I was nervous to sculpt the character as I had never sculpted a human character before and had done little sculpting prior to this year. Originally, Caity was the one who was going to sculpt her, with a little input from me as the rigger and animator. However, I knew it was something I wanted to try and an area where I wanted to expand my skillset.

I first imported blender’s stylised female base mesh into Maya to alter its proportions to fit Caity’s design of Charli. At this point, I decided that since I had a little experience in blender, I wanted to learn Zbrush while I had the opportunity as I had previously found it very confusing.

 

Once in Zbrush, I used Anatomy for 3D Artists as well as online images as references to understand where muscles and fat would sit on a feminine build, and how planes can add structure to different parts of the face and body. Through feedback, I was advised to move the nose and mouth forward as once translated into 3D, the face became very flat, making it difficult to add volume to the cheeks which, otherwise, made the model look sickly. Henry also helped by sharing a 3D skull model as my model was lacking in contours a cheekbone would cause.

I also took the opportunity to learn Zbrush iPad. I continued to use Zbrush on my laptop much more due to the larger brush selection, however, I found that Zbrush iPad was good for more basic sculpting.

To create the hair, I downloaded two IMM hair brushes. Henry also shared a set of IMM hair brushes with me, showed me how to create a custom brush and how to use Nanomesh for hair. I decided that sculpting the hair using the selection of IMM hair brushes I now had would work best with the style of our character.

Feedback from Caity and new ref i chose to help with shape:

 

IMM hair brushes:

 

Due to the bottom layer of Charli’s hair being seen, I was finding it difficult to build volume in the right way. I followed a tutorial which included a character with similar hair length to ours. This character had hair that was much smoother and tidier than Charli, so I altered it a little and added another later of hair at the neck to give more of an illusion that the hair was unkept, rather than pinned up.

Throughout modelling Charli, I followed Rheanna’s guest lecture videos. To create clothes, I chose to follow Rheanna’s demonstration of duplicating the body, masking out and creating Polygroups where I wanted to clothes to be, hiding and deleting the other areas, and using the edge loops tool to create panel loops. This allowed me to delete the inner layer of the clothes easily which otherwise could have caused problems when rigging and animating. To model the shoes, however, I went back to Maya.

I attempted using ncloth in Maya once I had a basic shape for the baggy crop top, which I was hoping would give me a good base to bring into Zbrush and sculpt from.

After my first attempt, i found that subdividing the mesh caused too much stretch and the inner layer was causing issues. After making changes, I decided it would be more beneficial to use the results as a reference rather than importing into Zbrush.

Following Rheanna’s advice to make folds in the socks, trousers and top, I used sharp S/Z lines using the standard and damstandard bushes and moving between subdivisions as to not lose shape. I also created my own stitching alpha for the seams of the trousers.

For the mouth bag, I had to learn how to use the zmodeler tool, which allowed me to extrude edges around the mouth and add creases at the opening of the lips. I found the zmodeler tool a little difficult to use to create the teeth and gums, so I went back to Maya to create those.

When I was happy, I sent the model to Alec for feedback. He advised that even though our concept had hands on the larger side, the hands might be a little large in proportion to Charli’s head, and to run this past Caity in case we wanted to change them a little.

Finished Model:

Alec also sent me a link to two YouTube tutorials on polygroupit which is used to retopologise meshes using zremesher by painting lines and creating groups in Zbrush. Both, however, stated at the very beginning that the Zbrush plugin was not ideal for characters that would later be animated. I decided that in the long run, it would be more beneficial to completely retop Charli in Maya. I followed various YouTube tutorials and Anatomy for 3D Artists to learn how to create hinges and create loops around areas such as eyes and the mouth that would require more movement.

At this point, I was not sure if the T-shirt would be rigged with joints or simulated later on in maya or blender when animating. Regardless, due to the bagginess of the T-shirt, I gave the T-shirt an inner layer so there would be a noticeable thickness. This layer would also help with the appearance and movement of the T-shirt later on if it were to be simulated.

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