BA2 - Final Sculpt Refinement Part 3

Progression Part 3

“Best” render of how much I have progressed, including the shape of the wings and her feathery armour which has been duplicated, moved and placed on her body.

The same as my last render however in gold, mostly for me to judge how the final will look with a gold material.

Problem No. 7 I encountered while making my final sculpt

One thing I noticed with my renders was how my Harpy's wings had extra feathers on one side, however because I had already merged all the subtools for the wings, I wasn’t able to just duplicate them separately. To resolve this, I masked the left wing and deleted the right, then duplicated and mirrored it using the deformation tools.

Problem No. 8 I encountered while making my final sculpt

One of my biggest issues with these wings is although they looked rather aesthetically pleasing, I knew that the typology was incredibly inefficient; much moreso than the hair I zRemeshed earlier. Because of this, I used zRemesher multiple times to bring the polycount down and to correct the typology. However, there were still parts which looked very strange.

My next move was to try and manually correct areas, like the back here for example, where I deleted the hidden areas using the “HidePt” technique. I also tried to smoothen out these areas but it seemed to do more bad than good regarding the topology placement, as pictured in the lower right corner.

This was my last attempt to manually fix my inefficient topology featured on the wings. I managed to correct some areas, but because of the separate layers the topology still appeared very strange in looks.

I knew that I wasn’t able to fix the last wings, so I decided to completely start over from scratch, this time using the help of a YouTube tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kgXFPFzA1o.

To me this seemed the best way to create a visually appealing set of wings without oddly placed topology.

I started to create my feathers by layering separate subtools and then using the Damien_Standard brush to add detail. However because I knew that these feathers were going to be duplicated, I zRemeshed them to bring them to a lower polygon count. This also was to prevent my zBrush from crashing.

In order to achieve curved duplicated wings, I followed the video tutorial when editing my settings. As well as using the “Create InsertMesh” option to make my duplicated feathers into a brush.

When drawing a curve from the body of my sculpt, this was the result. My brush size was quite small, hence why the feathers resulted in looking this way.

In order to achieve this look, I needed to readjust the curves as well as increase the brush size I was using. After this, I was able to ‘Split’ the masked areas for the wings to appear on a separate subtool.

These were my final wings which I had created and then layered. As much as I was satisfied with the methods of achieving this look, the wings themselves didn’t turn out as I expected. I wanted them to have a feathery appeal, and not so bionic which is what these represented.

#ba2