Trying to understand workflow and/or how to fix posed sculpt?

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

This will sound like such a dumb question on my part, but please bear with me.

If I’m trying to do a sculpt like this;

jeff-mcateer-jeff-mcateer-abduct-this-alien-creature-punch-right.jpg1200×824 93.5 KB


https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EdPrA

What is the best workflow?

Now I know that the obvious reply is model you characters, then pose them. Duh!

But I’m wondering how do most people make their posed sculpts look “seamless.” What I mean by seamless refers to the look of a “solid contact between objects.” For example, if we were to look at the man’s fist, I can see that the fingers are making “solid contact” with his palm, his thumb’s are wrapped around “solidly” around his fingers. If I was to take a rigged character and make a fist out of that characters hand, the hands won’t have that “solid fist look.” I typically see it in video games; a character is holding a sword. From afar it does look like he is holding a sword, but when you zoom in you see his hands aren’t “solidly” wrapped around the sword handle. The handle is just floating in between the fingers. I hope my explanation makes sense. Another good example is that alien’s feet. It’s clearly not making “solid contact” with the floor.

So for modelers/sculptors out there, how do you get that “seamless solid contact look?”

Thanks for any advice.

#2

Go figure…

#3

For that particular case, the hand was probably sculpted this way - fingers fused together. For movies, you can get away with corrective shapekeys, that’s what most people do - big studios have their own muscle/skin-sliding systems to deal with this, and there’s even one for Blender now (https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?410990-X-Muscle-System-for-Blender).

#4

I was thinking of doing shape keys, but after reading some of the comments in that link I think I’m going to decide to just sculpt everything. I just have to plan ahead and decide which parts of the character I can get away with modeling/sculpting in a symmetrical pose (easier edits) and which parts are better model/scultped in posed mode.