Organic Modelling Assignment: Cute Character

In Week 7 we were given the brief for Assignment 2 – Organic Modelling. We were asked to model / sculpt, texture and present a Cute Character without exceeding 40000 polygons.

Idea Generation

I was really excited about this assignment as it gave me the perfect opportunity to create a 3D piece for my portfolio. I appreciated how broad the brief was, and was very impressed by the cute character examples shown to us in class. It was difficult for me to choose one character to model, so I decided to pick 6 favourite ideas and go from there. At this stage we were still learning the very basics of the software, Blender, so I was also taking my time with it and hoping that I could decide after seeing what I would feel would be the most enjoyable to sculpt in Blender. I quite enjoyed the modelling exercises we did in class, such as the apple and the pear. Doing them really helped me understand the importance of first blocking out your character before moving into details. Blocking out in 3D is similar to sketching in 2D. While watching Henry’s demo video of blocking out the Shiba Inu, I was inspired to explore the idea of sculpting a dog character (see all ideas below). It was a priority of mine to create a scene that would tell a simple story. I liked the thought of giving my character accessories that would bring the scene to life. I also thought about the way I wanted to present my character, I wanted it to look good when rotated in orbit mode in Sketchfab. After I was set on 6 different ideas, I created very quick thumbnails of them in Photoshop and wrote a list of pros and cons on a sheet of paper.

 

1. Mimi & Tutu (original characters)

+ Fits brief and portfolio, human character, style

– Too complex, needs to have motion

2. Three Puppies and A Butterfly’s Metamorphosis

+ Fits brief, details (keep it simple), story

– Too much going on, too large of a scene

3. Lulu & Beans (original characters)

+ Fits brief and portfolio, looks good in 3D, human character, style

– No story yet

4. Alligator bopping its head to music

+ Fits brief, character design, style, simple

– Too simple, needs more to it

5. Caramel the fancy pup, lying on cushion

+ Fits brief, interesting shapes, details

– Not very unique, no story

6. White Sheltie pup wearing strawberry hat, sleeping

+ Fits brief, interesting shapes

– No story, lacks detail

 

I was most excited about 1. Mimi & Tutu, because I was motivated by the idea of making a version of one of my illustrations in 3D.

Last year, I remember listening to an episode of a podcast about visual storytelling, which taught me that “small details can work as an extension to the character”. It can also sometimes be interesting as the viewer to know more than the characters themselves do (ie. dramatic irony), which is something I myself try to explore in my own illustrations. When creating the original artwork, I wanted to tell a simple story about a girl, Mimi, who struggles with her confidence as a beginner dancer, but when she finds the right environment to practise it helps her feel more confident and that confidence shines through her almost like magic. Mimi is unaware of “the magic”, but it appears because she finally believes in herself. Another example of something similar to this can be seen in Disney and Pixar’s Soul, when characters are In The Zone. Mimi is an original character of mine and I wanted to capture her the best I could in 3D. Tutu the elephant is also a character of mine, but the brief only asked for one character, so she would have to be labelled as a prop for now.

Cute Character Reference Sheet

 

Research / Inspiration

Before I dived into the modelling / sculpting stage, I went on Sketchfab and searched for models with a similar description to get some inspiration, but I couldn’t find very many. However, I have included some of the models that I did find below.

Ballerina – The Audition by ronsyl – I really enjoyed the sense of environment in this piece, in particular the floating particles scattered around the scene. I also liked the idea of creating a dome around the scene. However, the style of this model wasn’t suited for what I was hoping to create.

A little coffee in the evening by Tijerín Art – The style of this model was closer to what I wanted to create than the previous model of the ballerina. I think this character is very cute !

The Legend of Zelda The Twilight Princess by technoir – I found this model and fell in love with the idea of presenting my scene with a black background, because it makes all the glowing particles way more noticeable.

Updo by Heather Bea – Although I didn’t feel confident in my texturing skills to recreate a similar style to this model, I still found it very inspiring. This model was based on concept art created by Mike Henry.

 

Particle Effects

I was very intrigued by the particle effects in some of these models and having no prior experience with particle effects, I took to Youtube and watched a few tutorials on how to create them. I was also considering creating a spiral of particles that would follow the path of a curve. After watching the tutorials, I added them to my Watch later playlist for later.

