So now that I knew what my Mothman’s personality was and roughly what he would look like I started to think about staging and adding a bit more exaggeration and stylisation.
This started with thinking about my Mothman’s prop, I didn’t want it to be too boring and keep everything in size with my character. To fix this I thought of making the props around my Mothman oversized to lean into this ‘bug’ idea further.
With my new idea I got to sketching out some positions for him and staging. He changed from this lanky grotesque bug to a more child-friendly rounded one that would fit more in line with the movie series. I had got to thinking about what final pose I had wanted him in before I started with making some turnarounds, here you can see he’s more rounded in the stomach and square in the shoulders with his droopy wings that act as a sort of cloak. This style of body is brought by combining that of the Human Fly and the ‘Dad Bod’ of Drac from Hotel Transylvania: Transformania, to combine the bug and the older man idea. With that as well I have decided to position him with his lower set of arms clasped behind his back (an idea that came to me as I was walking home and seeing an older man hold himself this way), and his front two holding this oversized pen.
I went and took these designs and started to plan out my turnarounds. I took the shape of Drac’s body and manipulated it to fit my character while looking closely at the Human’s fly proportions ( since I was struggling to align these myself). I decided that the arms when straight should be long enough to touch the knees (the bottom set should be near the ankles), the mouth area would just be a bump shape on the main face since I don’t have a nose to sculpt and will place a bushy moustache on top of this. I gave his thighs a bit of thickness to match references of moths I have been collecting. I also started to draw out simple shapes to help me with my breakdown of the character in Blender.
I then took these and made cleaner turnarounds that I can take into Blender with me to sculpt on as a reference, I made a version with and without wings as I had an idea to do them separately to make it less complicated for me as I sculpt.
Then I went back and did some more sketches of my final design into possible poses or emotions, I decided I wanted to have this hunched look to add to his age and so the end body result will have this bean type shape. The eyes will bulge out slightly, and he will have a strong brow bone like the other male characters in the movie series, some thick emotive eyebrows will be placed on top and his antennae will lean back over almost like a comb-over. I really like this design now instead of my first version of the Mothman, it looks a lot better for stylisation reasons and the style we have to try and replicate.
I had went and looked at some more sculpt tutorials to learn different approaches to block out my character shape in the best way. I wanted to look at a couple before I started on a practice sculpt of my Mothman because I have found this assignment quite difficult to wrap my head around so far.
Sculpting
It was time to practice sculpting again, I set aside a lot of time because I work somewhat slow in this medium. I brought in my turnarounds and began to block out my character over the top of these, setting a front view and a side view so I could use the orthographic view as a quick comparison. I found out that these weren’t the best turnarounds as I actually went and adjusted the shape more in sculpting and instead used it as a rough guide. You can see here that it wasn’t exactly lining up so I might go back and redraw them for when I start another sculpt of the same character, thinking about they symmetry of the base body shapes. Here the process was simple, I made the head and stomach from a subdivided sphere, and the chest from a square and I took time editing these closer to the base I wanted before joining and sculpting. I did start with this first for sculpting before going back and adding other elements of the body.
When it came to my neck fluff, I used a mask, inverted it and extracted the mask area to create a separate object (meaning I wouldn’t disturb the rest of my sculpt), the first time I did this I actually made the mask too small so I had to redo it but add more of the area I wanted), then I simply built of the volume I wanted with my clay strips brush before going back in with the techniques I had learnt in the above videos to try make fur. This was achieved with using ‘V’ patterns with a small clay strip size and also using the snake hook to grab up some fur chunks, as well as turning off my mirror modifier to get some asymmetric fur patterns. After this I went back and built up my face shapes, cheeks, eye sockets, moustache, etc.
Then I went and blocked out the rest of my body, the arms, thighs, legs and shoes. Here you can see that I extruded the pants inward to try create the idea of pants if u saw the model from below.
I did have some trouble with making the shoes. For some reason when sculpting this I didn’t bring in a reference from these, so even after I fixed the issue of my primitive being too small (I had to mask the toe of the shoe and remove it and snake hooked a new point out that had more voxels), It doesn’t look like the best shoe, but I now know for next time to make sure to use all the references I can.
Once my legs were done I went back and tackled my arms, mainly my hands. I’m still struggling with making hands unfortunately, this time I had to tried to use cylinders and re-meshed, they didn’t fuse like last time but they were unable to work on top of. Then I went and masked all my finger locations, inverted and moved and this seemed to work but I did have to go back and do this one by one. They still aren’t the best so I will hunt for a better approach to make these for my next practice sculpt
Then I made a quick stage and added some bronze-like material to my sculpt. I learned a lot from making this as a practice, the main issue I can tell was that I kept wanting to add details to areas and then when it came to remeshing these would disappear and I would get frustrated, but now I know to reminded myself block it out, add details later, then refine these. This is looking a lot better than I expected it to, I am a bit proud of myself as I haven’t been doing the best with 3D mediums. I will go back and try this build again soon to refine it further and then maybe see about adding the wing coat once I pose him how I want.
I also made a quick turnaround with this, I couldn’t get the follow path to work alongside the track to modifier that I was using to focus on the model (via an empty I place inside it), so it is a bit shaky with the turnaround but this is something I can troubleshoot at another time as well. Also to note here is that I am using the Tri-Lighting add-on to give me the nice three point lighting that I recently discovered.