Learn the shortcuts for your most used tools or create new ones you are comfortable with to gain some speed.
I think this video helps with what a sculptor would learn. It seems with art particularly that starting simple and building leads to spectacular results.
