Introduction

Hello MMF community! John Yakimow of Battle Yak Miniatures here. Every month Battle Yak Miniatures releases a new set of printable figures as part of a monthly Battle Pack, and a good number have been put out in the year and a half or so that Battle Yak has been running! I've recently had some fellow artist folks in the 3D sculpting and printing community reach out to me with questions about my work (which I'm always happy to answer) and what my process is for creating my miniature designs. And so I've taken it upon myself to write this article about that process.

This article features a recently made release, the Moulderbloom Fungaren, a horde of highly detailed and customizable mushroom monsters, and I will be going over the steps of bringing a Battle Yak Miniatures Battle Pack to life, from initial concept to final, 3D print ready files!

The Moulderbloom Fungaren are perfect stand-ins for any adventure featuring classic tabletop fungal creatures like myconids, and can be used to populate any kind of underground, swampy, or dank and deadly adventure setting. They're available for sale now on the Battle Yak Miniatures online store, and you can get 50% OFF with the promo code available at the end of this article! Heck, you can go get the code and buy them right now if you want, and come back to read about them after.

Got 'em? Good. Here's how I went about making them.

Step One: Have an Idea

In this case, it was 'mushroom monsters.' While not as ubiquitous as classics such as orcs or goblins, mushroom monsters have not been uncommon in the realm of fantasy and sci-fi gaming, with examples throughout tabletop and video games. Mushrooms have a lot of character even just in real life, so they make great characters when you add mouths and limbs and give them weapons to beat on people with.

I'd designed a number of mushroom creatures for fun a few years ago, and these acted as the basis for the Moulderbloom's inital design.

There were also copious amounts of rough sketches in sketchbooks, the artist equivalent of shorthand note-taking.

Since they could come in virtually any form, the design possibilities were many. I settled on a core set of basic humanoids, which would allow for lots of weapon customization options, and a big brutish fungal abomination to act as a striking centerpiece figure.

Basic Principles & Tools of Sculpting

Once the idea was in my head, it was time to realize it through sculpting. I use ZBrush for all my sculpting, it's an excellent program and I have used it for several years so I am well familiar with it. There are other programs like it, but this one is mine. All of the techniques that I use have analogs in other sculpting programs, so these principles should be broadly applicable whatever software you use.

From all the past sets I've developed, and from studying the work of other artists, I've built up a collection of 'basic figures', rough templates of humanoids of various sizes that I can use to get started with. They range from basic shapes to roughly sculpted anatomy, depending on what I'm making, and using them is often easier than starting from scratch.

I decided to begin with a basic humanoid shape. I mostly use Zbrush's default sculpting brushes:

ClayBuildUp, Inflate, Move and Snake Hook for definition,

Smooth, Trim Dynamic and Polish brushes to refine surfaces,

and DamStandard and Slash to carve creases and edge details.

I don't use a lot of custom brushes, but one set I do regularly come back to is the Orb Brush Pack by artist Michael Vicente, which has some excellent Fur, Rock, and the very useful Cracks brushes.

Dynamesh and Initial Sculpting

One of the most useful tools in Zbrush is the Dynamesh function, which when used recalculates the surface area of your sculpt and adds more polygons to it to maintain optimal topology. What all that means is that you can do stuff like this:

Dynamesh lets you add more and more to a character's form while keeping the mesh uniform with clear detail. The amount of topolgy Dynamesh adds can also be controlled, so you can decide how low- or high-detail you want the resulting mesh to be. When starting, it's best to keep the Dynamesh resolution low, since you're beginning with basic forms and building up to more elaborate detail later on.

Dynamesh also fuses any separate parts of the mesh together, so it's useful for combining elements and closing holes in the geometry that might be troublesome. Just be sure you don't acidentally fuse two pieces that you wanted kept separate, because un-fusing them can be tricky!

Using Dynamesh and the above Brush tools, I quickly turned my starting mesh it into a fungal humanoid, the basis for my first Fungaren.

Adding Details with Subtools

Once the basic body was done, it was time to break it up into individual pieces, called Subtools in Zbrush, so I could more easily add detail to them individually. Zbrush lets you select a piece of a model and separate it into a different Subtool pretty easily. You can use Zbrush's Masking Brush tools to select a part of the mesh, then turn that part of the mesh into its own distinct PolyGroup. With the option for Draw PolyFrame turned on, you can readily see how all the different parts of your model is divided into different PolyGroups based on their different color. These groups will all become separate Subtools when you use the Split functions like Groups Split.

With each part of the body its own separate Subtool, Dynamesh can be used on each of them without fusing them with other body parts in unwanted ways.

