Sawyer - Sculpting Process

Howdy!  My website in dire need of an upgrade (when's the last time I even finished a full illustration?  No One Knows), but until then, I'll post the process of my latest piece in this handy-dandy blog feature.

For my personal portfolio, my goals for this piece were to:
-Make a stylized character
-Sculpt it in Zbrush
-Bake and paint textures
-Do a simple rig
I almost immediately thought of my friend Tim and his characters, and thought it would be fun to model one of them (plus, doing fanart of your friends' stuff is cool).  I picked his character Sawyer, from his webcomic Gashire, which you can read on Webtoon (HERE) and/or Tumblr (HERE).

​Here are the references that he sent me, drawn by him:

(I'd love to model Marty there too!)

I then sketched out a turnaround that I could slap into Zbrush to put in a reference grid.  Up until now I've always started off my models by block-modeling in Maya, but this guy is FULL of organic shapes, so I thought that would be a bad idea (plus, my professor recommended starting in Zbrush anyway).

Here are my turnaround images:

I added these to the grid in Zbrush, made myself a sphere, and just went at it with the move tool.  He looked pretty funny initially:

(I don't know where that meme came from, but I think about it a lot.)

As I went on and added more stuff, he began to take form:

(One day, I will remember to take more screenshots during my process, instead of just when it starts to look like something and then I wanna show my friends in the group chat.)

I'd like to personally thank the fur alphas by J Roscinas, which I got from his alpha pack on Gumroad (HERE).  

It was around when I finished the high-poly sculpt that I realized Sawyer here has less-than-ideal topography.  I found a tutorial by Danny Mac 3D on how to retopologize with polygroups (HERE), and it worked pretty well!  Sadly I couldn't get it to work with the legs, so his topology there is still kinda bad.  Next time, I'll do this step before I add on all the details.  It's still a learning experience!

​I did get this fun screenshot of Sawyer's head looking like a creepy clown, though:

(Ninja Turtle mask?)

I unwrapped his low-poly model - one material for the head and one for the body - and then went on into Substance to texture him.  I started by blocking out all of the colors:

(He's made out of jelly!)

I hadn't made anything with subsurface scattering before, but adding it in Substance was easy-peasy with a quick Google search (I really gotta give special thanks to Google).  His skin and the scar have some subsurface applied.
He's pretty cartoony, so I didn't feel the need to do realistic texture - just some more shadows and highlights and I called it done:

All in all, I'm really happy with how he came out!  I would love to sculpt him again and make it so that he has, well, eyelids and a mouth that can open, as well as fur detail that is more 3D instead of fake 3D.  He kinda looks like he'd be in the pre-rendered cutscene of a PS1 game as he is.  That said, he still looks like the character, so that's pretty cool.

I still want to rig him, though...!   Give me a minute!!