Introduction
After some deliberation I decided to just post this stuff under R&D.
So I've been doing some sculpting practice for a little while now, mostly as a warmup, and I thought I'd share my process and some thoughts. In this post I'll go over my progress with torsos, but I've also been doing practice with faces, appendages, and of course genitals. I typically do these as a warmup for ~30-60 minutes a day, but not religiously.
My overall goal is to better understand anatomy so that I can, obviously, improve the quality and variety of my models. When approaching torsos I just started with a cube and worked from there using dynamic topology (dyntopo). I thought about using Zbrush, but getting a deeper understanding of Blender's sculpting tools was a better opportunity since I use them all the time anyway. It turns out they aren't so bad, and they're being updated all the time.
Sculpts
Below I'll go through each sculpt, day-by-day.
I started out with torsos because I figured they'd be the easiest. During these first few days I was really trying to get more familiar with the tools and how they worked. I didn't use any reference and tried to sculpt a male torso from memory. As you can see, it's a little rough around the edges.
Like day 1 I was sculpting from memory here, but with a single anatomy diagram for a female torso. It's a bit better than day 1 now that I broke in the tools. Many of the proportions and planes are still a bit strange and unrefined though. Especially the breasts.
I went back to a male torso for this one and decided I should really try to understand the broad strokes of the musculature, throwing in a few more images for reference. Skin details and fat pads should wait until I've worked on the underlying parts a bit more. If I was really hardcore then I'd start with the skeleton, like many do with the face, but I didn't want to commit that kind of time.
Here I went back off reference and tried to sculpt a smoother torso, but I stumbled a little bit with certain aspects. Still, and improvement to day 1.
At this point I wanted to get back into female torsos because there were some challenges I wanted to take on that weren't as prominent with the men. Mainly: the breasts. I always struggled when sculpting them because of their precise 3D shape. They could look like something completely different from a thousand different angles. And there's two of them. It's like if you tried to sculpt a clay square into a perfect sphere with a knife. Take a little off on one side and suddenly the whole shape is wrong. Since it isn't musculature, it obeys different rules. I run into a lot of these same problems with the face as well.
The trick lies in understanding the planes of the body; the common shapes and lines that unite the anatomical details. Traditional artists would be much more familiar with this stuff than I am, so I wont butcher it by defining it myself.
In the book The Human Figure, Vanderpoel writes:
"Before entering upon the study of the component parts of the body, it is of the highest importance that the large planes of which the minor forms are a part should be thoroughly understood. A mental grasp of them in the large is essential to strong draftsmanship."
Put simply: they can be a good beacon when you get into the weeds of anatomy.
By day 6 I probably committed to stylizing too early. From what I understand, caricature is easier when you have a solid grasp of the realistic, but for some reason I have an easier time learning when I accentuate the features. Perhaps it just feels easier and really isn't good for me.
I kept the breasts pretty big so far because it frankly makes them easier to work on, but I also started accentuating the hips, abs, and parts of the back. I keep this up for a few more days before I start reeling it in. Again, this isn't religious practice, but simply a method to help me get a better grasp of this stuff. So I'm sort of going at my own pace.
After a while I started to arrive at something appealing without too much effort. I was finally starting to understand the breasts better, along with some other non-muscular shapes. Now I was going to try to shift my efforts to more subtle proportions.
For me, fit and slim figures come a little easier than soft or chubby ones. I think it takes a decent understanding of all the underlying components before you can start adding a lot of fat. So instead of jumping right into what you'd traditionally find in an anatomy study, I just tried to slim everything down. I kept the hip and shoulder size roughly similar though, and I wouldn't start experimenting with them until recently.
I had a little trouble with the breasts here as I was trying to figure out how to apply what I'd learned with the larger ones. The shape is a bit weird and I think they merge too harshly with the pectoral muscles instead of laying on top of them.
More or less trying the same thing again. I was starting to find a better form, but I was still hanging on to those accentuated ab and pelvis shapes. It's probably something I should have broken down and built from the ground up. They're appealing shapes but if the goal is to get a better understanding then I probably should have studied them a bit more closely.
Here I started adding some of the musculature back in, trying to combine the slim and muscular parts to something that sort of made sense. At least now the hips-to-waste ratio wasn't quite as insane. I still left her legs and butt pretty large and that really hasn't changed until recently.
I wanted to have a little fun and try out a chubbier figure. Sort of a fertility statue look with the big breasts and belly. I still don't have a very good understanding of the fatty parts of the human body, but at least I was able to construct something appealing. What strikes me as strange is the cut off between the belly and the pubic area. For some reason there's always a sharp contrast, but I don't really understand why. Something I'll have to study further.
Nothing too significant here, just trying out a thicker muscular figure. When I make muscular characters I always make the features super defined because... like, they're big muscles, man. However I think it might sell the look more when you see some of the bones and fat in there too. It's sort of like when you see the body comparisons between different athletes. It's more than just adding muscles, you have to take everything else into account as well. There's still more to learn, but I'm kind of happy with this one.
Here's the most recent day of practice. Now that I was happy with most of the aspects of the torso, I started trying out new shapes and sizes but still keeping things a bit stylized. There are a lot of different body types out there, many appealing in their own right, so it wouldn't be fair nor beneficial just to stick to one. Variety is the spice of life.
Like the previous day, I really like this one. I've just started getting to a point where I'm making torsos that I'm happy with for the most part. Which is more than I can say for faces. Oh God the faces...
Conclusion
I still have plenty to learn, but for a fast track in anatomy this has been less painful then I expected. Looking back I can definitely see some areas I neglected though. In the future I need to work more on limbs. Once I get a decent understanding of those I can start doing full-body sculpts, then from there I can start focusing on the subtleties and gestures.
For now my priority is going to shift back to faces. They're very difficult, so progress is a lot slower there.
