ZBrush Character Modelling Part V: Other Details (Hair, Hands, Accessories etc.)

It was time for me to add some detailing to the hands using some reference images to get an idea of what they look like.

Figure 62 – *Backhand* (Doctorlib, 2019)

The first thing I had to do was sculpt the shape of the hand before dynameshing it to add detail, including the fingers, palms and back hands.

Figure 64 – *General Hand Shape* (Virtus Creative, 2020)

Figure 65 – *Hand Veins* (Virtus Creative, 2020)

I had to sculpt the fingernails on each of the fingers like this.

Figure 66 – *Fingernails* (Virtus Creative, 2020)

Then the knuckle lines of each finger, both front and back.

Figure 67 – *Knuckle Definition* (Virtus Creative, 2020)

I did the sculpting on one hand basically. All I had to to was mirror the subtool and position it on the other side of the body.

Figure 68 – *Mirroring the Arm Subtool* (CG MAGUS, 2015)

I would adjust the arms later, merging and dynameshing them with the rest of the body.

Hair

Now it’s time to add some hair onto my character. I figured I would take some inspiration from a few of these and attempt to combine them into one hairstyle if all goes well.

Figure 70 – *Short, Back & Sides* (HAIRMANZ, 2021)

Figure 71 – *Skater Hair* (becomegorgeous.com, 2018)

Figure 72 – *Court Wig* (Amazon.com, Inc, 2022)

I downloaded a custom hair brush that will help me sculpt the character’s hair fairly easy and efficiently.

Figure 73 – *Makkon_Haircurves_03 Custom Brush* (Chris Whitaker, n.d)

Upon sculpting the hair stroke, the strand starts off way smaller compared to end, so I had to modify the curve in the stroke panel.

Figure 74 – *Curve Modifying in the Stroke Panel* (edricew, 2018)

Now when I select a stroke, the hair looks better. I ensured myself to cover the top half with multiple strands of hair to make the mesh look good.

Figure 75 – *Side Hair First* (edricew, 2018)

Figure 76 – *Hair Around the Ears* (edricew, 2018)

I also made the hair its own separate subtool for polypainting later.

Figure 78 – *Separate Subtool* (edricew, 2018)

Accessories

For the accessories that my character will be holding, I settled for a skateboard to carry around and ride on. I gathered up an image to take some influence from when making my own skateboard.

Figure 79 – *Black Skateboard* (SkateHut LTD, 2021)

I used Maya to model the skateboard since I’m more skilled than using ZBrush’s Zmodler feature. I documented the progress of the skateboard as I go along.

Figure 80 – *Making the Base* (fillx 3D Modeling, 2021)

Figure 81 – *Board Slant near the End* (fillx 3D Modeling, 2021)

Figure 82 – *Making the* Wheels (fillx 3D Modeling, 2021)

Figure 83 – *Rim Detail* (fillx 3D Modeling, 2021)

I mirrored the wheel on one side and combined the objects together to smooth and mirror the other side of the board, like so.

Figure 84 – *One Side Mirrored* (fillx 3D Modeling, 2021)

Figure 85 – *The Finished Model* (fillx 3D Modeling, 2021)

Now all I had to do was export the model as an FBX and import into ZBrush, like so.

Figure 86 – *Maya to ZBrush* (Cobus Van Staden, 2017)

Figure 87 – *The Skateboard Inside of ZBrush* (Cobus Van Staden, 2017)

Clothing/Topology

I will take the clothing influences from Part I and use the extract function to create some simple clothing for my character. I masked out the area for the T-shirt to extract a new polygroup from.

Figure 88 – *Masked Area* (Sean Forsyth, 2021)

Figure 89 – *Polygrouped Shirt* (Sean Forsyth, 2021)

I had to clean out the neck area of the T-shirt by navigating to GroupLoops in the Edge Loops panel and ZRemesh the model to get a clean topology.

Figure 90 – *Cleaner Topology* (Sean Forsyth, 2021)

Now it was time to make the extractions. I carefully repeated the process but made the extractions its own subtool to clean out before merging it with the shirt.

Figure 91 – *Shirt Extractions* (North Pixel, 2016)

Figure 92 – *Extraction Tweaking* (North Pixel, 2016)

I repeated the process of masking out the areas for the shoes and jeans in which the character will be wearing, like so.

Figure 93 – *Shoes Topology* (Sean Forsyth, 2021)

Figure 94 – *Jeans* (Sean Forsyth, 2021)

I cleaned out some of the messy geometry in the neck area of the shirt, like so.

For the topology, I duplicated the model to distinguish itself from High Poly to Low Poly, and I ensured myself to adjust the lips slightly beforehand so it looks more natural.

From there, I draw some ZRemesher guides around the key areas of the faces so that the topology would wrap around them, like this.

Figure 95 – *Retopologizing the Face* (SpeedChar, 2019)

The following orthographic topology examples are before I adjusted the mouth area.

Polypainting

The last thing before rigging the character was to polypaint the entire body, so I got to work starting with the colour of the skin. After that, I had to colour the eyes on both the low poly and high poly versions of the character to get a desired result.

Figure 96 – *LP Eye Colour* (Pixologic ZBrush, 2016e)

Figure 97 – *HP Eye Colour* (Pixologic ZBrush, 2016e)

Now it’s time to colour in the remaining subtools, starting with the jeans.

Figure 98 – *Demin Colour* (Pixologic ZBrush, 2016e)

Figure 99 – *Hair Colour* (Pixologic ZBrush, 2016e)

Figure 100 – *Skateboard Colour* (Pixologic ZBrush, 2016e)

Figure 101 – *Shoe Colouring* (Pixologic ZBrush, 2016e)

I decided to change the skin tone from a cream to a natural skin colour to finish it off.

Figure 102 – *Skin Tone Change* (Follygon, 2019)

Rigging

It’s time for me to put this guy into a T-pose for rendering. I ensured to go into Transpose Master > ZSphere Rigging since it’s much quicker and more efficient

Figure 103 – *Transpose Master* (FlippedNormals, 2018b)

Before I did that, I split the HP and LP characters into its own subtools, like so.

I basically positioned the ZSphere into the center of the mesh and started to make the skeletal parts of the rig, like so.

Figure 104 – *Making the Skeletal Base* (FlippedNormals, 2018b)

Figure 105 – *Result So Far* (FlippedNormals, 2018b)

I had to carefully position the rig so that it wouldn’t overlap with the outlines of the hands and fingers, like this.

Figure 106 – *Rigging the Fingers* (FlippedNormals, 2018b)

And I had to make the Rib Cage so the torso wouldn’t move with the arms.

Figure 107 – *Rib-Cage* (FlippedNormals, 2018b)

And here is the full skeletal rig, which I used to pose the character into a T-pose.

Figure 108 – *Full Rig* (FlippedNormals, 2018b)

Figure 109 – *T-pose* (FlippedNormals, 2018b)

Turntable Render

Evaluation

Looking back, here are some areas of improvements I can consider in the future. The shape of the face is something I have to work on, since the final shape isn’t as round as I hoped it would be. I need to consider smoothing some of the skin out for next time, particularly the arms and the legs. I will keep that in mind for next time I’m working in zBrush.