Hello, this video is about why your sculpting sucks. Sorry about the harsh title, but sometimes it's tough to know why our sculpting doesn't work. And this is a quick guide to show you the most important aspects to get right from the start, so that we can all improve and have amazing sculpts. Do check out my website for other detailed and free courses, and do get along to the Discord server and chat to me there. Links are all in the description. So when it comes to sculpting, every sculpt can be broken down into three levels. First of all, you have the basic shapes or the blocking out, and sometimes this is called low frequency work, and that's where you get the basic silhouette of your shape. Now the mid-level is the detailed shapes, so if it's a person, for example, you might have hands and fingers, the nose and the mouth, the third level is the fine detail, and on a person that would be things like the paws, the wrinkles, veins, if they're really muscular, then you might see details in the muscles as well. This is where you get out your detailed brushes, and I'll put a link in the description to how you can go about doing that. But one of the major mistakes that I see lots of beginners doing when they say, can you assess my work, is that they've gone too quickly over the first level, and they've put too much effort into their detail when they haven't got that basic shape, blocked out, and a good silhouette. So as an example, if I come into blender, and create my base model with Metables, so I'll delete the default cube, and shift a Metable ball, I'll go and up the resolution as well, or I should say bring it down, and I'll go into front view and start building a character. For this example, I'll just do one side, I'm just pressing shift D, duplicating the Metable, and moving around into place. And for the sake of this example, I won't do any legs. So there's a very basic character blocked out, and I would want to go in and start sculpting this on a low resolution to get my first silhouette and simple base mesh. However, before I do that, if I go into side view, we can see that I still need to do a lot of work. As we can see from this model here, that the side profile of a person is actually quite curved, and we need to bring the chest out, arch the back, shoulders back, and so on. So inside view and blender, I can bring the chest out a bit, scale it in the Y, so it's flatter, bring the middle out as well, I'll scale that in the Y as well, and already it's a better shape, and really I'll probably duplicate this, and bring it out to the front, and this one as well, bring it out to the front, make it a touch smaller, and it looks like a much better shape. But we still aren't finished there, there's still the arm to do, the shoulders need to be back, and then we can reposition the rest of the arm, accordingly. And now when I'm moving around my model, I can see a basic silhouette of a human from whatever angle I go to, and that's important to keep moving around your model when you're creating the base mesh. It's so vital to spend a lot of time on these early stages. You can be an absolutely amazing artist at the detail, but your models will still look poor if you don't get the base shape right. So when you're creating your base shapes, if we look at this anatomy figure here, you can easily see how you can break down your model into those basic elements. You can build those up with metaphors, or they can just be simple shapes, and then you boolean them together, or join them together before sculpting. But it's really vital that you can look at an object and break it down into its basic elements. Look at the outline of the shape from lots of different angles, and make sure you're repeating it in your basic shapes. That's where good reference images will help, and you can even bring your reference images into blender to trace around. I think as much as possible, it's best not to do that when you're practicing, because you may not always have a clear reference of the model you're trying to create. Instead, try and look at lots of different reference images and create something from them. So make sure you're spending a lot of time building up the base level of your model. In order to help you do that, once you've done your Metables or your basic blocking out, and you're looking to go to the next stage, keep the detail level of your brush very low. That will force you to not go too detailed, like I was in the face just here. Because it's a low detail, I can make sure the silhouette is correct, without messing up any detail that I've done. And it's really easy to push around the shape, because there isn't much detail to it. So make sure your blocking out is good, and your silhouette is good. And when you start building up the sculpt, keep the detail level of your brush down, for as long as possible. Then when you've got your model to a position where you think this really looks like what I'm trying to produce, that's when you can start the detailed work. So watch out for more episodes on sculpting, and you can always take part in sculpt January, which is just around the corner. Thanks for watching, and I hope this helps.