Scenario Zbrush Character Creature

Realistic characters and creatures (ZBrush 2026)

Expert level here means every form has a cause (skull, mass, tension, compression) before any pore exists, and every detail pass is reversible, regional and judged in renders from several views and lights. The agent works the way Kingslien and Costa do: find the upstream cause, fix it at the lowest level that holds it, and keep detail on layers or behind a stored morph target. If a sibling skill named here is missing from your available skills, ask the user to install it (npx skills add scenario-labs/skills --skill <name>); unattended, proceed from tool schemas and flag the gap.

REQUIRED BACKGROUND: scenario-zbrush-expert (bridge, stroke engine, review loop, 2026 traps). Toolkit: scripts/zb_character.py (stroke plans, ZBrush-side wrappers via zb_character.call(...), OBJ, alpha and render checks) on the lead's toolkit.

Stance (the expert delta)

• Cause before form, in planes. Kingslien: cranial versus facial mass, then the Bridgeman masses (forehead box, flat cheek, maxilla cylinder, triangular jaw), then features sculpted through the forms around them (nostril through the alar facial juncture, eye through the nasojugal groove). "Almost everything right or wrong in this face is right or wrong back in the beginning." A region touched twice means replan (MoveBudget). His single separating lines suit synthesized strokes.
• Detail is worthless on a weak base. Costa: judge primaries blurred, from afar, upside down and under three lights from the first sketch; keep level 1 alive for likeness edits until export.
• Asymmetry lives in the big forms. FlippedNormals break symmetry in the mid-frequency pass; J Hill again in the last 25 percent (nose tip off the axis, one ear, a lip corner, one eye's scale); Lazov pushes the whole creature from a stored morph target. Creature big forms: skull mass, one orbit rim, the jaw corner, a nostril, a horn's angle. Scars and broken scales come on top, never instead.
• Skin: scale first, regions second, breakup third. J Hill sets pore scale globally for age and sex first; lids and lips stay clean; even skin between details reads as plastic. Lines lie across the compression, in short connected segments (Costa: wrinkles connect pores, perpendicular to the circular muscles). Cracks on horns and tusks go large to small in stages (Starkie).
• Scales follow the anatomy; alphas never finish a surface. Henning Sanden: generic tile, mid value 50, tested on the model at least three times while you build it, then a hand unify pass; smooth inside a scale, never across its border. Starkie: a close-up hero gets individual scales (he gives no numbers). Berger: story, then biology, then cool; reference animals blended with no seams.
• Sharp enough to survive the render. FlippedNormals: carve deeper than feels right, because SSS and soft light eat sharpness; J Hill: only the sharp detail survives in the highlights. Over finished detail ClayBuildup erases what is under it: enhance with Standard, make directional passes with Elastic.
• Folds and poses have causes. Grassetti: every fold starts at a tension point, ends in another fold or an edge, is heavier near the tension; tightness picks drop, zigzag, X or Y. Eaton: only the force chain is tense; active muscles run straight between landmarks; scapula about 30 degrees at 90 degrees of arm elevation.
• Agent limits [added]. Transfer well: palette operations, feature masks plus Deformation sliders, layers and morph targets, two-point alpha stamps, short lines, spray loops, curves-API horns. Stay weak: Costa's thin ClayBuildup layering, groom and Morph-brush feel, anything needing Ctrl or Shift held, and HD Geometry (the A key cannot be sent). Say so in the report.

Establish first

Workflow

0. Brief and maps. Design pyramid (Berger); rest versus rich zones (Lazov); scale flow over the anatomy (Henning). GATE: all three written down.
1. Masses (from scenario-zbrush-sculpting, or skull first here, Lazov). Head: cranial versus facial mass, then Bridgeman masses on a stroke budget (Kingslien: 16 Move strokes; C2). Creature: skull, jaw hinge, horns (C17), open and closed mouth on layers (Berger). Figure: landmarks first (Eaton). GATE: sheet with front, profile, three-quarter and below (view_facing("-Y")); head_ratio_check or scapula_check passes or the deviation is deliberate; no retouched region.
2. Face critique pass in Kingslien's order (references/critique.md). The first failing step is the fix: a separating line (C3), a masked move (C4) or plane strokes. GATE: face_report moves the right way against the previous stage.
3. Topology, stack, projection. Detail only on a clean, UV'd base. Choose the route before the first Divide (C5): SDK only, subdiv_plan(route="regular") to about 20 to 25M, micro detail in a tiled map at render; computer use, 3 to 4 regular levels (top 1 to 2M) then 3 to 4 DivideHD. Never add HD over a 6 or 7-level stack: you cannot go below the HD entry (J Hill). Reproject with zb_ops.project_all (checkpoint, morph target and top-level layer built in), eye, mouth and nostril interiors masked first; then walk every level (C19). GATE: stack_check ok; spike_report ok in every danger-zone group; points per level logged.
4. Secondary forms: folds, wrinkles, fat pads, lids, lips; Costa's thin ClayBuildup (Z 2 to 3, many short strokes), Kingslien's lines; symmetry off for the big-form mid-frequency pass. Cloth: plan folds (C13) or simulate, then sculpt (C14, C15). GATE: blurred and thumbnail renders; no form "screams".
5. Tertiary detail, one layer per frequency (layer_new, agent-side ledger). Aim first: aim_at the region, stamps inside region_on_canvas (C9). Pore or scale bed: Surface Noise (C7) or alpha stamps (C8, C9), each alpha tested on the model while built. Wrinkles across the compression (C10); cracks with crack_tree, largest first; breakup (C11); hand unify. GATE: raking close-ups; alpha_check (and dots_check if dots were used); no tiling; lids and lips clean; each layer seen at intensity 0 and 1.
6. Asymmetry pass (C12), big forms first. GATE: asymmetry_report finds at least two big-form regions broken; posed figures skip it.
7. Fur and hair (C16). Mask, preset from a file, Preview, Accept, Fast Preview PRE Vis 6 to 8. GATE: coverage render with a contrasting fill.
8. Final review and handoff (C20). Costa's eight steps under three lights, upside down, blurred; eye_report; detail_survival on the SSS render; map_request_check; versioned ZTL. GATE: scorecard passes, or open items listed.