So I wanted to have my model sculpted as soon as I could, since I knew that this and retopology would take a lot of time.
Originally I had thought that I would use my Previs model as a base, to sculpt on top of and fix, however since I made it so long ago and had refined the idea since then so I just felt that I couldn’t touch this or make edits to this.
Preparing to Sculpt
The first thing I did to set up my new file for sculpting was to create some turnarounds that I could use for sculpting. Instead of wasting time redrawing these out, I just cut pieces together from my other concepts and arranged them into turnarounds, (since I had already drawn out the typical poses that would help me sculpt out my model).
I went ahead and brought these into Blender to act as a guide for block out and general proportion checking.
Since I didn’t redraw my turnarounds I wanted to go ahead and try block these out according to my ‘turnarounds’- but I quickly found out that this wouldn’t have worked… Just looking at these stitched together drawings, they looked fine enough to me as a turnaround and in fact they were not. I used some subdivided cubes and took these into the sculpting menu to grab and deform without adding more geometry yet. When I matched these shapes to the front and side view, it seemed fine! And then I moved onto the back and found that it didn’t match up at all, there was also a slight shift in the way I had drawn the spine and difference in the arms between the front and back views. So in the end I decided to go ahead and redraw out my character into turnarounds.
Redrawn Turnarounds
Here I have my new turnarounds- While they aren’t perfectly done they are a lot better when it comes to size and proportions. I decided to leave off all the extra elements that I was planning to add separately, like the pouches, the dagger and the googles. I just wanted to focus on the main sculpt to not overwhelm myself when it came to retopo. I then set this up the same way as I did before for Blender.
Also before I started sculpting I decided to grab a couple more references and have these with me using PureRef as I sculpted.
Sculpting
CHANGE OF PLANS
On the 09/03/2023 we gave our preproduction presentation and after wards I had talked to Mike about our character designs and rigging and such. The feedback that I got from him was that Sculpting our models might take too much time, so instead we could look to Poly Model them and go back and create a normal map to add additional texturing. This was a little annoying to hear, but would probably be better in the long run.
So, I went and researched how to approach poly-modelling. After some research I have learnt that this is basically being able to skip straight to the retopology and it gives u a bit more control and consistency so I might look to approach models this way in future.
This tutorial was super in depth and touched on a lot of tips as well as big Nos when it came to working, similar to what Mike had told us about last semester. It focussed on what worked for manual rigging, how to fix spiral loops, and how to approach certain body parts. I really liked watching this but I still feel a bit anxious when thinking about starting on my own model, since I know it isn’t going to go smoothly on my first time and it is something a bit different to what we have done before.
This tutorial was fine. It didn’t really give me what I was looking for since I was wanting to take this character and be able to animate with it with some good loops and such, this tutorial seemed to lack this so it wasn’t the greatest use of my time.
Since I liked the body tutorial he did, I went back to Dikko! to learn how to use this approach for my characters face too. It also served to help remind me of the important loops for the face a reminder on poly count. I took notes of these loops and any other tips he reminded me of before starting on my model, I also decided to approach this elements separately just like he did to help not overwhelm me.
The one element I didn’t approach last year was hair, which is now an element of my current design. So, I felt pretty nervous and stressed when thinking about how to approach this stylised hair that I have seen through the vast amount of tutorials. This reminded me of how to use curves and tapering them using a curve, as well as introducing me into geometry nodes. I was happy to hear that I wouldn’t have to retopo these meshes since it was mentioned that they come out quaded, so the only thing that I see myself having a lot of ‘fun’ with is the unwrapping.
Poly Modelling Fidget
I am going to take a similar approach to Dikko!’s poly-modelling example, starting with the head, then moving onto the body, then adding on my other elements. I am going to try and follow along with what Mike suggested last time, and to simply model the clothes along with the body and then finish with the hair. The other elements like the goggles and the dagger, I will hard surface model and then just join these/parent these on after.
FACE-( approx. 6-8 hours)
I forgot how stressful I found the modelling process before I started on this again. It took me around 6-8 hours of work, a lot of it just having minor adjustments and troubleshooting. The first issue I came across was my drawing, the front face didn’t match up with the side view, so I had to go an re-draw this out before starting. I followed along pretty consistently with the tutorial from above, starting with a cube and deleting each side faces I went and shaped out the skull roughly. Then I started to add in my important loops on the face, around the mouth and the mask around the eyes, trying to match these up on the side view as well as the front. This felt really weird to do, and I was second guessing myself every step of the way think that it was going to turnout really bad, but I just kept at it and chipped away at the work for the whole day.
Then I worked to build up the rest of the face, building a loop around the top of the nose and around the mouth, and a loop for the eyes and then once I adjusted the verts around the face I went ahead and added in a sphere to be the eye.
