Whether creating your own design or bringing someone else's concept art to life, your role as a character artist is to capture not only the likeness, but also the figure's essence and transfer all these details into a 3D model. Achieving an appealing look is one of the most challenging aspects when sculpting stylised characters, but the reward is immense when you reach a stage where the character feels both believable and alive.
In this tutorial, I'll guide you through the process I followed to sculpt a different take on Raphael from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, which is based on concept art by the awesome Luigi Lucarelli. He showcased not only the character's appearance with clothing, which is our primary focus, but also a version without the jacket and T-shirt that's highly beneficial for us 3D artists, as it offers a clearer understanding of the character's torso.
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01 PLACE REFERENCES IN ZBRUSH
This first step is, by far, the most important of the entire process of translating a 2D design to a 3D sculpt successfully. Studying the concept art before diving into ZBrush gives you all the input you need to understand the character you're sculpting.
First import the concept into Photoshop and try to deconstruct it. What I usually do is first break it down into primitive shapes. That
