Now that I knew what my character looked like, I needed to learn about the character modelling pipeline.
For my research I watched this Flipped Normals video and I also attended a couple workshop/talks from Peter Adamson (3D character artist at Billy Goat Entertainment). From these I was able to understand the main stages of how characters get made and pick up on some subtle differences in the game, film and VFX pipelines. Generally, productions would have a set of base meshes to use, but Peter explained the importance of starting to build up your own asset library including making your own base-mesh to help understand the importance of form and proportions.
It is pretty common to be swapping between different software, so I will be working in both Blender and Zbrush for creating my model. Although I got some experience over summer, Zbrush is still pretty intimidating for me and I wanted to get more comfortable with it and this tutorial helped a lot.
Blockout
The most important element needed for Blocking out your character is anatomical references, so I went and gathered as much as I could. These include both fox and human anatomy since I was going to combine these to create my character. The main idea is to build up the forms of the muscles with some primitives and then refining these with some sculpting to later retopo to a usable low poly mesh.
I also sketched out a rough turnaround to help build my blockout.
Using Blender I blocked out my character. Initially I had his mouth closed but Henry informed me that for rigging it is actually better to sculpt with the mouth lightly open and eyes lightly closed, so I went and adjusted that accordingly and brought them into Zbrush. Using the silhouette checker I thought the head looked a bit small, and I also ran into an issue where the ZRemesher was causing some webbing, so I went back to Blender.
In Zbrush I defined and smoothed my block-out. I mainly used brushes like clay build up and trim dynamic to define the planes of the body. I also carved out the facial shapes using dynamic subdivision. I then went and masked out the hand and used Sculptris Pro to drag out a finger shape, which I just duplicated to fill the rest of the hand. I also went and created the shorts at this stage, since the baggy shorts didn’t follow the shapes of the thighs it would be easier to use them instead of creating extra work for me later.
I also took some time to practice how I could approach the ropes on my character- this was done with 3 cylinders that I twisted, and then used bend curve in the customise menu of the move tool.
I definitely could have spent more time really refining the shapes and elements at this stage, looking at this now, things like the forearms, the legs all could have been smoothed and adjusted, and even elements on the face look a bit off. These are all still able to be adjusted once I have retopo’d this model and brought it back into Zbrush but I will keep in mind to really spend more time on this stage for future projects, as getting the silhouette and proportions down can really make or break the entire character. I also learnt how hard translating a 2D concept to 3D is, although it was pretty fun sculpting and bringing my drawing to life.
Retopology
Retopology is something that we touched on last year, but I really wanted to build on the basics and try to understand it a bit more. This stage in particular is something I was pretty scared for so I went and got some references to help me out. I also was trying to plan ahead for being able to extract some elements out (claws, armour, etc) and for having clean unwraps.
So I started by placing down my main loops across the model, my first hurdle was try
Then I just started to fill in the rest of the model. I was able to get some feedback from Peter Adamson, which was very helpful. He pointed out that my hand topology was correct but in the wrong area, so I went and looked at some rigs I had downloaded as well as Polycount and talked to Henry about functionalities of loops. I also learnt that topology is slightly different for games, as when you import them into game engines they end up triangulating the geometry.
I also went and added knee, elbow and knuckle loops to reduce their deformation, as well as forming the throat and eyelids by ex
Although I didn’t apply them to this model I learnt a lot more about topology. Things like muscle loops and how to add dimples, crease in skin/cloth can all be added into the main rig instead of just using blend shapes. Pretty topology isn’t everything! I can say now that I am a lot less scared of topology and find it a really interesting process.
