the butler

Mudbox Sculpting Tutorial – ‘Butler’

Another quick Mudbox sculpting tutorial video.

Ready set go!

mudbox sculpting tutorial 1
The Butler

 

My goal with the Butler was to create a ‘character’, someone with personality, in as short a time as possible. When sculpting like this (a speed sculpt), there’s no need to worry about base meshes, UV unwrapping, or anything else to slow you down.

I started with the Mudbox default male. When you’re practicing sculpting (and sculpting does take a lot of practice), just start with the defaults. It’s easier and you get sculpting quicker!

In the video below you can watch as I reshape the base mesh into the shape I wanted, and then proceeded to build on top of that with other tools. What tools, you may ask?

A Quick Overview of the tools I used:

  1. Grab – used in the beginning to reshape the mesh.
  2. Wax – used in the beginning of the sculpting process to quickly block out facial structures. Also used to block in the hair.
  3. Foamy – used with a sharp falloff and negative value, used to exaggerate facial features and create fine lines and wrinkles.
  4. Pinch – to sharpen detail and straighten out curves into more regular shapes. Also to remove jitter from brush strokes.
  5. Stamp – to add skin surface texture and pores.
  6. Smooth – to blend everything all the time.

And now, the Mudbox sculpting tutorial video:

This guy was just over 2 hours of sculpting. HD vid, no audio.

Here is a gratuitous over-sized render

of the finished sculpt (click to embiggen):

mudbox sculpting tutorial 2

6 thoughts on “Mudbox Sculpting Tutorial – ‘Butler’”

  1. Hey James, any chance you can do a blog post on how to render out finished sculpts with the lighting set up like the one you have above? Are these the kind of renders that employers expect to see in portfolios? Thank you!

  2. Sure, Chris, I will whip something up and post it in the next day or two. To your second question – when presenting to an employer, you want to make sure you are showing the best possible images of your art. I would recommend more elaborate treatments over simple greyshaded screen grabs, I’ll go into more detail when I make that post.

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