With Dynamesh and sculpting tools to progressively increase detail, every piece of the figure gradually started to approach its final form!

Keeping the parts of your figure as Subtools is very handy for customizing them with smaller details too! Once the basic Fungaren had taken shape, it was time to festoon him with all kinds of fun extras, like small mushrooms, those fungal shelf-things that grow on the trunks of trees, warty growths, and in this case a belt with a mysterious runestone belt buckle.

Batches of details can be kept as different subtools, allowing them to be hidden from view at your discretion. This way you can dress up your character with all kinds of different details. You can try out different looks in different combos to create a variety of unique looking figures quickly and easily.

Now that I had a figure with a ton of potential details, it was time to give them a dynamic pose.

Preparing a Figure for Posing

So far, the Funagren has been sculpted in a fairly unnatural 'default' pose to make it easier to get the details in. Now it has to be given a more natural pose, something with hunched over posture while brandishing weapons.

Some artists sculpt their figures in those poses right off the bat, and that's definitely an option if it works for you, but I tend to pose my figures after the above steps have given me a lot of detail options to work with, so I can get a lot of figures more quickly. I go about doing this by taking advantage of Zbrush's capabilities with Detail Projection and Subdivision Levels.

First I make a copy of all of the most basic elements of the figure into a new Zbrush Tool. Here you can see the basic figure - arms, legs, some clothes, etc. I do this by hiding all the Subtools I don't want to deal with and using Merge to combine the ones I will be posing.

Next, I make a duplicate Subtool of the merged figured, and then use the ZRemesher function to cut the detail of the mesh way, way down. Here the figure went from 5.5 million polygons to about 20k. Now I have the original high poly details mesh, and a new low poly poseable mesh.

Finally, I Divide the poseable mesh a couple of times, giving it loads more polygons, and use the Project function to add all the high detail from the details mesh to the poseable mesh. I can now manually adjust the SubDivision levels of the poseable mesh, moving it from high detail to low detail, like you see here:

Posing and Adding Details

What was the point of doing that? Well, meshes with a really high polygon count can be a huge pain to pose properly, and some rigs struggle with moving high amounts of detail, to say nothing of trying to keep a high-detailed mesh clean and looking good while you're moving it. Posing the mesh while it's set to its lowest subdivision level is much easier and faster, and any clean-up once it's set back to its highest subdivision level is usually a lot easier too.

This method also saves you the time of resculpting a lot of a character's detail over again for each different pose, since the majority of the sculpted detail is preserved by the subdivision levels. You can even use tools like Move and Inflate on the lower subdivision mesh to nudge it into proper form, and these changes will carry over cleanly to its higher subdivision levels!

In just a few minutes I have my Fungaren in a much more natural pose. At this point, I start bringing in my other smaller detail subtools and getting them set up to work with this pose. By keeping them all as separate subtools, they can be rapidly tweaked and positioned just right.

And in practically no time at all, the Fungaren has been posed and loaded with detail. By working from an initial pose-ready model and a separate library of decorations, you can rapidly create an army of posed characters with unique details on each one!

With customizable parts like different weapons and modular heads (or in this case, modular mushroom caps) you'd never know that a bunch of different figures were all actually one figure with different poses and decorations! It's the perfect scam!

Sporriors Overview

This is the method I use to create the standard character figures in my sets, which typically represent a basic unit of troops. I give them a range of customization options, including modular weapons and heads where possible. In the case of these Fungaren Sporriors, their heads were sort've sprouting up from the trunk of their body, so making the entire head modular was a tricky prospect. I decided to just make their caps modular instead!

After each Fungaren was posed and given detail, I went through and did some clean-up and resculpting, giving each one a slightly different face. Doing more Dynamesh and resculpting at this point will require getting rid of your lower subdivision levels, so make sure you're done with the majority of posing if you decide to add major details afterwards.

You can still split up your mesh into multiple Subtools if you want - this can even help you keep most of your mesh with subdivision levels by just splitting off the part you want to sculpt, in this case the head. Do whatever helps you make the most of your changes in the quickest, most effective, and least stressful way!

Making Modular Elements

The Sporrior weapons were made in pretty much the same way at the Fungaren themselves. Once I had an idea in my head of what each one would be, I started with basic shapes and detailed them using Dynamesh, sculpting, and subtools.

Weapons are generally a lot quicker and easier than entire characters, especially with this style where they appear organic, and having hard edges isn't as critical. I had an arsenal of fungal weaponry for the Sporriors to wield in just a few hours.

I sculpted hands grasping the weapons seprately based on the hands for the Sporriors, giving them the option to be modular. I added a simple sphere to the hand as a ball-joint, then used a copy of that sphere to prepare a socket for the ball-joint to fit into. Prepping a miniature for modularity is pretty easy, and once again relies on Dynamesh and a few other Zbrush functions.

