As I wrote on my Animation Studio blog, during week 6 we had individual interviews with our teachers to see how we were getting on with work – I expressed that I was generally a little behind and at times struggling due to my ADHD, however generally was enjoying the course and at the end of the day, managing to get my work done.
This week, moving on from our last assignment where we were learning the basics of Blender, we moved onto applying that knowledge to creating actual characters!
But we’re not going to create just any character – our assignment is about creating a character that would fit into the Hotel Transylvania universe / art style, based on Genndy Tartakovsky’s cartoony and expressive style. This is in order to practice fitting our 3D models into a particular art style, as 3D artists often have to do in the studio.
Genndy worked on several animated works such as Samurai Jack, the Powerpuff Girls, and Hotel Transylvania, which we’re basing our characters around. His character designs are almost built around the expressions. In this assignment we mostly have creative freedom to do what we want to do, as long as the character looks like it fits into the Hotel Transylvania universe, and keeping in mind the expressiveness of Genndy’s style.
As for the class, though, we started it off by opening up Blender and just experimenting with the sculpting a bit.
We were introduced to Sculpt Mode and started experimenting around with the different sculpting tools. We created a cube and remeshed it so that it had more faces to more easily sculpt from, as sculpting at its core is just another way or moving around vertices on an object.
Being introduced to Sculpt mode was really interesting as it now meant that we could implement a little more of a creative side to our creations, as opposed to just being technical all the time.
To start off, we tried to sculpt a face, starting with creating a simple cyclinder mesh, remeshing it and going from there. It’s good to start by shaping the mesh into the vague shape that you want before building on that.
I didn’t have anything specific in mind, but I just started using the tools provided to slowly but surely sculpt the mesh into something that resembled a face.
I also learnt how to create and invert masks, which can be very useful to use when you want to edit specific areas of your sculpt without affecting the rest.
I also added a sphere that I shaped and added a mirror modifier to, in order to create the eyes.
Finally, I sculpted over those eyes in order to create some eyelids for the face. For one of my first sculpting attempts, I was pretty happy with it.
I also experimented around a bit later on with trying to create some more animal-shaped sculpts, especially since I was thinking of maybe making a monster that was animal-based for my assignment.
As well as that, I also tried to create this elf/goblin creature, who I gave a rather sad expression. It was really fun messing around with all of the sculpting tools that Blender has to offer – one of my favourites is snake hook, as it can be fun to pull very specific areas out quite a lot, which can be fun when editing ears or horns.
For our homework, we were asked to do some research and concept art for our assignment. I decided, since I hadn’t seen it in a long while, and since I wanted to get a better sense of Tartakovsky’s style, I would watch the first Hotel Transylvania movie.
I took note of how the different characters had very unique face shapes and elements of their design, how some had very sharp features while others had rounder ones, but all of them were very unique and distinct from each other.
I also wanted to have a look at some of Tartakovsky’s art, so I looked on his Instagram to find some inspiration: https://www.instagram.com/genndytartakovsky/?hl=en
His style is pretty recognisable, and a lot of the shows and movies that he’s worked on include characters that have exaggerated base shapes, and as I’ve noticed, typically small eyes to go along with that as well.
So I did some concept art for a character that I might like to create.
While sketching, I wasn’t fully sure what I was going for but I was thinking along the lines of a humanoid animal monster, and one of the first things that came to mind was a minotaur. In my sketches I included exaggerated poses and expressions, as well as making the eyes relatively small most of the time. It was really fun playing with different shapes to try to create this character.
I was still unsure if I wanted to stick with the minotaur idea, but I found it fun to mess around with different ways that you can draw a bull/cow head, so I kept on sketching. I also thought about maybe adding the snake to the character design, either as a pet or as a tail.
I also did this sketch of what the character could possibly look like.
Overall I was still figuring things out, but it was really interesting being introduced to sculpting in Blender, and I was excited to see what more we were going to learn in this program!