I wasn’t present for the class on blocking and sculpting, however I watched the recorded videos and they helped me a lot with understanding how understanding your character’s anatomy comes into play when blocking out your sculpt.
Doing the exercise definitely helped me warm up and understand a little better how to go about blocking my creature.
So I gathered my references and got to work.
However, as I mentioned in the previous blog, I was still figuring out whether I wanted the pose of my creature to be posed horizontally or vertically. At first I tried a horizontal pose.
Above is a VERY rough idea of that I was going for, but I did use it to create my first blockout.
I didn’t end up going with this, but at the very least it helped me experiment a little more with blocking my creature out and seeing how I want to go about creating it.
So, I redid the process, this time posing him horizontally.
Subdivided cubes were my best friends. I feel like I can really get some good shapes with them in edit mode while keeping things low poly.
It was hard for me to figure out exactly how I wanted the tail blocked out, as I was under the impression that at this stage it needed to be completely straight out.
At first I made it so it went straight down.
The limbs were a little weird but a lot of fun to figure out! Trying to create the jelly parts was definitely interesting. Additionally, the blocking out exercises really did help me know a little better how I wanted to go about this, eg. in blocking out the shoulders.
I also at this point changed my decision and decided to have the tail coming straight out.
After I was fully happy with my blocked out character, I moved onto sculpting!
I did complete the sculpting process in Blender rather than ZBrush, admittedly because ZBrush is an unfamiliar program to me, and I found it intimidating and confusing to work with. Looking back I think especially if I had handled my time better, I would have liked to at least experiment with ZBrush, and would like to potentially experiment with it in the future, especially as it is often used in the animation industry.
As I started sculpting, I mostly had a bit of difficulting figuring out how exactly I wanted to shape things such as the head and limbs.
The ears and eye placement were also a bit of a struggle, as well as working with the auto-merged topology at times.
I set up a plane to later cut into with the knife tool to create my character’s back fins. I also roughly added in the ball at the end of the tail, and my character’s head light. However, I kept these as separate objects for now.
Additionally, I decided to just go ahead and block out the shape for my ears as well. I thought it would be easier to create them in the sculpting stage, but just blocking them out and then sculpting on them proved to be much easier for me.
I also got some feedback from my lecturer that the tail for my character does not, in fact, have to go straight out, as it is more serpentine in terms of its body, so I attempted to fix it in the sculpting stage.
I decided to just take my blockout, merge it and try again. There were some things I didn’t really like with my sculpt attempt this time around though.
By having the models in view side to side, it was a little easier to adjust the new model to the older one and change the shape of the face for example, or compare features.
Making the shape of this tail was a little tricky. It didn’t symmetrise properly and I didn’t notice, which made retopo a little bit more difficult down the line, but thankfully it wasn’t a major issue.
Also, I despite trying to fix my new sculpted model, I simply liked the old one better, so I sort of messily attempted to just add this new tail to the model. It wasn’t ideal, but it would be fixed in the retopology stage.
And then I could move onto the second stage of sculpting, smoothing things out and actually adding a little bit more detail!
I definitely found this more fun as I had the basics figure out and I could just focus on making things look nicer.
I added back the blocked out ears at this stage and it worked really well this time!
Adding in my character’s eyes as spheres helped with sculpting that area a little more.
After some more work it was finally time to do the back fins! I was looking forward to this part.
To help me out, I initially took a screenshot of this and drew over it in a drawing program, then used that as reference. I found this a little more intuitive than just randomly cutting in with the knife tool. Either way though, I cut in using my drawing tablet rather than my mouse as I felt it gave me more control over the shape.
And it helped a lot! I was happy with this as a base so far and would adjust it later.
But it was really nice seeing my character with the back fins like this! It made things feel a little more complete.
As a final touch, I squinted the eyes for the retopo stage, and added a big smile to my character.
Although I wanted my character’s mouth to be open in the final model, I found sculpting the actual shape for the snout that I wanted was a lot easier this way, and trying to open it through sculpting didn’t really work for me. So, I decided I would tackle that when completing the retopology.
My 3D sculpting skills still aren’t perfect by any means, however I do feel like I’ve really improved in my 3D skills in general since my other two models, so that was really nice to see. And again, part of me wishes that I had tried out ZBrush, but honestly Blender worked very well for what I needed to do, and it felt a lot more straightforward to just work everything out in the program, especially when I had to redo and rework different things.