3D Digital Literacy

As an homage to Pictoplasma’s competition last year, we were required to model/sculpt, texture, and present via Sketchfab, a Cute Character of your choice, without exceeding 40000 Polygons. I was quite late starting on this project which I’m pretty annoyed about because it was actually pretty fun. To start I collected a bunch of research on characters I thought were cute, that I wanted to recreate. I was interested in something a little unconventional from the beginning and was leaning a lot into fantasy. I first thought I wanted to do some sort of forest spirit, similar to Totoro.

 

You can see some notes I took here, on what style/genre I wanted to emulate as well as what type of sculpt I wanted. I thought it would be fun to do something quite fleshy and fat and didn’t think other people would do something similar to this. I also wrote what made these things cute, coming up with; chubbiness, silly faces, large, round shapes, non threatening etc.

You can also check my Sketchfab Collection to see my 3D research/references.

 

 

 

 

This was what I came up with, as you can see this character has all of those things. I was pretty ambitious, hoping to do a full forest scene with god rays, foliage and a smaller friend character, similar to Totoro and his friends. It wasn’t really that useful as a reference. In my meeting with Michael, I found out you shouldn’t sculpt the character in a pose, and he suggested I should get rid of the scene and just have the character by himself. He showed me some basic sculpting techniques and anything he thought would be useful for me, which I’ll talk about more once I get to that stage of the sculpt.

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Sculpting

 

 

 

 

 

The first thing all these videos, as well as Michael, covered was making the base mesh (basic shape before details). Henry showed us a technique using metaballs whereas Michael wasn’t a fan of metaballs and showed how he makes them just using basic shapes. I found a method I liked online, in the last video shown here.

 

 

 

 

 

I used a new feature, the lasso trim tool. The main purpose is to cut geometry away, however you can also use it to create geometry, this let me draw shapes from my view, generating shapes of different depths with the thickness of my brush radius. all these shapes are added within the same object (in the tool settings I changed the trim mode to join). I enabled X symmetry, and started drawing the shapes of the major forms of the body. It’s better to sculpt in symmetry to save time.

 

 

 

 

 

After remeshing, and using the draw and smooth brushes I ended up with something like the first picture, I wasn’t happy with these proportions at all so I went into edit mode, and scaled them to better fit what I imagined. I then used the smooth brush to fix the mesh a little. The third picture is what I ended up with, which felt a lot better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My character was looking pretty blobby, they are a little blobby by design but that could sound like an excuse for lazy sculpting, so I added in some muscle groups, based on human anatomy. Obviously the character wont have all these muscles, they aren’t even human and muscles aren’t cute anyway, but I wanted to build up a better sense of proportions and anatomy so the character wouldn’t be so undefined. I built up the muscles then added layers of fat/made some smaller, mostly using the draw and smooth brushes but I did use the inflate brush while building the muscles.

 

I collected a bunch of unconventionally cute characters and looked at them. I liked the mouths from Lickitung and Toothless, I wanted an open mouth/tongue hanging out to add to the silliness of the character so they were good references. I also found a list on CartoonBrew, which worked as a good checklist.

 

 

I also got some feedback from my group in the other project, and Alisa mentioned how a bald head is kind of creepy to her which I didn’t think of, so I thought about some ways to approach this. I thought about adding the mushroom aspect from the smaller character I had in the concept, but mushroom men are kind of overdone, so I tried this sort of ponytail look, with leaves extruding the top of the head.

 

 

 

 

 

I added the mouth, which I thought would be fun to have open and smiling, using a technique Michael showed me. I first used the draw brush and held ctrl to eat away at the mesh, creating a cavity. Then I used the mask tool, masking the mouth area and inverting the selection, this let me use the grab tool to pull out a sort of jaw, since it didn’t affect the masked area. I also added the eyes, spaced low on the head and far apart. To do this I created small holes where they would go, then added a polygon mesh sphere. I added a mirror modifier to this, mirroring it on my sculpt so it stayed symmetrical. I kept this as a separate object.