 

Sculpting in Blender

I quickly created a model sheet, because I knew it would help me with getting dimensions right in the block out stage. This was something that Henry recommended to us during class.

Cute Character Model Sheet

Before actually installing Blender, we were asked to watch a handful of videos to introduce us to the software. The video that was the most helpful to me was the one below. It was very easy to follow!

 

1. Blocking out

After completing the apple and pear modelling exercises, I had a better understanding of how all the sculpting tools work in Blender. I started blocking out my model with metaballs as a single object. After a while I realised that this wasn’t going to work very well, so I decided to scrap the file, start over and work on the character’s body, hair and dress as separate objects.

I made sure that none of the limbs were touching so that I could easily Mask them and use the Pose tool. This was very finnicky, but I was pleased with how I was able to pose the character’s arms and legs so similar to how they were in the concept. I also added a simple sphere and removed half of it to create a platform for my character.

I then blocked out the general shape of my character’s hair using a sphere and the Grab tool. I didn’t smooth it out yet, because I wasn’t sure about the style yet.

I had to straighten my character model quite a bit for it to be in a similar enough pose as in the concept, so I just again used the Mask tool and Pose tool for this.

I very quickly blocked out the character’s dress because my one-to-one tutorials were coming up and I didn’t want to present my character without the dress. I was happy with how my model was looking at this stage.

I had a one-to-one tutorial with Michael, which I was excited about because I know he worked on some models in Doc McStuffins. I was hoping to get some advice on how to sculpt the hair, eyelashes and the sheer cloth on top of the dress. He was able to give some great feedback and general tips even though I wasn’t very far in my model. He suggested I turn on Dyntopo and start working in some detail next.

I have to be honest, I didn’t touch the model for a few weeks after doing the block out. Working on another big project alongside was making my workload a lot more difficult, so I decided to just leave the model until the other assignment was handed in. This obviously raised the pressure for m, but I was confident that I could have it done. We were also very fortunate to get an extension. I feel like I developed my modelling skills while working on the other assignment, so I almost felt like this model would actually seem like a smaller assignment than I originally thought. All the brainstorming and planning was done, now it was time to execute it in practise!

I had another one-to-one session with Alec and I got great feedback on my progress, although I hadn’t done much work on the model since Michael’s tutorial. Alec recommended that I create the dress in Maya and showed me how to create the sheer cloth on top of the dress using a Ramp Shader. I found this very helpful as he was able to record his demo for me to watch later!

 

2. Details

Continuing on the model after a few weeks break I started working in some detail and defining the shapes. I focused on Mimi’s base mesh (body) and used tools such as Grab, Draw Sharp, Clay Strips, Smooth, Flatten, Inflate, Snake Hook and Simplify. I found Draw Sharp tool to be very useful in creating specific details, Flatten tool helped me define the feet and hands and Snake Hook was very useful when creating the thumbs. I also really found all of these tools to be useful in very different ways when holding down ctrl.

I wanted to define the dress mesh more so I created simple shading on it with the Draw Sharp and Smooth tool.

Then I finally worked on detailing the hair. I still kept it quite simple due to the style I was going for, but I had fun detailing it with the Draw Sharp, Inflate, Simplify and Smooth tool.

At this stage I had decided to bring in a second character in the scene, Mimi’s friend Tutu the elephant. I started working on her mesh by just adding a sphere and cylinder first and going from there. I used Snake Hook to create the limbs, ears and trunk. I kept this model extremely simple as it was just a prop in the final scene.

After I had created Mimi’s eyes and nose, I tried creating some simple eyelids on her. First I used Draw Sharp tool to create a crease, I then used Inflate tool to raise the eyelid and finally I just held down Shift to have the eyelid appear more smooth natural.

After some final touches, I was finished sculpting in Blender.

 

Modelling in Maya

I took the sculpture into Maya to add small details such as the bow in Mimi’s hair, which I created using the CV Curve tool. I also twisted the ribbon to make it look like it was flowing in the wind.

Retopology

Because of the polycount being too high for the requirements for this assignment, I decided to retopologise Mimi’s base mesh and Tutu’s body as well. I used the Quad Draw tool and held down Shift every now and again to Relax the new mesh and pressed ctrl for more vertices.

