Over easter I finished my cute character model. I started by sculpting the right hand of the gnome. I knew this would be the more difficult hand, so I wanted to give myself enough time to sculpt it. In my original design, I gave the gnome 4 fingers. However, when it came to sculpting him, I felt he looked better with 3 as I wanted his finders to be chubby, but I didn’t want the hand to be any bigger than it was. I used the crease and pinch tools quite a bit whilst sculpting these more detailed areas, such as the shoes and hands.
As I was following the wizard gnome tutorial for some of my sculpting, I wanted to see how my gnome would look if I made his nose a more realistic shape like in the video instead of basing it off of the small gnomes from Gnomeo and Juliet. I didn’t like how his nose looked after making this change as I feel the round nose makes him look cuter, so I went back to the original file.
The hat was the last part of the gnome I sculpted. To create the creases and floppy look of the hat, I used the pivot, crease, and pinch tools. I also used the layer tool to create the wider section at the bottom of the hat. This is my favourite part of the gnome as I feel like it adds the most character to him. It did take longer than expected to get the wider section just right as I wanted the edges to be quite sharp and they kept coming up v curved. I do think I got there in the end and I’m very happy with my model.
To save some time, I used the retopologized tool in Maya to retop the areas on my models with little detail, such as the petal, the gnome’s head and nose and his sleeves. Everywhere else, I retopologized myself. The hat and hands took the longest as they are the only non-symmetrical parts of the model.
I then created the pot, duplicated the petals and uv mapped my models.
Once in substance, it didn’t take me very long to complete my characters as I had a very clear idea of how I wanted them to look. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was the texture of the gnome. I originally added a ground gravel layer to his height and roughness channels, making him look like an older gnome. However, I wasn’t happy with how matte he looked, and I wasn’t able to turn down the opacity on the layer. After adding a little more dirt to some areas, I was happy with his texture and felt they were ready for exporting to sketchfab.
