When I drew up my character reference sheet I had in my head a rough idea of how I could start to block in the basic shapes of my character. An altered cube for the coat, cylinders for the sleeves, cubes and cylinders for the legs and arms, cubes for his trousers, spheres and a cube for the head and two cylinders for his top hat.
These primitives provided a good base for me to sculpt from. I was happy that my character had a clear silhouette at this stage; if you squint you can really start to get a sense of how he’ll end up looking.
From this stage I remeshed various elements and started using the elastic deform and grab tools to start shaping it into something more workable.
Mike advised me on how to add in his scarf, which was something I was struggling with; I had to flatten and slope the area around the ‘neck’ of my character to create an appropriate area for my scarf to be placed before being sculpted, using a UV sphere as a base.
Trying to achieve the look of a scarf tied in a simplified ascot knot was a little challenging, but once I’d found some good references of scarves and ascots and cravats beyond the original illustration it became a lot easier for me to get the right effect.
To sculpt lapels, I decided to translate them as elements of detail on the chest of his evening coat in lieu of having them as objects separate to the main body. This was against Mike’s advice (which I may regret not taking), who gave me a short demo of how I could go about having them separately. I chose to do it this way because I wanted to keep the profile and silhouette of the coat clean and neat. More appropriate for such a formal dress code and for my character I felt.
The design of my character’s coat is similar to the one in the illustration that inspired me, keeping it full cut with a high buttoning point and concealed buttons, except here there will be no contrasting lining on the revers- the whole coat will be black to have it be more striking (that’s the effect I’m hoping for at least). The shape of the lapel is different too, sticking to a more traditional notched style with a moderately high gorge.
To create the effect of fur I thought back to John Tenniel’s illustrations and felt I wanted something more in line with that more illustrative style to suit the kind of fur my dogs bare instead of more usual sculpted fur, so I began using the clay strips brush with dynamic topology turned on to essentially draw the fur onto the exposed parts of my character’s body.
I was genuinely elated when I saw the results of this method, it was exactly what I wanted by way of style.
Now the top hat gave me some real difficulties at the start. I was trying for too long to create it using sculpting tools in blender and it just wasn’t working. It wasn’t until I had modelled my worm character’s cowboy hat in Maya for the Animated Narratives short that I realised there was a much better way to do this with hard surface modelling. So I started the same way by using a cylinder for a flat top crown, deleting the bottom faces and extruding along the bottom edges for the brim. From here I just hat to create the right shape by altering verts using soft select mode. Worked like a charm.
I did have an issue when I tried to extrude the faces on the underside of the brim downwards to give it some thickness that I never fully resolved (it just extruded the outer edges up or down when all the faces were selected).
The only way I found to get around this irksome issue was to extrude this edge down and inwards before using soft select mode on the vertexes once again to try and get the shape of the underbrim to conform to the topside.
From here I added a hat band using a pipe primitive and the effect of a bound edge by extruding the outermost faces of the brim up before smoothing the mesh and bringing it into blender to see what it looked like on my dog and, after some resizing and manipulation of the character mesh, it fit quite nicely.
I made an effort to UV unwrap the hat at this point before I brought it into Blender.
All the while I had been continuing to develop, smooth and manipulate my sculpt as needed.
Despite the simplicity of the nose, I was quite pleased with how effective it was when I added it to the face. In the above image you can also see where I applied Mike’s advice of having a more obvious brow ridge and eye sockets, a lovely consequence of which being that it gives him a nice dose of personality. I’ve chosen to make him a little old and grumpy-looking. To make this change I just used the grab brush to edit the area around the eyes. It’s such a simple change, but it made me smile from seeing such distinct character being added from it.
I was pretty happy with how my sculpt was looking at this point. It’s less stylised and youthful than my drawings, but I do like how it’s ended up developing.
Again at Mike’s recommendation I pushed in the hat at either side to try and have it better suit the dog’s head. I also used the cloth brush to add some subtle crumples and wrinkles to the crown to make it look a little worn and more organic.
After some trial and error with the pose tool, I figured out where the pockets should be placed and used the draw sharp brush to mark them into the sides of the coat
After slimming the coat a tad to create more working room with the sleeves, I found myself pretty much finished with my sculpt and ready to start retopology.