Reducing Poly Count

To reduce triangles and vertices, I deleted Mimi’s body that is hidden under the dress.

I also used the Reduce Mesh tool on Mimi’s hair because I didn’t care about detail here. I did the same with her dress.

Ramp Shader

I took Alec’s advice when creating the dress overlay and used Ramp Shader to create opacity in the tulle. This article explains Maya’s Ramp Shaders really well: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015/ENU/Maya/files/Shading-Nodes-Ramp-Shader-htm.html.

I tested the dress overlay and Ramp Shader Map in Sketchfab and tried to see how it would handle my test Ramp Map. It worked fine as long as I changed Alpha to Luminance and Inverted Texture. I feel like this might be because I created the opacity map the opposite way around. This article helped me understand how Opacity works in Sketchfab: https://help.sketchfab.com/hc/en-us/articles/202602073-Transparency-Opacity.

UV Unwrap

Working on Mimi’s base mesh UVs was fairly easy after having the retopology done. I just created new UVs using the Camera Based option and Split the arms, head and legs as separate maps.

Working on UVs for objects that I hadn’t retopologised such as the hair and dress was more difficult.

Textures in Substance Painter

I was scared to begin texturing as I felt it would be easy to mess it up. Due to this, I decided to start by texturing the platform and moon first, as I felt they would be the easiest. After texturing the rest however I felt the need to change the colours of those objects as I felt they didn’t match well with the rest of the scene. To make this easier in the future, I could create multiple colour variations so that I can switch between them if required. After making these small changes I was happy with the end result. My favourite part of the texturing process was definitely shading Mimi’s hair.

Image Planes

Once I was finished with textures I wanted to make the scene feel more alive by adding some of the elements my 2d illustration had as image planes.

I updated my Maya scene with these by just adding the PNG files as planes. Once I was happy with the composition I updated the model in Sketchfab and applied all the textures. At first it didn’t work because I hadn’t applied the Alpha maps correctly, so I just tried again with the same settings but applied Alpha maps in the Opacity section and chose Luminance instead of Alpha, which thankfully worked.

Final Outcome

Here is my final model laid out in Sketchfab. I am very happy with the final product.

 

Reflection

I really enjoy 3D modelling and sculpting. As I had an interest in sculpting with clay and painting physical 3D objects, working digitally was not all that different for me. If anything, it gave me a better grasp of shapes and forms. Learning new software is always daunting, but I was willing to try it and I feel like I did really well. I have a lot to improve on when it comes to the UV and texturing stages, but like I mentioned in an earlier blog post I plan on practising over the summer to gain more confidence in these areas for second year. It was really fun to compose a scene in 3D and bring some elements from the original illustration as 2D image planes. I enjoyed retopology as well, but I didn’t have time to completely retopologise my models. If I had done this, maybe the UVs would have been easier to do. I am proud of what I have created over the semester and although my final model isn’t perfect, I am happy to submit this as my first 3D sculpture created in Blender. In the future I will consider thinking of some of my pieces as 3D projects from the start, rather than adapting a completed 2D illustration.

Final 3D Model and Reflection

Sketchfab link to my final 3D model:

 

Gallery:

Front View
Close-up on Bear
Close-up on Birds
Back view and Shadow

 

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Reflection on This Assignment

Before this module I had no experience with 3D modelling at all, but through this past month I have gained the knowledge to successfully complete my first 3D model based on 2D concept art. Whenever I was struggling with anything, I would turn back to the class material. I found the videos very helpful and easier to follow than other tutorials available online. I learned best by trying different things for myself in the software. The most important lesson I learned was to be patient with myself and not be afraid to try out techniques that I did not yet fully understand. For example I was anxious about the UV unwrapping stage, but I found that after trying it for myself it was not as complicated as it first seemed. By the end I had a better understanding of the general workflow between Autodesk Maya, Substance Painter and Sketchfab. I feel like I have gained a foundation of 3D modelling skills and now have more confidence in my ability to work on 3D projects in the future. I am looking forward to trying more complex projects and using other 3D modelling programs in the second half of the module.

 

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