 

 

 

 

 

I really liked how this worked with the mask tool, so I did it in some other areas to add details/adjust proportions. I liked the effect it give for creating areas of overlapping skin, like between the legs and the belly. I then went in after with the crease tool and inflate tool to exaggerate this better, then smoothed it.

 

Again I added some more detail so my the sculpt wasn’t so blobby and undefined, working on the chest/shoulder and the shoulder/back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I then added fingers. To do this I used the snake hook tool, which pulls vertices along with the movement of the brush, letting me pull the fingers out of the hand. This was the first real time I had to Dynotopo, since I was pulling something out of the base mesh instead of just sculpting on it. I used a bunch of brushes and tools to make the fingers. I tried building up volume between the fingers using clay strips, but didn’t like this brush at all. since it required so much smoothing. I mostly used the crease and inflate tools, as well as the pose tool. I also found the blob brush useful to create the pads of the palm and fingertips.

 

 

 

 

 

I created the toes using the same methods as above, but ended up mostly smoothing them away to be almost solid, and just to resemble the shapes of toes, detailed toes made him seem a lot creepier. At this point I had to start working on the hair, so I went onto Sketchfab to look at how this effect can be achieved and different styles of leaves I could go for.

 

 

 

 

 

The first pic was just me playing around with the snake hook tool, testing out some ideas and getting a better grasp of how it worked. I sculpted where the ‘hair’ would come out kind of based on the top of an onion. I didn’t really use the dynotopo throughout this project, I tried to avoid it because it would be a little unpredictable sometimes, I mostly used remesh when I needed more detail. I used the flatten brush for the first time, flattening the inside of the hole that the hair would come out of. To add those bumps and ridges I used the draw and crease tool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wasn’t sure on how to approach the hair at first, I tried to have thicker and stiff leaves, then floppy leaves and I ended up going for something kind of in-between, I played a lot more into the ponytail and added a bobble and really liked how it came out. I didn’t really document the specifics because it was  a lot of experimenting, but I mostly used the snake hook tool, along with the crease and blob tools. I didnt need to remesh or dynotopo because I used a seperate object (sphere) to start the sculpt. and duplicated this a few times.

 

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Retopology

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s not much to say about the retopology process, I was just very slowly drawing quads. I didn’t really follow what we learned with Henry doing the face retopo, because my character’s mouth was open and they didn’t have a nose or ears, also their head was so circular. I didn’t have a lot of the guidelines and markers I had before, so I kind of just winged it. I did try and separate the edge flow up a bit since some areas had to be a lot higher poly than others. I then worked on connecting these areas with different junctions to split up the high and low poly areas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Honestly looking back I wish I could redo the retopology with what I know now, I could’ve separated the limbs and head a lot better. I needed to add a lot of divisions along the toes, and this led the whole way around the head and body, which was nice and clean but it resulted in a lot of extra polys in the torso and face. It did kind of work out since the top of the head needed a lot more faces for the ridge, and this led directly to the toes, but I definitely could’ve laid this out better.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s an example of a junction point at the fingers, the hands required a lot more detail than the arms so I used junctions on the fingers based on what Henry showed us with the nose and forehead.

 

 

 

 

 

This was the finished retopology of the body, while it came out super clean and all the edges flowed nice, a lot of the body didn’t need so many faces, I could directed the edge flow better and used more junctions from high to low poly. It was significantly better than the sculp, I just wish I had a little more time to work out a better topology. I managed to save some time because I realised you could turn on soft selection to smooth the retopology in large areas.

