Sculpting a Mermaid Character with Dynamesh - ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games - page 384

The Brief: Creating the Aquatic Female Character
Our design brief for this chapter is to create an aquatic female character, a new take on the mermaid. The
mermaid should not follow the typical archetype of female torso on a fish body; rather, look for ways to
create an appealing feminine character while combining humanoid and fish form language. The character
need not appear helpless or vulnerable; instead she should seem fully capable of self-defense in an un-
derwater environment while retaining beauty, sense of grace, and elegance. The character should appear
much more ichthyoid than human.
We will execute this brief using dynamesh as our primary design tool. This will allow us to build up the
volumes of the character with no concern for the underlying base mesh. Dynamesh allows us to approach
this figure just like we would a traditional clay sculpture, by adding and removing mass when and how
we need to, rather than trying to push an existing volume into the shapes we need.
Using Visual Cues to Communicate Character
In the process of working this brief, we will need to create an undoubtedly alien character—in this case, an
undersea being with ichthyoid qualities that reads to the audience as being female. How do we accomplish
this? To successfully communicate humanoid and aquatic qualities, we need to find real world touchstones
we can incorporate into the design. These visual cues serve to subconsciously push the viewer's mind to
make the assumptions we want them to make about the character. We have seen this already in how we treat
the jawline of an aggressive character or how we use shape language to communicate malicious intent as
opposed to kindness. In this case, we will look for typically female qualities we can incorporate into the
design.
Since we know this character needs to appear more alien than human, we know we will need to rely on
the body proportions and the shape and relationship between the facial features to communicate a sense of
the feminine. Without being able to rely on cultural gender cues like hair and costume, we will rely instead
on a generalized baseline of skeletal and facial shape relationships that will lead the mind to read the figure
as female.
Stereotypes and Tropes in Design
In design we sometimes have to play with stereotypes as a visual shorthand to communicate some things
to the audience. For example, when creating this feminine-looking creature, we will rely on some facial
structural cues that are stereotypically feminine within a narrow band of western culture. It is important to
keep in mind there are vast variations of female and male faces in the human population just like there are
variations in body types, skin tones, and costume. When we try and shape the viewer's perceptions while
relying on generalized perceptions, keep in mind the elements we rely on in this chapter are exactly that,
generalizations and not a barometer for any kind of visual standard of “beauty.”
Skeletal and Morphological Differences Between the Sexes
Since we will need to create the impression this character is female rather than male while retaining a dis-
tinctly alien anatomy, we will need to understand the common general visual cues that help us sex the skel-