In the last few years, artists have begun turning more and more to concept sculpting as a means to rapidly design and develop characters. Instead of using 2D techniques in Photoshop or Corel painter, more and more artists are jumping directly into a digital sculpting application like ZBrush or Mudbox and designing their character on the fly.
ZBrush has become the industry standard for digital sculpting, and recent additions to the software (most notably dynamesh) have made it possible to achieve an almost infinite variety of characters and 3D assets from base-meshes as simple as a shpere, cylinder, or cube.
The ability to dynamically equalize the topology of your model means that artists no longer have to worry about "running out of detail"
1. What Is Concept Sculpting?
Five years ago, if you worked as a modeler in the computer graphics industry, it meant that you were modeling characters, game assets, and environments almost exclusively from someone else's concept. This is because a skilled 2D concept artist was capable of getting a finished character design in front of an art director faster than a modeler could generate a base-mesh. Times have changed. ZBrush is the only piece of 3D software that lets you be a concept artist and a modeler at the same time. You don't design in Maya and Max if you're doing character work. Traditional character modeling just takes too much time and precision to model on the fly and make changes as the ideas In ZBrush the goal is to get the best looking high-res mesh possible, and retopologize for production later. Scott Patton was one of the first artists to pioneer the use of ZBrush for quickly generating concept art, and2. Advantages
Versatility: Compared to a piece of 2D concept art from a single camera angle, a concept sculpt is far more versatile and affords the artist an opportunity to develop renders from multiple angles.
*In September 2011, Dynamesh was introduced with Pixologic's ZBrush 4R2 update, which for all intents and purposes frees artists from the constraints of topology for the first time in history. Three months later the preview video for ZBrush 4R2b was released, revealing the fact that in three months Pixologic had introduced an entire hair & fur system as part of an incremental software update that most people expected to be little more than a patch to fix a few bugs.
3. Disadvantages
Speed: Although the process of designing and executing a sculpt is incredibly fast compared to traditional modeling techniques, a talented 2D concept artist can still churn out sketches and speedpaints faster than a digital sculptor can pull together a concept sculpt.