 

 

 

 

 

The tongue was fairly simple. and I cut out the back which connected to the bottom of the mouth to decrease the faces some more. The hard part was the hair.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see I was struggling with the hair, sadly a lot of people on Sketchfab used different objects phasing through each other which I wanted to avoid, I though the octopus would be a good example but it was made up of triangles. It seemed like I had to go for a more solid object, rather than separate extruding objects though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can see in the first pic that I made a shape to base it on, I smoothed a cube a couple times and scaled it/bent it to the shape I wanted. This was also kind of my back up plan if I failed with the quad draw, to make multiple of these objects and match the shape of the hair with them. It ended up just being used as reference for me to work from though. I started to approach it like a hand with fingers coming out which helped me visualise it a bit better. There was so many awkward camera angles and positions while working on this, and the quad draw wouldn’t add quads into spaces sometimes just because it was so awkward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was remined of Medusa working on it so I looked on Sketchfab for some Medusa models to see how they done it, one of them kind of helped. It was hard to transition from the leaves connecting to becoming separate, and every time I smoothed the quads it would get confused at these points and phase through each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eventually I managed to get it done, I would have to go out of quad draw a lot and manually connect vertices because the angle was too awkward for quad draw to figure out, which was a very slow solution to this problem. After I had to do some clean up because there was a couple triangles and n-gons, but this was easy enough. The rest of the retopology was simple.

 

 

 

 

 

I used a lot of connected junctions to go from very little quads to a lot on this leaf, which was really cool but it made me realise how much polys I could’ve decreased the main body retopology by, making it a lot more efficient. I think I did a pretty good job on the retopology though, it came out pretty clean and while a little on the higher end it was still nowhere near the 40,000 polygon count. Here’s a side by side with wireframe turned on to compare.

 

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UV and Texturing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never UV mapped a humanoid character before, and it was kind of hard since there were no clothes that could hide the seams. I found a bunch of images online and a pretty in depth guide on how to approach this though. I cut around the neck, the tongue, the arms and the legs, the base of feet and the hands to separate them all into their own UVs. I had cuts hidden through most of these, like the back of the head, armpits and the undercarriage.

 

 

 

 

 

The leaves and bobble were pretty basic. The hair was a little more complex, I basically UV projected this as a bunch of cylinders, separating each leaf into its own UV. I was going to stack them into symmetrical pairs but then realised it would be good to have some variations in the texture to break up the symmetrical mesh.

 

 

 

 

 

I baked my mesh maps from the high poly sculpt, I never realised this was how it was done but its a pretty cool process. They came out really well but I did run into a few issues.

 

 

 

 

 

I’m not surprised there were some issues with the hair, I knew the way it connected in retopology was slightly different to the sculpt, but it was how the quad draw tool worked. I left this for now and would figure out how to fix it later. I did try baking the hair from the low poly mesh instead but this lost a lot of detail I wanted to keep, so I’d come back to it.

 

 

 

 

 

I looked online at some rendering and textures that I liked, as well as some real life materials. I was hoping to base the character on a spring onion, the colour scheme I had in mind reminded me of one and it definitely fit the character. I liked how the ‘skin’ and saturation looked on the mushroom character as well as the dirt details on the first creature.

 

 

I’ve spoke about this method I use before in the previous 3D Digital Literacy Assignment, as well as in my animated Narrative Assignment. I used this throughout the different materials in different ways. I would basically add a fill layer with a black mask, then another fill layer on this which would have some sort of procedural or generator paired to it, I liked using the Cells and BnW Spots for this. I add a filter called blur slope to this, which gives it a painted/splotchy look, then I’d add other filters to achieve the desired effect, such as blur directional or sharpen. In this case it was just to add some colour variation so I only decreased the opacity. The tongue had little roughness so it would look wetter, but some areas had patches of roughness for variation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the tongue I came back to fix this issue, I identified it was the normal map that was causing this so I figured I could take this into photoshop to fix, which worked pretty well. I painted over these glitchy areas with the surrounding colours to fix it, I wasn’t completely sure what I was doing and there was a lot of back and forth but I got it to a point I was okay with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was just me identifying the areas with the issues in Substance, so I knew where to fix in Photoshop. You can see in the first picture I imported version 5 of the normal map, which I hoped was the last but there was a few more afterwards.