Taking the copy of the ball-joint sphere, position it at the end of a figure's arm, where you'd want a hand wielding a weapon to attach. This is easier to do if the figure has a large bracer or armband or glove, some big detail that can readily be turned into a socket for a modular hand. Try to have the arm you're adding a socket to be it's own Subtool if you can, so you can activate Dynamesh on it without fusing it with other details. It's also a good idea to increase the size of the sphere you're making the socket with just a bit, to insure the socket will be able to fit it without issue.

Once you've sized up the sphere, set it to Subtract in the Subtool command window, and place the sphere below the Socketed Arm Subtool, then merge the two together. With Draw Polyframes turned on, you can see that the sphere has been given a white coloring. This denotes it as a Subtraction mesh - when you activate Dynamesh again, these elements will be Subtracted from the resulting mesh, instead of being fused together.

Doing this will hollow out the end of the arm, giving you a socket perfect for attaching modular pieces. By making sure the ball-joint on your modular weapons fits within the socket you've added to your mesh, you can be confident that the pieces will fit together when printed!

Sporeggoth Overview - Making a Multi-Part Monster

The same techniques outlined above were used to create the Sporeggoth creatures released with the set, which were so large they needed to be split up into multiple pieces. The body, caps, and legs of the Sporeggoth were kept as separate Subtools all through the sculpting process, and that made prepping them for being printed as modular pieces a lot easier.

To make sure the legs fit the body of the Sporeggoth, once they were completely detailed they went through the same Subtraction Dynamesh process described above, this time using a copy of the Sporeggoth's own body as the Subtraction mesh. This made sure that the legs would fit flush against the body when printed separately. The body and legs were also given ball-joints and sockets using the same method for the weapons, for ease of attachment.

The Sporeggoth's giant cap underwent a similar process, with spikey pegs rather than ball-joints, to ensure the cap would fit cleanly and not slide around at all when glued together.

Making a character made up of modular parts in this way will ensure that you can create a towering beast of any size you want, regardless of what model printer you have!

Making Bases

The final thing I do when making a monthly release is to put together a set of bases that matches the theme of that month. To fit with the Moulderbloom Fungaren, I chose to make a set of bases depicting an underground cavern infested with mushrooms.

My method for making bases uses a function in Zbrush called Boolean Union, which basically creates combo mash-ups of two separate Subtools.

First I start with a little slice of terrain, like this cavern floor here, sculpted with all the same brushes and tools I've shown already. Once this bit of terrain is done, I move on to preparing the bases.

As with figures, I have a set of template bases in various sizes. I make sure each base has an extended surface, which is where the majority of detail will be sculpted on.

With a base Subtool ready to go, I make sure it's ordered beneath the terrain I've sculpted, and then I set the base Subtool to Intersection. With this done, you can activate the Live Boolean view button to get a preview of what the combo union between terrain and base will look like.

With Live Boolean view active, just hit the Make Boolean Mesh function to finalize the creation of the combined mesh. After Zbrush grinds its gears for a bit, it will spit out a brand new Tool with the result of the Boolean union: A near-perfect sculpted base!

Once you have all your base sizes and have cleaned up any obtrusive bits, you're pretty much ready to print them! I like to make variants of my bases loaded down with more decorations, and with this set I covered the cavern floor with mushrooms and the bones of hapless victims of the Moulderbloom. If you have a lot of decorations available from putting together your figures, these can make great additions to your bases as well.

This method lets you quickly and easily put together a huge selection of decorative bases in a very short time, and works with every base size and shape you could want!

The Moulderbloom Fungaren

The methods described in this article were used to create the entirety of the Moulderbloom Fungaren set, which includes all the characters seen here.

Similar methods, modified as needed, are what I've used to generate pretty much all of the figures for every Battle Yak Miniatures release, from heroes and monster to terrain pieces and themed bases. Now you know what goes into a monthly Battle Pack, from start to finish!

The Moulderbloom Fungaren are available now at the Battle Yak Miniatures online store, and you can get 50% OFF all of them until August 15th with the Discount Code BLOOM! Battle Yak Miniatures starts every month with a sale on the latest set, and has end of the month sales for previously released sets too!

Join up on Discord to talk with me and the Battle Yak community about what you'd like to see from future sets! Follow Battle Yak Miniature social media for updates, previews, and news about future releases and sales! Watch for new miniature releases as Battle Yak Miniatures continues to grow!

Battle Yak Miniatures

MYMINIFACTORY

MAKERS

CREATORS

PARTNERS

SUBSCRIBE

APP