Category: 3D Digital Literacy

I made a little more progress with Gus’ sculpt, getting his trousers and shoes shaped out! I’m pleased with the progress, I think that his little legs look cute – I had wanted his boots to come up a little higher, I might get some advice on how I can make his boots rise up a little more. Probably with a mask?

I also want to add his pocket to his hoodie, I’ll likely create it out of a cylinder and move it up to look a little like a pouch on his hoodie. I’m hoping  it’ll stop his torso from looking so flat, without it making him look too chubby. I want the character itself to remain quite slim and boy-ish, but his clothing to give the illusion of being too big for him!

I decided to work on finishing up Gus’ hoodie, and I first modelled a lace in Maya to use for the draw string of his hood:

I then imported it to Blendr and sculpted the arm cuffs of Gus’ hoodie:

I think I work on his boots and his trousers next!

In 3D literacy class today we were told to work on blocking or begin sculpting our characters. Henry said that my blocked up model looked good, and that I could begin sculpting; the only changes that he suggested were to move the fingers and legs further away from each other to lower the chances of them merging. He also suggested that I make the palm of the hands separate from the arms. He then showed me a great way of getting started on my boy’s hoodie, by combining the main body and the arms and sculpting it to be the garment, and then masking the outside of the head, extracting the mask and then increasing its thickness to create the hood.

I then went in to work more on the hood and I knew that I didn’t really like the fully smoothed out appearance of the screenshots shown above – I wanted something a little more textured. Whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be seen, but I love how this is turning out right now:

I want to work on some little cuffs for his hoodie tomorrow and I think that’ll be me satisfied with the hoodie at the moment! I just hope that he’s OK, and that my preferences aren’t gonna be something that the lecturers don’t want to see.

I wanted to try some of the tutorials that Mike put up this week on how to sculpt. I started with a simple rock sculpt, following instruction:

I actually quite like how this turned out, and getting to know other tools within Blender was a lot of fun! I then moved on to the head sculpt:

Honestly, this turned out kinda creepy looking, but it was OK. I really wish I was a bit more rough with it, overly smooth meshes just don’t do it for me.

Finally, I had an attempt at blocking out a rough character – I haven’t sculpted this, but I would like to try at some stage:

This character isn’t mine – I used this reference sheet to get some practice with sculpting. Doing the bird alone, without a step by step guide, still feels a little out of reach for me. I may just try following Mike’s guide bit by bit, which will hopefully make modelling my own stuff a lot easier going forward.

Edit: I did actually attempt one of the tutorials on sculpting, it is also a monstrosity but it is also very funny:

During class this week we were shown how to sculpt an elephant. Mine ended up looking like a complete monstrosity, but I learned a lot from this process! It also made me lauhg a lot. IDK why, but art that makes me laugh is a success in my mind.

I visited sketch fab, and looked at a lot of ‘cute’ character concepts just for some inspiration. I knew what I wanted to do, but going through these talented people’s sculpts, textures and posing really motivates me – the more practice I get, the better I’ll become! I wonder if some day I’ll be as good as these artists:

(The Neo Geo girl is a particular favourite, to be honest.)

When I picture my final project, I picture something like this in terms of atmosphere – I want to achieve the little firefly/star effect that this artist achieved, which runs the whole way round the sculpt.

I’ve decided to name my little Axolotl Explorer ‘Gus’. I drew up a little reference sheet for him, so that I could start blocking out his body in a T-pose – I found this really helpful when I sculpted the fruit for last week’s homework, so I thought it’d be best to use this technique to start:

This is how the character looks as of the work I did today:

I’m really pleased with the model so far, hopefully it’s all symmetrical and good to work with going forward! I am going to show it to Henry in my next 3D Literacy class.