Recreating Dragon Ball Vegeta with ZBrush Face Tools & Character Creator

Intro

Arnoldo Atencio Vazquez, a Venezuelan Graphic Designer, specializes in 3D modeling and art. Overcoming small-town challenges, he pursued his dream, earning a degree and working at a top advertising agency. Inspired by Disney, Arnoldo mastered various 3D tools, including Reallusion software.

His diverse portfolio spans custom maxillofacial prosthetics, virtual and augmented reality experiences, and indie game development. Arnoldo's passion and dedication have established him as an innovative force in the 3D art industry, consistently pushing creative boundaries and excelling in his craft.

Gathering References

Before starting, I suggest gathering reference images of the original character in different moods or situations. This way, we can comprehend every relevant muscle detail for crafting its expressions.

Using Character Creator

I started with using the stylized CC base character Eddy, deleting the redundant elements, and only leaving the body.

To further customize Eddy’s base model, some CC morph sliders were used to achieve the final look. To push the anime style, I also straightened out the teeth. Once completed, I initialized the Face Tools plugin, left the default settings, and sent him off to Character Creator.

Once exported, we can find all of the pieces that make up the character in the “Subtools” panel, including the head, body, tongue, eyes, and teeth.

Head Base Sculpting & Eyes Setting

The Face Tools plugin provides 6 levels of subdivisions. Always select the lowest level for head base sculpting. The plugin also offers the option to visualize the boundaries of each muscle section. It allows me to take care of the boundaries of each section, and manipulate the topology correctly and according to the style of our character.

For example, Vegeta’s eyes have a very particular triangular shape, and with the “Range” visualizer, I can see where the eye begins or ends, its upper and lower parts, and thus maintain a good point of reference to achieve the proper expressions. I now place a plane in front of the head and insert a texture with the character’s face to precisely match its proportions. From the Content Manager, we’ll swap out the eyes for ones more in line with his style.

Polypaint

Since Vegeta is an anime-style character, I prefer to apply polypaint before sculpting the expression details; as this helps me visualize the modifications that are to follow.

Click on the “Diffuse” button to show the diffuse map. To start painting, I will need to convert the existing texture to polypaint. Then activate the “MRGB Channel” button found in the “Draw” panel, and finally press the “Polypaint From Texture” button. After this, we can turn off the “diffuse” option and start painting Vegeta.

I leveraged the existing textures on Eddy, as they are already suitable for the stylized result we want. I then painted skin details in various areas of the face, such as the eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, and scalp, to work in the resemblance to Vegeta.

After painting the character, I clicked “Update to Character Creator” again, this time, ensuring that the “Polypaint-Diffuse” option was selected in the export popup window. Now, in the “Go-Z” popup window, you’ll see the option to apply the head color to the body. In the color update, you’ll see that the color we added to the head automatically matches that of the body.

Skin Details

Now that we have a good base ready and painted, it’s time to add the smallest details to our character’s skin. To start, we need to set the subdivisions of the model higher, in this case, we have 6 levels, so we set it to the maximum of 6 to have a more defined mesh.

Then, activate the “Detail Layer” button to visualize the skin details; To start editing, press the “Record” button in the “Layers” panel. This will allow us to record all the details we make on the skin while sculpting on it, and when exporting to CC4, it will be “Baked” onto the Normal Map.

Now, I begin to add some base skin details using noise for certain parts of the surface. We can also utilize specific preset brushes in ZBrush to create finer details.

Again, when we finish the details, we update by pressing the “Update to Character Creator” button. This time, we only need to select the “Detail – Normal” option in the popup window.

As you can see, the Normal Map now possesses way more details than before; and, our model is looking better as well.

Accessories

Before we move on to the next stage, let me quickly show you the progress I’ve made on accessories like hair, clothing, gloves, and boots. This helps in getting the character closer to the original concept.

Custom Expressions

In this section, I will ensure the expressions are in line with the topology of each facial section and optimized. In the Face Tools “Expression” panel, there is a list of 13 sets of Facial Expressions that we can use to achieve the character’s original look. You can notice how each of these expressions corresponds to each muscle group of the CC4 facial editor.

If we want to modify these expressions, we can deactivate the “Detail Layer” option to hide the details we worked on previously and go back to the lowest subdivision level.

Press the update button for the eyes, teeth, and tongue so that these objects are automatically updated and modified along with the expressions.

I’ll start by working on the “Jaw Open” morph as that is one of the most commonly used expressions throughout the Dragon Ball Z series; particularly when it comes to battle scenes.

While sculpting and modifying the expressions, it’s important to consider all three axes while doing so. By considering the X-, Y-, and Z-axis of the model, rather than working from one fixed point of view. Therefore, we aren’t misled into thinking in just two-dimensional terms of a 2D anime character.

Use the “Polygroups” view and isolate each of the groups offered by the plugin. This way, it’s much more comfortable and easier to edit the parts of the expressions that overlap each other. While adjusting this expression, I also tweaked the teeth and tongue to align with the expression.

Custom Expressions – Facial Expressions and Brows

When we proceed to export to CC4, select the “Update Expressions / Wrinkles” option and “Expression Morphs”. Then, select the expression that we have created — in this case, the “Jaw Open” expression. Once I update the character in CC4, open the “Edit Facial” menu to discover the changes made to the custom expressions for the character’s face.

Now, let’s continue with one of the parts of the face that, for me, is more representative of Vegeta, his eyebrows. As you can see, no matter his mood, this character is always frowning. Select the “Brows Drop” expression in the “Face Tools” expressions panel. Repeat the same process as in the previous expression, and update to CC4 selecting with the same parameters in the export panel; except that we change to the current expression “Brows Drop”. Repeat the same process for the other expressions you need to modify from the list in the Face Tools panel.

Create Wrinkles

Now, let’s see how to adjust the wrinkles in the expressions. To start, we adjusted the subdivision level to the highest, in this case, we have 6 of them. Note that wrinkles are visible when we set one of the expressions activated. Once this is done, we start adding more details to the expression, hoping to get the expression closer to the reference images.

We will also use this process to mark the expression lines with polypaint and convert the texture to polypaint as we did before and add them.

While working on this expression, I added veins that appear above the eyebrows when Vegeta furrows his brows. For the export to CC4, I activated the expression morph options “Wrinkle-Normal” to include the details in the normal map, and “Wrinkle-Diffuse” so that when the expression is used, the lines are heavily marked to have a greater impact on what the character is conveying.

Now we can see how the expression lines are marked in the center of the eyebrows. This way, we can play with and try each expression to achieve the desired results.

I hope you liked this tutorial on how to bring the expressions to life with this wonderful tool. You can generate other versions and transformations of Vegeta to take advantage of the versatility of this great software. To learn more details about the making of Vegeta, please visit the full article for insights, and stay tuned for more lessons in the future!

Arnoldo Atencio, Graphic Designer & 3D Modeler