I then worked on the eye and eyelid, adjusting the verts so that they lay on top of and around the eyeball, this took a lot of adjustment, making sure to keep the top and bottom crease symmetrical with the number of quads. And then I went over and smoothed this area.
Next I went and made up the lips and nose, these areas I found were a big pain. The mouth on my finished version of this still doesn’t look quite right, but I just tried to match this up to my drawing. The nose I just extruded some quads from the centre of the face and merged these back on.
Then I added some extra geometry around the nose so that I could shape it more accurately, this I found very hard since I don’t know too much about correct anatomy, I just tried my best to capture what looked ok and what looked like my sketch. As well as starting to fill out the chin, I went and made adjustments to the face with a variety of sculpting tools that didn’t add any more topology (smooth, grab and inflate).
Now this, this was where I had started to really work myself up. I just really wasn’t enjoying HOW this looked, and the eyes looked to buggy and a number of things that I could mention. Following along with the tutorial I added a subdivision modifier to see what my model looked like with this- and this made my model look very alien and wrong but, that was how it was apparently supposed to be before u went in and made a number of other adjustments. I just fond it really stressful and disheartening that mine wasn’t looking like his was ( he went and did a step that I skipped since it wasn’t necessary), but of course mine wasn’t going to look like his I am still learning and adapting to this form of art.
I decided after a lot of poking and prodding that it was fine at this stage. I went ahead and started building up the other elements, which unfortunately I also found myself with some issues too.
Mainly, along my mirror line I kept getting these bumps, or it would sink in with I went to smooth over the model, and everytime this happened I had to go and move the verts individually to fix it. I went ahead and filled in the rest of the skull by making grid like connects, using the same geometry that came from the face and not adding any new loops. Then I smoothed this out and inflated/grabbed as necessary to adjust the skull shape.
Then I went ahead and started to work on the ears, this would be the final part and I was so ready to be finished for the day. I just deleted the faces around the ear on my side view, and then inset these twice (not forgetting to use the smooth tool to get a nicer shape for my loops). I then just extruded these outward to my ear shape, this time using my front face to get the right shape and length. There somehow was a triangle after I extruded, I couldn’t get rid of it so I just shifted it to where it would affect the animation loops (the tip of the ear where I merged these points together). I then just added some loops and adjusted the general shape of the ear, smoothed these quads out and inflated the back of the ear.
Finished face! It is by NO means perfect, but it has all the components of a face and has the structural loops to match, I still have such a long way to go when it comes to modelling and even though it was stressful getting to this point I think I did ok.
BODY
Dikko! also made a helpful reference video of the full body topology that I can use to make sure I have the necessary loops, the bottom of the body isn’t important to proper rig up here, so I am only going to focus on creating these loops for the hips upward, since below that my model has no movement functionality I can just focus on extruding the points out and shaping the pants and feet. The base we have decided will be consistent design but different sizes, so mine will just fit the size of my character, with the inside matching our specific character’s race/class).
This modelling session was around 7-9 hours long, which was very hard to sit down and try focus but I managed to get it done. This had a lot of problems just like the head did, again since this is new and I am still getting into 3D of course there is going to be bumps and issues.
Starting off I made the waist loop, starting with a plane and mirroring it, adjusting to fit both the front and back positions. I also discovered that you can make certain reference planes visible from only specific axis, this helped to quickly look through the front and back without having to manually turn the opacity off.
Then I went and worked on creating all of the other necessary loops, the hips, shoulders, start of the arms and the shoulders as well as the centreline to the crotch area. Trying to balance out each views proportioning and keeping the idea of width.
This was a big issue I had with my model, whether I should build up these bikini line loops or not, and how this would look with my desired Baggy cargo pants look. At this moment I couldn’t figure out how to make this look right, so I just decided to scrap it, since I didn’t need functionality from the legs at all. Instead I just deleted some loops and brought these down in a gird adjusting to get this inline crease between the legs.
THen I went ahead and built up the belt, jsut by extruding out a loop and adjusting the general shape to kind of fit what I had designed. I will be honest, I am not the best at designing in the 3D space so there is some areas that look a bit Janky compared to my original design.
The next loop I established was the chest to shoulder loop, this connected to about under the breast area. This was actually established after I went and worked on the loop around the should mass. After this I went and added loops to help frame the chest area better, then just filled this in like a grid. This was actually an area that I didn’t really understand last year, I added loops just where ever I saw fit, but this helped me understand the functionality of the loops a bit better, so hopefully this time it is a bit more correct!
(checking what the Subdiv looked like on this)
The easiest part for me was definitely working on bringing out the arm loops, just extruding these out to match with the drawing and trying to work on creating these muscle masses, and extruding out for the glove cuff.
