During my one to one tutorial with Alec, I explained I was so busy working on the other assignment that I didn’t have time to work on this assignment for the past few weeks and he was very understanding about it which is a relief. When I sent him my Blender file, he said to not use dyntopo but to use the multiresolution option in the spanner icon to increase the resolution of the model rather than using detailed flood fill. Thing is if you want to export the model so it has this resolution you need to not be in the sculpting tab but be in the layout tab instead so the option to export that becomes available. Then retopologise in Maya by using the far right magnet tool and using the quad draw tool in the modelling toolkit and UV map the polygons before exporting the polygons and texturing them.
After Alec’s feedback from the one to one tutorial, and once my other group animation assignment was finished and submitted for the deadline, I got back to work on the cute character assignment after not touching it for a few weeks. The first thing I did was arranging the metaballs so that all of the body parts are now connected including the tail, body with legs, head with face tufts and finally the ears. The arrangement of metaballs is shown below:
With the metaballs arranged in the correct places, I went into object mode and turned the metaballs into a mesh using object – convert to – mesh and started making adjustments to the model including using the scrape tool Michael mentioned last week to flatten the bottom of the paws a bit, smoothing some areas of the body and inflating other areas to better reflect the shapes I’m aiming for and added more subdivisions to the model by adding a multiresolution modifier. Since I still wasn’t comfortable with Blender I watched a couple sculpting tutorials to get a better idea of the software. The tutorial videos are shown below:
Even with the videos, I was still struggling with sculpting as it’s quite a hard thing for me to pick up as it’s hard to tell which areas I’m supposed to adjust and what areas will be affected by my adjustments such as the smoothing until I brush the model and see the result myself. I much prefer modelling in Maya as that was fairly easy to grasp and the models in Maya turned out better than my model in Blender. That being said, I still think the model turned out fairly decent with my adjustments overall. The adjusted model is shown below:
With the adjusted model finished, I exported it and opened it in Maya where I retopologised the cute cat using the quad draw tool. I started by adding the polygons so that they would cover a circular area, such as the eyes, muzzle, face tufts, ears, shoulders, thighs and base of the tail, before increasing the size of them to cover a greater area and using the multicut tool to split the big faces into multiple rows of smaller faces by adding edge loops which I found was much easier than trying to manually add the polygons one at a time and meticulously moving them to have the edge loops look organised and neat. The cute cat with these polygons is shown below:
It’s looking well so far. The edge flow is coming along nicely and looks really cohesive. Although the polygons don’t quite match up with the sculpt in some areas such as the face tufts and ears, I believe this works to the model’s benefit as the ears look a lot sharper and the face tufts look a lot neater which I was struggling to do in Blender so I’m quite pleased with this development and with how the retopology is looking so far which is why I kept them the way they are instead of fixing them to fully match up with the sculpt.
I then added more polygons along the belly so that the bottom of the muzzle and the base of the tail are perfectly connected in the middle which I can then use to connect to the other body parts I previously connected polygons to. I repeated this method for the top of the muzzle and the back before creating new rows of polygons along the row of polygons connecting the top and bottom of the model. An example of this is shown below:
Doing this allows me to keep the edge flow consistent on either side of the model by having each row of polygons look like they belong together. As you can see the rows of polygons connecting the front and back legs together follow the edge flow of the previous rows of polygons in the front and back legs so that the model looks more cohesive as a result. I then continued until all of the model is covered in polygons with the finished retopology being shown below:
I think it turned out really well. It was quite difficult trying to have most of the edge loops flow correctly because of how relatively complex the full body model was to retopologise and there were multiple instances where triangles were unavoidable as a result, but on the whole I’m quite proud of the body considering how inexperienced I am with retopology.
With the cute cat retopologised, it was time to make adjustments to the eye faces and nose faces to have them extruded inwards/outwards where necessary. For the eyes, this is to make room for the actual eyeballs and for the nose this is to have the nose stick out from the muzzle. I also added an edge loop above and below where the mouth should be and moved the middle edge loop inwards to create an indent in the muzzle for the mouth. For the nose, I extracted the faces as a separate object to make it easier to texture in Substance Painter since it will be textured differently to the rest of the body. I then added two spheres to act as eyeballs and placed them in the spaces I created for the eyes. These adjustments are shown below:
Lastly, for the markings of the cat I thought it would be interesting to make the markings a bit more detailed compared to the reference image so when UV mapping I selected the relevant faces and cut them and moved the remaining parts of the body on a separate UV map to make it easier to texture the markings separately in Substance Painter. For the remaining parts of the body, I selected the edge loops of the top of the legs, base of the tail, base of the face tufts and base of the other ear so that the UVs of the body wouldn’t look too stretched.
