Monday, July 11th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

See how to create hyper realistic ZBrush characters

The Gnomon Workshop has released Creating Hyper Realistic Characters in ZBrush, a new four-and-a-half-hour guide to sculpting ultra-realistic human figures, recorded by WWE in-house artist Hossein Diba.

See Stone Cold Steve Austin recreated as a ZBrush sculpt
In the video, Diba shares a breakdown of his workflow, through a character study of the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin.

The process starts with a low-resolution base mesh, then continues with sculpting primary shapes, focusing on sculpting landmark anatomical features, including those of the head such as the ears and nose.

Diba then begins to work out the secondary forms as he refines muscle shapes and facial anatomy.

Tertiary detail is then added using alphas and different brush techniques to create the small skin wrinkles and pores which add the final element of realism.

With the sculpt complete, Diba demonstrates how to use ZBrush’s FiberMesh system to create facial hair, as well basic texturing with PolyPaint.

Finally, the character is posed using the Transpose Master toolset and a presentation render produced by generating ZBrush render passes to composite in Photoshop.

About the artist
Hossein Diba is lead character artist at WWE, where his responsibilities include sculpting, texturing and shading characters and creatures for animation, games, cinematics and 3D printing.

He has worked as both a freelance and staff artist, with a portfolio that includes Royal Rumble 2016, likeness head sculpts for Modern Life, Evolve, Alan Wake remastered, Fallout: New Vegas, and Batman: Arkham Knight.

Pricing and availability
The video is available via an online subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, giving you access to over 300 detailed tutorials. Subscriptions cost $49/month or $499/year, and there is a free trial.

Read more about Creating Hyper Realistic Characters in ZBrush on The Gnomon Workshop’s website

Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon – School of Visual Effects, Games and Animation.