Since the assignment has its most marks weighed in the model section, I thought it was important to start to practice more sculpting. I’m going to try and balance my free time with sculpting practice and drawing practice. With all new mediums it can be very frustrating to start to learn so I tried to be patient with myself when developing this new skill, since I actually find it quite fun and interesting.
So I had already watched the lecture videos and made some notes on them, but I knew I would need to see a lot of different sculpts to start to learn different approaches. So I took to YouTube to watch various speed sculpts and tutorials, taking in any words of wisdom or thought processes as they form their character. I found this helped a bit to just simply watch the process and make mental notes to try for myself.
Tutorials/Speed Sculpts
Personal Sculpts
This was my first attempt at a human head sculpt, I used references of an actor showing different shadows and angles to try see the volumes of her face and I put these into PureRef to have them on the same screen as I sculpted. This went through many ugly stages before it got to the point below, and I’m still not entirely happy with it but at least it looks like a human and for that I am a bit proud. I struggle a lot with anatomy and trying to visualise things in 3D but I can tell that the more I do this the better I will get, I just have to keep at it and push through.
Here I decided to try and make Drac from Hotel Transylvania, since this is the same style that I will be making my character sculpt in. I tried to get the Boolean modifier to work to cut out the mouth shape but unfortunately it wasn’t working for my model due to a possible polygon overlap in the sculpt (found from searching online for a troubleshooting Blender forum). It was actually easier for me to sculpt this with my reference in Blender, and so it made me think that if I have my character turnarounds before trying to make my model I could have them up and sculpt always checking to see if it fits in my guideline shapes. I also learnt from Mike that it is helpful if you know what shapes you want on the face, say the pointy nose you can just bring in a triangle shape and join it to the head and sculpt over it.
I decided to do a non human sculpt for a practice, and for this I decided to do Pochita from chainsaw man. This was a much faster sculpt that I did so it isn’t 100% accurate but I did find myself really enjoying the process. To start I blocked out my whole character with cubes I subdivided and sized correctly, I then hard surface sculpted the handles on the body using extrusions and edge loops in a similar way to the pull kart handle from a couple weeks ago. The tail and chainsaw head I made from primitives I extruded out and bevelled afterwards.
I then went ahead and joined together the main body shapes and remeshed (I did this at a 0.05 voxel size as the connections between my objects were less artifacting this way). I then turned on dyntopo and adjusted the overall sculpt, blending the joints together and starting to carve out the paws and joints.
I continued refining these shapes with my crease tool and then decided to apply some quick materials to help me visualise the progress with the correct colours. After this I decided to add the blades on the chainsaw, I started by painting over the area I wanted to affect with my mask brush and inverted this, then using the snake hook tool I pulled out the blades one by one until it was recognisably a chainsaw.
I did one last pass adding details and carving out shapes and then I was done. I actually really enjoy sculpting and can see myself going through and attempting to sculpt some of my favourite characters as well as some of my own.