I went ahead and made the hands by squaring off the centre from before into quads. Then extruding these out downward, making the thumb and its pad by extruding out the side faces and I decided to reduce the poly count in the centre of the hand so that I could add some necessary spans that would let me extrude out the fingers. Going over with the smooth and grab sculpting brushes to fix up the shape as I saw fit. Then I just extruded out the faces to create a finger shape (using the LoopTools addon to let me quickly circle out the end of these). Finally checking it with the subdiv to see if it look right, I went back and upturned the end of the fingers to try recreate the shape, but looking back at it now it could do with some more edits.
Then I went back and tried to work on the arms a bit better, looking at the quad distribution and trying to look at the muscles.
I then adjusted the back to try achieve the idea of drawing, the back muscles and the strap in-between. I used a reference for this as well and just worked on trying to get something that looked fine.
I went and made the base plate to break up my work, at this point I had been working on the body model for like 6 hours straight and I was getting a bit stressed. Only to go ahead and work on the back again as I wasn’t liking how I did it before.
You can see I started to deviate from the drawing a bit here to what I thought fit best. Looking at this now, you can see I still have a lot of anatomy to learn still as it looks a bit messed up, also the facce still looks weird to me so I am noting to go back and fix this a bit.
I had went and asked about the topology in the Discord channel for this module and had received some feedback, and with this I decided to try and redo the legs working with the correct loops this time.
Some added benefits of this was it gave some extra fullness to the butt area, and then I just worked to try and create some ideas of volume using some reference, my group decided that we wouldn’t have sculpted textures, and look to just paint anything on afterwards.
The toes were done similarly to the hands, adjusting the base and then extruding faces out to be the toes, I smoothed these out and tried to mimic the shape of toes by rotating with the proportional edit tool and inflating, etc
Then I learnt about edge creases, used to keep the straight/sharp edges even with the subdivision. I went and applied these to some areas, I definitely need to have one last past over the body and the head (this over smoothing might be why the head looks so strange and abnormal).
LAST ADJUSTMENTS/CHANGES
So, I really wasn’t enjoying how funky my character’s face was looking, and I showed this to a couple people for some feedback of what they thought was off and the main consensus was the chin stuck out too much, and I had thought that the cheeks weren’t full enough. I went ahead and made some of these changes via proportional editing and also adding some edge creases to work these out.
Then I went ahead and added a material to see how it would feel with a closer colour to what it would be when texture and I think this helps a bit. She still isn’t perfect but she isn’t too bad for my first time.
ACCESSORIES
So before I started on the hair ( I had found this weirdly daunting for me to dive in to) I went and created my characters accessories, her earrings, nose ring and the base plate.
The earrings were easy to make, I used a Torus primitive to create the rings and then just deleted the inner faces. The bolt-like earrings I made using a cylinder with 8 sides and then adjusted to how I liked, instead of the circular earrings I had drawn.
Then the base plate, after discussing with my other group members we decided on this rounded top and a flat bottom, so I adjusted these on my plate as seen below. Then I made sure to ask what type of bottom my plate should have (with each of these being unique to our characters and what class they were), and Eoin helped me saying that it should be something like a cobble path. I looked up some references and got to creating these rocks using a plane that I extruded out, I created about 5 different shapes and then just duplicated these around and adjusted to fit the space. I went and left some space in between them because I thought the gaps between them had this nice rustic feel to it.
After working through this and filling the bottom of the base, trying to achieve different heights and points as if the rocks had been worn down on this path. I then sent this to a couple people asking if it looked to busy since I realised after there had been a lot of rocks when compared to what we were basing our plates off of. The feedback I had received said they didn’t think that this was an issue so thankfully I didn’t have to redo this. There are some issues with it and it isn’t perfect but I think it is pretty charming.
HAIR
I went and followed along with how he set up his geometry nodes to create a hair strand. I will be honest, this was a bit difficult to wrap my head around but I can tell that there is a lot of potential with using this branch of Blender.
Then I went ahead and grabbed some hair references, both real and 3D views of animated hairstyles that fit the design that I had chosen.
So after some experimentation I finally got a curve that I liked as a hair strand using the geometry nodes and so I just went built up the hair using this pattern, and duplicating and adjusting the strands to fit.
I actually really like how this turned out, it was a lot easier than having to go and try to sculpt these out with a subdivided cube.
Then I used a different Geometry node to have the smooth front hair, I decided that I wasn’t going to have any complicated texture on these, instead I will draw these on or bake it into a normal map to fit, matching these to my reference as close as I could.
Then I was starting to get a bit worried about the Polycount I had on these, so I experimented with the look I had and adjusting the render levels on the curve and a subdiv modifier to see how it would look once converted to a mesh (basically I wanted to get the lowest faces I could without losing too much detail).
As I was adjusting my model, this error happened, and I found that I needed to remake this end curl, so I just deleted the faces there and extruded the faces down and merged to a point, before quading these triangles out.