I then assigned lambert materials to the objects so I could texture them in Substance Painter. My process for texturing them is shown below:
Skin_Mat – I had the brush set to colour and painted the skin the white from the concept art reference. For the markings, I painted them the orange from the concept art reference. For the fur, I used the Artistic Hairy Paint brush at 50 percent opacity with pen pressure turned on. I had the brush set to height and had it set to 1 to make the fur go outwards and painted the entire body so all of the body looks like it has a furry texture.
Eyeball_Mat – I had the brush set to colour and painted the eyes the light green from the concept art reference. For the pupils, I painted them black and made them big like the Puss in Boots big pupils shown below:
Nose_Mat – I had the brush set to colour and had the roughness set to 0.5 so that it would look like it has a different texture compared to the skin and eyeballs. I painted the nose the pink from the concept art reference.
The texture maps for the materials is shown below:
With the cute cat finished, I went to work on the broken plate to go alongside it. I imported the broken plate reference into Maya and created a polygon plane for each of the broken pieces. I then adjusted the vertices of the planes to fit the shape of the broken pieces before extruding and moving the pieces upwards to turn the 2D planes into 3D objects. To give the broken plate pieces some extra depth, I selected the faces of the outer rim, used soft select, and moved them upwards so the plate pieces would resemble a real life plate more as the outer rim isn’t level with the rest of the plate in real life and is instead a bit above it as plates aren’t completely flat. The plate pieces and the reference are shown below:
I think the plate pieces are looking quite well. They resemble the original reference quite well and will complement the cute cat very nicely when they will be uploaded together to Sketchfab with the textures added to everything.
I started UV mapping the plate pieces to texture in Substance Painter and assigned a lambert material to them. My process for texturing the plate pieces is shown below:
Plate_Mat – I had the brush set to colour and painted the broken plate pieces off white similar to the reference image. I also had the brush set to metal and had it set to 0.5 at 50 percent opacity so the plate pieces would have a sort of glossy sheen to them which would catch the light.
The texture maps for the material is shown below:
With the cute cat and the broken plate pieces finished, I uploaded them together to Sketchfab. The Sketchfab links are shown below:
https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/cute-cat-with-broken-plate-f639fce9c6244e628a2d085d46b76ce5
Despite my initial frustrations with sculpting at the beginning, the rest of the assignment was fairly enjoyable to do. Retopology for instance, although very very time consuming and a good bit of a challenge, was very satisfying to get right and to see the blue polygons gradually covering the cute cat sculpt made me feel a sense of accomplishment, plus it ended up fixing some of the things I was struggling to get right with the sculpt as it was hard to get the face tufts looking neat and the ears looking sharp in Blender which was a great development and made me feel a lot better about this assignment. I also believe the textures in Substance Painter came out very well as the fur on the cute cat looks soft to the touch which adds to the idea of the cute character as soft and fluffy things are often seen as being cute.
The addition of the broken plate pieces also helps to complete the scene as it shows that the cute cat accidentally broke the plate and is now trying to get out of trouble by looking cute and innocent in the hopes the owner will go easy on it. Overall I’m pleasantly surprised at how well this assignment turned out considering most of my time was spent on the group animation assignment for the other module for the past few weeks and had no real time to work on it until after that assignment was submitted, plus my general inexperience with sculpting which made me struggle a lot with the cute cat sculpt and didn’t have much time to figure things out properly. If I were to do this assignment again, I would dedicate more time to learning Blender especially sculpting so that the final model could reach its full potential and turn out even better than this version. I’m just glad I was able to turn this assignment around after the sculpting stage where things were actually starting to look up and the final model started looking better with each new stage.
Over the summer I’ll probably spend more time practicing sculpting in Blender as it relies on more hands-on knowledge to use the tools to sculpt rather than simply knowing what each tool does, and hopefully this will benefit me next year if we are required to do anything else in Blender, though if given a choice I’ll likely stick with Maya as Maya has become more of my comfort zone since I’ve gotten used to modelling and even rigging to an extent.
References Of The Week
