Character Modelling

As I modelled a skull for my 3D digital literacy assessment 1, I was already familiar with the basic shape of a skull. I used the same reference model to create the model. Even though my skull had exaggerated features, such as larger eyes and a smaller nose to make him look cuter, using the 3D model of a skull really helped when modelling mine in blender.

I created a sphere and used the draw and draw sharp tools to create his face at low resolution, then increased the resolution so I could carve out his nose and smooth out the whole skull. I feel my practice modelling skulls before was a large benefit when sculpting this skull, as it didn’t take me as long as I thought it would.

  

Reference:

After exporting the skull as an FBX to Maya, I started modelling the petals. As the petals had to be wrapped around the skull, which wasn’t a perfect sphere, I could not use the duplicate petal tool, meaning I had to model them separately. I used smooth preview and the multicut tool to create the curves in the petals. I wasn’t sure if they needed to be straight for rigging, so I saved them straight down in one file and folded at the bottom in another, so I was prepared for when it came to rigging.

I couldn’t get the shape of the petals just right, so I imported them into blender to smooth the mesh’s, however, when importing them back into Maya, the polycount was too high and I couldn’t reduce it in blender, so I went back to the original file and converted smooth mesh preview to polygons. After receiving feedback from Alec, he said that my petals didn’t need retopologized and I could begin rigging the folded petals once I finished retopologizing the skull head. I also included a short spine connecting the skull head to the flower petals like in one of my previous designs.

Before I retopologized my skull, Alec did show me how to bend the petals without needing to change the shape of the actual petals. By going to deform, nonlinear and blend, I was able to change the low bound, high bound and curvature assets to fold the tops of my petals.

Reference:

To include in our environment, I created a patch of grass that could be placed in front of headstones in blender, then added a green standard surface layer in Maya.

After I uv mapped my character, I imported it as an FBX into substance painter, where I added a candle wax layer to the skull that was recommended by Cloe. Instead of creating actual dark eye sockets for his head, I added a layer of dirt by creating a fill layer and black mask and painting in all the creases on his head.

I still wanted the skull boy to resemble a tulip, so I looked up reference images of red tulips as I wasn’t sure how the red and orange colours in their petals blended together.

Petal Reference:

Alec sent me a tutorial on how to rig my character using NURBS circles and the bends I created before texturing. After parenting controls to each petal and the whole character, I created a new attribute in the channel called fold to each of the petals and set a driven key so when I turned the fold attribute to 0, the petals would unfold and when I turned it to 10, they would unfold, exposing the whole head. I also parented 3 joints and bound them to the spine and skull head, so I could rotate and move the head in a more realistic way.

Once my character was rigged, I attempted light trials so I could see how my textures would look in the final render. I also added blendshapes to the skull, allowing the animator to change his expression to whatever fits the emotion of their scene. I am very proud of the character I created as I feel he is exactly how I imagined him to be and I love how the lighting brings him to life.

Blendshapes:

Leave a Reply