Then when it came to my character’s hair poofs, I didn’t exactly know hoe to approach these. I started off thinking I could build these up in a similar way to the hair on the head. I decided to abandon this, in favour of something that would save a lot of polys and just ease of use. The way I created these new poofs, was simply using a sphere and adjusting these to fit roughly with my model, I strayed pretty far from my initial design for these, since this is only my thrid model, it would be a lot easier for me to change the hair from loose tied up strands that went a lot wayward, to instead be these rough buns that I could instead bake or just draw the texture. I didn’t want to be too over ambitious since we don’t have a lot of time to finish off the story.
Then that was the hair done for now, while I am a bit sad that I wasn’t able to get the exact hair I had wanted, I can see myself after a bit of improvement coming back to Fidget and even remaking her as a comparison.
ACCESSORIES
The only Fidget was missing now was the accessories I had designed, tackling the bag, dagger and goggles (since I had already went and made the piercings and hair rings earlier).
The bag was made from a simple cube that I extruded, beveled and adjusted.
The goggles started as a cylinder, and I extruded these out, then created the strap from a cube and brought this around the head.
The knife too began as a simple cube that I just extruded and adjusted- the hardest part of all of these props was just makign sure that once I had bevelled my shapes that I went and quaded them out, but otherwise they all were quite simple.
And with that, Fidget was all modelled, the next step was one I hadn’t been looking forward to but definitely needed more practice in…
UNWRAPPING (and all of the struggles)
First Attempt:
The first attempt at unwrapping didn’t go well, and this honestly was because I had been working a lot and had got pretty rundown from this. By not resting and allowing myself a break I found myself pretty overwhelmed and was making mistakes that would stress me out greatly (this also didn’t pair well with a lot of stress that I found myself getting into with regards to my group and their workflow). You can see a lot of the following UVS are pretty bad, distorted and I didn’t approach the seams too well so I quite literally just deleted this and started over again.
Second Attempt:
This attempt went a lot better!
I had taken a couple days of rest, to let my mental health reset and work on other elements for the group and came back to Fidget with a clearer mind. The first thing I did was applied all my scales, then I went and decided that I would use 3 texture maps for my model- one for the hair, one for the main body and then one for the props. Then I went and made three materials according to these and applied them to each respective element with the UV checker map in place.
During class time I had just ran through and broke down each individual element a bit willy nilly , just from what I could remember from last semester, and then I went about adjusting these with a better concentration at home.
The props are all unwrapped here, I tried adjusting these in the UV as best I could, straightening them out where appropriate to.
When it came to the hair I found that this was warping a bit, so I had to go though and add some seams to help these out a bit. Again, I went ahead and straightened these elements out to help fit the UV space better. I am not entirely happy with how these turned out, but they’re not obviously awful so I went ahead with them anyway.
Finally, Fidget herself needed done, this area was a bit of a doozy so it took me the longest, I’m not entirely happy with how this came out either but I think it is okay for my third model.
So this was where I had gotten on the model during class time. These were fine but I definitely saw some areas that I wasn’t happy with.
Like this glove in particular, there was a very obvious disparity of the checkers, so I needed to go through and separate the glove into two halves, as well as making sure there were seams between the fingers.
I went through every area I had done and tried to break them up like this, and then I went and sorted my Uvs out to help visualise the model a bit better. I knew I would have to arrange these like this later on as I wanted some areas to have a higher resolution than others.
Then was the main struggle I had, the face. I had forgotten a lot about how to approach unwrapping the face so it was a bit of trial and error along the way. Initially I had the nose all connected, but when I applied the mirror modifier, this would cause a disparity in the UVs that I didn’t like.
I ended up marking seams around this area, and then went to work out the issue I was having around the eyes.
I went and removed the outer seam around the eyes I had made and removed the inner cuts to the outer face, essentially making a mask.
Then when I unwrapped this it looked a lot better than before!
Then I just went and unwrapped any other elements that I had wanted to not be reflected, like the pants, upper arms, top and stomach. And that was the unwrapping of Fidget done (at least for now). Although I hated this process I think it turned out fine, there is definitely areas I could improve on here but that will come with time and knowledge as I get better at 3D.
Adjustments!
I went ahead and made some small adjustments of areas that I noticed were a bit too noticeable, the chin in particular was an issue for me so I went and created a split to even around the face of this, since on the chin it becomes very stretched. This was a similar issue for around the back so I went and added some seams to the shoulders that majorly fixed this issue for me.
Other than those, Fidget was all modelled out! As i mentioned before, there was a bit I cut out, for time and effort sake, and there is definately areas that more knowledgable modellers could pick out and note issues with. But I am satisfied with how Fidget came out and I look forward to being able to make her come to life! (even if I notice a lot wrong with her…).