 

Before moving on to the biggest and most obvious part of the model, I looked over some stuff we covered in class, as well as a playlist that was linked. While my character doesn’t have fleshy skin like this, there was some stuff covered that helped, like the different tones in the face and the affect blending modes had.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I played around with adding detail through height but this really took away from any cute aspect the character had. Hyper realistic Pokemon and cartoon characters are normally pretty scary and grotesque, so I stuck to keeping the detail simple. I added some colour variation with the technique mentioned before, as well as dirt splotches on the lower half and the hands of the creature, like the reference from before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here I add further variation and discoloration. I used ambient occlusion as a generator to add yellow pigments. I noticed an issue with the top of the head and it wasn’t caused by the normal maps this time, but the ambient occlusion maps, so I took them into photoshop like before and fixed this. I added green at the top, to compliment the transition to the hair.

 

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Final Touches – Posing and Accessories

 

 

 

 

 

I made a quick rig based on the human rig in Maya, removing some fingers and joints to fir the character. Next I painted the skin weights to control the influence each joint had. Honestly I was running low on time at this point, I had some experience in rigging our alien character in this last assignment which came out really well, but this rig wasn’t the best, if a join moved to much it would cause issues like seen above, this is easily fixed but just time consuming. I didn’t have a lot of time so the pose can’t be anything crazy.

 

 

 

 

 

I quickly made a log for the background, a big part of the concept art as the character is using it to lay on. I was told to only keep the character and the log and to scrap the whole scene idea I had, since the focal point is the character. Luckily, I had a wood beam smart material created, which can be seen in the previous (windmill) project. So I added this on top of my base colour, as well as a fill layer adding green highlights along the curvature.

 

 

 

 

 

I tested  few renders and liked how it looked, and had this pose in mind, like a giant toddler chasing excitedly after something. It is quite similar to the T-pose from before, with some changes, this was kind of my workaround the rig issues due to the time I had left. I had to quickly give him something to chase after, and thought a firefly/bug would be quite cute and add some of the magical/whimsical vibes I wanted to create from the concept art

 

 

 

 

 

Super simple stuff, watched a quick video on emissive materials again and added a very small but bright bug to the scene. This was definitely an after thought but I think it really added to the scene and was a good workaround for the rig limitations. I also found it very cute, reminiscent of childhood innocence when a toddler would chasing after and trying to play with something interesting or new.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did a quick test in Maya then exported my fbx to Sketchfab. I had to get rid of some of the texture maps like the height, as it would just cause issues like seen on the tongue in picture 5. I don’t think this was a big issue since my model wasn’t exactly low poly, and like I mentioned before, the height details kind of took away from the cuteness of the character anyway. The last photo is roughly what I ended up with. I might reposition things or add something in the back, it feels a bit empty. Also when the character’s in the pose it makes parts of the mesh look a little boxier or deformed which I’m not that happy with as the sculpt was very round and smooth, but I think the pose adds to the character so I’ll stick with it.

 

Reflection

I’m happy with how it turned out, especially since it was done in such a short time frame when compared to my other projects. The character is definitely cute, albeit a little unconventional, cute like and old man or an ugly dog. I like the expression and the posing, while not perfect, works for the context he’s in. I really think the accessories add to it a lot, a log by itself not so much but that shows it’s a forest, and excitedly chasing the fireflies like that, wide eyed, mouth open, is definitely cute. I’d love to approach this all again though, I’m not sure how I’d work around the issues with the hair yet, but I think I could definitely improve on the sculpt and the retopology and with a little more time I could build a very cool scene and rig for this guy. I’m super happy with my modelling progress so far though, I could definitely see this guy and the windmill in a video game or something, definitely not AAA but maybe a mobile game if I’m lucky. I’ve had a lot of fun in this semester and considering the time frame and context, I think I did pretty well in this project.

 

https://sketchfab.com/matthewshannon