Blocking out my character
This week I started working in Blender. I imported my concept arts and then started blocking out my character, using my concept art as a reference.
Since I was only blocking out my character, I wasn’t too worried about getting every shape perfect, as I could always go back and increase the geometry which would give me more faces to sculpt with to try and achieve a more accurate sculpt.
As you can see here, I blocked out a very rough version of my character using metaballs. We were told to install a plugin for Blender which would allow us to achieve symmetry when using the metaballs but unfortunately I could not get the plugin to work. It was hard making the ears symmetrical without this plugin, but I think I did a fairly accurate job. The body was also made out of metaballs while the legs and neck were made of cylinders and a torus shape.
I then started to smooth out the different meshes so that I could begin to sculpt out my character. I mainly used the grab and elastic deform tools to try and get the correct shape for the ears. I ended up giving my character more rounded ears instead of the pointed ones in my original concept art, as I remember being told that rounded shapes give a friendlier appearance which is better suited to the cute theme of this assignment. For the fur I used the inflate tool to extend out certain parts of the head. I then used the grab and elastic deform tool to try and sculpt the fur to match the shapes in my concept art. I also used the snake hook tool which was very helpful to sculpt out the smaller shapes. I would then increase the resolution and repeat the same sculpting process until I was happy with the shape of the head.
Again this was hard to do due to the head not being perfectly symmetrical, and I struggled to get the fur at the sides of the head to look similar but I’m happy with the end result.
Next I started to work on the tail. For the tail I simply just used metaballs and used my concept art as a reference to get the right curves. I then adjusted the positioning of the metaballs so that the tail was attached to the cat.
I then created the arms using metaballs, as it meant I could adjust the positioning of the metaballs to match the pose in my concept art.
Overall I am very happy with my progress this week and I will continue to sculpt my model and hopefully finish it next week.