Claudio Setti is a character and props artist using Zbrush as his primary application for creating models for games, film and 3D printing. You'll find useful sculpting tutorials utilizing Zbrush in his Cubebrush store as well as some great 3D models. He graciously agreed to take us through the process of designing a character in Zbrush within a 10 hour period. Enjoy!

Inspired by the Sy-Fy TV series "Face/off" and seeing how the artists can accomplish so much in such a short period of time, I wanted to explore techniques that would allow me to quickly render out a character concept in a day. I chose to design a horned demon based on Dante's Inferno similarly to an episode of the show.

In recent years Zbrush has become a widely used tool in the film and gaming industry for character concept work. This is largely due to its speed of execution, flexibility and accuracy of concepts. By combining Zbrush with a physically accurate renderer such as Keyshot you can achieve results that look photorealistic in a very short amount of time.

I gave myself roughly 10 hours to finish this project...

In order to get the work done in a 10 hour period it had to be contained. I went with a bust in this case pretending I was making a design for a character makeup much like on the show. I didn't worry about the body or costume. This exercise was more about achieving a good usable result in a short amount of time and therefore making artistic decisions that would allow me to work within the time constraints.

Making a bust would be a realistic choice in this case.

As a prerequisite my demon had to have horns and be based on one of the nine levels of hell as described in the "Inferno". With no rhyme or reason I chose the first level "Limbo" :

"Limbo is the 1st circle of the Inferno proper. Limbo is on the outer boundary of Hell, just across the river Acheron. Here lie those who were not sinful in life, but did not acquire the proper portal of faith (Unbaptised)."

(Excerpt taken from http://dantesinferno.wikia.com/wiki/Limbo)

This description is a little vague but in my mind it made me think of demons that were neither too demonic nor too human but somewhere in between. Maybe there were humans in mid transformation? In any case based on this short brief I started sketching out directly in zbrush starting from a dynamesh sphere. I didn't really have an idea in mind and was hoping I would be inspired during the initial sketch phase.

Usually you would try various sketches in thumbnail form, exploring a multitude of ideas, but in this case I wanted to mimic the show where the time constraints don't allow for much exploration. Basically you have to go with your first idea and make it work somehow.

Based on the parameters I set myself I opened up Zbrush and started a dynamesh sphere project with a lower resolution of either 64 or 128. In the blockout stage it is best to maintain a lower resolution while moving larger areas and forms. At this point I'm looking for an interesting silhouette so I change the colour value of the material to black by hitting the "v" key as this will switch between two colour swatches (by default are set to white and black). The black color is ideal for silhouette exploration because it only reveals the exterior forms and none of the internal structures that could distract from the silhouette.

In general I use only a handful of sculpting brushes when I model a character:

• "Move" brush for manipulating large form.
• "Clay Build-up" for general sculpting of shapes.
• "Dam_Standard" for drawing or sketching on the forms.
• "Trim Dynamic" for creating flat plains quickly.
• "Snake Hook" brush for pulling out long forms like horns etc.

You can see the process in this video:

I walked away from the sculpt for a bit to gain some perspective and realized it was looking too busy and had some anatomical errors. I decided to fix the errors by importing a male base mesh I had created a long time ago and using the "Project All" function I projected the details of the demon sculpt onto the male base mesh. I stored a "Morph Target" and used the "Morph Brush" to bring the male base model back to it original form in areas I wanted to keep: it works almost like an eraser. Doing this I was able to keep the forms very human-like and in certain areas transfer the demon design elements onto the new mesh.

You can see the process here:

Once I was happy with the design and polypainting I brought the bust into Keyshot 6 using the zbrush to Keyshot bridge. I use one of the standard hdri environments and rendered it out at around 3,000 pixels wide. I used the maximum samples rendering output set to the max (1,000 samples) and let it render for about an hour or so or until I was happy with it. At that point you can simply stop the render and click "Stop and save" when it prompts you. I also saved out a clown pass just in case I wanted to isolate certain areas.

At this point I took the render into Photoshop (I have a really, really old version) and started playing around with the values using adjustment layers. I also added a little bit of noise and chromatic aberration for added realism.

I ended up cropping it to fit into a portrait format which was more suitable for this type of image. I saved it out as a .png file.

All in all I was fairly happy with how this piece came out for such a short time. I learned quite a few things that I would do differently next time. In the end what you learn is what counts the most and you do so only by finishing your projects. Happy Zbrushing!.