3D Character Creation - Sculpting

Initial Block-Out: What went wrong

I started the block-out of my Character only using my original character Design, this was an immature approach. I asked Carlo Bautista, our guest lecturer about my sculpt and its progress, what I received back initially shocked me but with space and time I could see the faults in the initial Block (seen below_

“Reference, reference, reference!” – Carlo, to me during the workshop. Listening to criticism and understanding criticisms are two distinctive concepts. I had to understand where I was wrong before I could accept it.

Per Carlo’s advice and session on character design basics. I used multiple external reference images pulled from Pinterest to work in conjunction with my own character turn-around which now included 3/4 full body turnarounds. I ensured that I had anatomically accurate references to aid my original character design. I realised that there were outstanding issues with my base mesh 

Studying Reference & Understanding Base Mesh Parts: 

Key Takeaways from formative feedback:

(1)  What I initially thought was the block-out was actually detailing. I skipped a crucial step.

(2)  Although I sculpted a mostly “proportionate” sculpt to my reference, I did not demonstrate my fundamental understanding of anatomy, this was a major issue with the sculpt.

(3) My polycount was far too high because I was not using Zremesher to lower the poly of my sphere mesh.

With this formative feedback, I went back to step 1 and started from the beginning,  reworking my character design. 

Reworking Character Design

Block-out #2: Front View 

Block-out #2: Side View

Block-out #2 : Back View

Organisation of Subtools / Anatomy of sculpt

Full Turnaround view of New Block-out Body Sculpt

After Merging sub tools and applying Dynamesh

Dynamesh & Zremesh:  

Using dynamesh with Zremesher was a back-and-forth process where maintaining the structural integrity of the Elf_Model and lowering polycount was dancing on a fine line. Per internal tutorials, I would Zremesh to 0.7 poly count in the beginning to keep a low poly count and light file size.

Top: Dynameshed Final Body / Bottom: Zremesher after Dynamesh

With the body block-out and detailing “finished”, I deemed it was time to work on the face.

The face block-out required less effort than the body, but it took several restarts to achieve a cohesive skull-to-jaw placement.  Using only the move, trim dynamic and Damien standard brush to block out the features,  I managed to achieve a likeness to the character head turn-around I sketched earlier.  

Ears: used external reference images to help inform the elf ears I sketched

Blocking out the Face : 

Face sculpting in Stage: Top left to Bottom right

Secondary Face: 

After applying Dynamesh and re-defining planes of the face after block-out

Sculpting Eyebrows and eyelashes

Blocking out Hands: 

Sculpting Hands: Left to Right

I treated the hands similar to the Body, I simply reduced the hands to their most basic shapes and used dynamesh, Zremesher and the move tool to create detail, then reduced polycount by retuning details once more to achieve pudgy, elf hands which were between realism and stylised. (The pinky has been adjusted, do not worry.)

Blocking out Hair:

My approach to blocking out the hair for this specific stylised character was mainly by using a 3d Zremeshed Cone and using the move tool to place and shape into rough shapes that I plan to merge and dynamic details onto later.

 

Hair Block-out in staged: Left to right

The main focus was to block out large shapes and whittle them down into smaller parts to make up the entire piece.  Hair was difficult to grasp as it could take any form, and having to think big while wanting to nail down the details was a difficult stylistic choice to practice. 

Secondary detail:

Clothes: To sculpt clothes for the character, I took a simple approach where I masked, extracted and played with the various deformation bars to achieve the main shapes and thickness.

 

 However it's worth mentioning that I needed a higher poly count to achieve the thinness of a heavy cotton shirt with folds, so I tried to meet a lower poly count with high detail. 

Blocking out Feet & Boots

To sculpt the boots I started by sculpting the feet which were approached similarly to the hands. I started with cubes which I smoothed down the 'Move' Tool and placed them to make the parts of the feet like clay. I proceeded to apply dynamesh and Zremesh to fine-tune the shape of the boot into the like of my tabi shoes in my character design. 

Low Poly Accessories:  Bow, Arrow, Quiver, Belt Harness & Hair Tie

Rope Belt

I wanted to make some accessories for the Elf_Model as I believe these would be important in communicating the visual narrative. I started with the rope belt (which in the final design is taken out for streamlining the character profile.)

Initially using Zbrush deformed with two cylinders to make the rope

After some advice, I went into Maya, and using curves, I created this rope which proved to be more malleable due to the movement that is enabled due to the curve tool and deformers in Maya.

Rope_Modelling

Bow& Quiver: 

Practicing how to model a Bow with Curves, and deformers. 

For making the bow I followed this tutorial for reference, I then decided to remodel following my design in Zbrush by using a subdivided cube which was bent using the Zbrush deformers. 

Zsphere was used to make the bowstring, by circling around the bow model, then dynamesh.

Final Bow

Arrow modelled in Maya

I love this arrow because of the bend in shape which nods to the novice handcrafting of the Elf.

Belt

The belt was mostly modelled in Zbrush by extracting from the character's body and using the inflate deformed. The buckle was similarly made using a cube.

Quiver modelled in Maya

The quiver design was simple and modelled relatively quickly from a cube, 

Finishing the Character Sculpting/ Modelling: 

I achieved most of my sculpting using 3 brushes, the Move tool, the Damien standard brush and the Trip dynamic brush. These three were the fundamental tools which helped shape the sculpt.

Tertiary Details: 

Tertiary detail for my stylised character who would mostly be depending on hand-painted textures, I used a combination of ZBrush Alphas for adding texture to the boots, the bow and certain areas of the trousers. Concluding that the modelling took much longer than I anticipated as I  have accepted that a large part of the process is spent on finding things out, rectifying mistakes and implementing feedback.

Final High Poly Close-ups: 

After finalising the model, I went back and detailed hair and final touches before starting Retopology.

Coming next: Retopology