My previously modelled staff was, unfortunately, not fit for purpose – I hadn’t considered that whilst it looked nice in preview smoothed mode, it would look awful in normal mode! I showed the staff to Henry but it was mostly unsalvageable, and I decided to start again.
Henry suggested that I stop trying to make the staff skull realistic, as it doesn’t suit hard surface modelling. Rather, that I should take a stylised approach. Immediately, Medieval – a PS1 game – came to my mind. I used Sketchfab – a system we will be using to show off our models – to look at other stylised skulls:
Reference One, Reference Two, Reference Three, Reference Four.
Once I’d thought about the general look, I decided to rework my concept slightly. A stylised skull didn’t fit with my original colour palette, which I felt wasn’t light hearted enough to go with a ‘cuter’ skull:
I decided to go with a brighter, more saturated look for my staff as I felt it fit together better with the new approach I was taking — I also would love to be able to have little bits of moss worked into the grains of the wood and the little nooks of the staff overall. After re-working the concept, I started to work on the staff itself – again! I modelled the staff and horns basically the same way as before, taking care to keep them in their low- poly forms when manipulating them instead of smooth previewing them. For the skull, I used the reference linked as an image plane as well as my own personal reference page provided above. I modelled the general shape by tracing the side and front view of the reference and my own drawings just to get variation – I took care when modelling the eyes, nose and teeth to make mine different from the reference and closer to the skull that I designed in my own concept.
I really loved how this came out, I’m so glad that I reworked it and am very grateful for the suggestion from Henry to go for a style more suited to hard-surface modelling rather than the more organic, sculpted look of my original design. The only thing that I want to change is to add a little bone trinket on the left antler.
Once I got the go ahead from Alec confirming that my model is good for UV mapping, I bevelled and smoothed the model, trying to make sure that I kept some of the sharpness from the original low poly pass!
I added a little bone trinket to the left antler:
I attended Alec’s extra class for UV mapping on Friday, and found this incredibly helpful. He looked at my design and said that it looked cool, and that it was suitable for UV mapping! He showed me how to do some of the UV mapping and I decided to do the entire thing myself – by doing this I have gained greater knowledge and confidence in UV mapping. I did it after paying attention to his demonstration in class, without revisiting the recording Alec made, and previously I would need to follow the step-by-step guide so I’m so pleased with my progress in this – I did the entire thing myself. I am still waiting for some feedback on how I did with this, but I think it looks good:
Hopefully this is all acceptable, and I can move it forward into Substance Painter to begin texturing.
This week was another bad week in terms of my confidence; after realising my huge mistakes with my first model I felt totally embarrassed and silly. I think I need to start giving myself a break, and realising that I am completely new to modelling and therefore cannot possibly know how to do everything immediately. I’ve been reading over my blog, and I have been incredibly hard on myself – but I need to bare in mind that every failure is a lesson and I’ve learned from all of them, the amount of progress I’ve made in a few short weeks is pretty compelling. I feel, overall, really pleased with my new model and am excited to continue with applying textures.