Art in games and film demand ultra-detailed surfaces. And the most important kind of surface is the skin on a person’s face. If you want to succeed as an artist, it is absolutely vital that you be able to create this detail. But how?

Stamps and more stamps

We can’t create skin detail manually. There’s just too much going on for that approach to work – in any program! In Mudbox, we want to rely on our Spray and Repeat brushes to layer detail on our skin surfaces.

What to watch for in the video:

The beginning of the video is devoted to creating the base shape of the face – so I use Wax, Foamy, and Grab most often. Detailed face sculpting in Mudbox 2015 relies on the Spray and Repeat brushes to create pores, skin texture, and wrinkles. Things to I go over that are good to remember:

1. big pores are in the center of the face, around the nose and cheeks.
2. Small pores are around the outer edges.
3. Skin texture is all over,
4. and wrinkles follow the edges of muscles.
5. Oh yeah – use sculpt layers!

Sculpting at that high-resolution is slow on my computer – are there other options?

I also show how to create bump map detail using the painting tools, as opposed to the sculpting tools. If you don’t have a fast processor, lots of RAM, or fast hard drives, using textures to create detail can be better for performance. Warning: you’ll need lots of video RAM to handle the big texture sizes! The real trick here is getting a diffuse and a normal map to match our black and white bump… I also cover that!

On to the video: Face sculpting in Mudbox 2015!

Ok, go get to work!