Additional Anatomy Drawings (Part 1)

I'm continuing to work in ZBrush and anatomy drawings in parallel.  I've tried doing a few three quarter full-body views to tighten up the anatomy on my model and this is helping out.  Here is the three quarter back drawing:

I'm still working on the three quarter front drawing.  It will be posted soon as well as ZBrush rough renders.

Head and Hand Detail Drawings

I got into ZBrush and realized I wanted to really push the detail of the head and the hands.  The reason is because they are the main organic pieces of the witch character not hidden by the costume.  So I gathered a few references and tried to synthesize them into these more detailed drawings.

Here is the head:

...and here is the hand:

Character Head Design

I've been working out more details for my character's head and "headdress".  Here is an early grayscale digital painting:

I just grabbed the head from the female isometric digital painting I did for the deformation diagram and started altering it.  Then I started adding color and aging her at the same time, again, to get more of that "wicked stepmother" look.

I feel like it's really important for me to know what the face will look like before I start sculpting it in ZBrush.  And if I can't do a good job with it in Photoshop, there's no way I'll be able to pull it off when I'm sculpting.  Anyway, I'm fairly pleased with how the face is coming along.  The headdress is going to need significant work however.

Deformation Diagram

One of the tools I'm exploring using in my design process is a graphic I call a "deformation diagram".  This has been inspired by my knowledge of character rigging and animation as well as observations of other hardsurface ZBrush sculpts which seem to ignore where character forms should be rigid versus flexible.

Because my character design is going to be fairly complex, I hope that the deformation diagram will allow me to avoid making any design mistakes like that.  My philosophy is that where a hardsurface area meets a deformable/flexible area, there should probably be a form change as well as a material change - or at least some sort of aesthetic suggestion of a joint being present.

One area of uncertainty for me is the forearm area.  In reality, this area has rotation flexibility so there should be more red in this area.  But my current design as well as many other costumes have forearm armor, heavy wristguards, etc.  I'm still decidng what to do here.

Body Base Mesh

Here is the base mesh for the basic female body form.  I have tried to make the quads fairly regular to facilitate easy sculpting in ZBrush.  The geometry of the hands is just a bit convoluted but was necessary to avoid vertex poles with six edges between the fingers.  In hindsight, it may not have been necessary to extrude more geometry into the ears like I did, but I thought it would make development of the ear easier.

Character Modeling Process

This image sequence represents part of the modeling process I will be using for my character.
(1)  This is the concept image I start with.
(2)  Here is an initial attempt on a base character body model.
(3)  The main problem with the model is that the head doesn't have the interesting form of the concept drawing.
(4)  To remedy this problem, I do a sculptural digital painting and plan out an edgeflow to model the form cuts and plane breaks I want in the new bust model.
(5)  I then model a base shape in Maya.
(6)  This base shape is imported into ZBrush and a rough head sculpt is massed out.
(7)  The head sculpt is imported into Topogun and retopologized to follow the desired edgeflow from the drawing in (4).
(8)  The retopoed version is imported back into Maya from Topogun.
(9)  This is the smoothed version of the new model.