Assignment 2 3D character development

Before anything I want to apologise for not keeping up with the weekly blogs, I don’t feel good about dumping this on you guys. This will not happen again, for your sake and mine.

For the body I started with a UV sphere and used the sculpting lessons we’d had in class to shape the basic body. I needed some help with the ears, Mike showed me how to properly use masks. Most of the body was never meant to last to the final design, things like the chest and legs were more guides to help shape the clothes.

The hands were an issue, I wanted to keep them from the sculpt but no matter what I did with Grab tools or masks they kept coming out looking really bad, eventually I just deleted them and started again. I got a reference image form online and used cubes. I flattened and extruded the cube to fit the basic shape of the hand, using loop cuts, bevels, and proportional editing to make the hand look more smooth and natural.

For the shoes I did something similar. I got a reference image and a plane, I extruded it out to fit the base of the shoe, then built up the front and heel of the shoe. Then I filled in the sides of the shoe, adjusting for where the foot would curve naturally. I wanted to do a little thing where the shoe would have a tongue in the front bit, but that became way too annoying during retopology so I scrapped the idea. For the laces I made a plane, merged it together into the centre, added a skin modifier, then extruded it out to form the laces. I didn’t think these would do well in retopology so I just made copies of them, then I used the decimate modifier to make them less detailed.

For the shirt and trousers I used the same technique. I found a tutorial on YouTube and followed it pretty closely. I made a plane, then cut it in half and mirrored it. after adding more vertices and edges I used proportional editing to shape the plane around the body to form the clothes. Then I extruded the plane out so it covered the body, then I deleted the faces near the top and bottom, but at the side I deleted only the faces, which was meant to help when I added the cloth modifiers. I added a few modifiers, gave my body mesh a solid property and after a lot of issues with overlapping vertices I eventually had my shirt and pants. When it got to retopology I decided to only do the front section of the shirt, because there’s no way to see the back of the shirt with the jacket and scarf on.

For the scarf I got a cylinder and squashed it down into a disk. Then I deleted the top and bottom faces and added a solidify modifier for some thickness and a subdivision surface modifier. I used some snapping to help get it into the right shape, then added a few more subdivided cubes shaped in the tail of the scarf. I wasn’t very happy with the first version, it didn’t really look right, so I destroyed it for the good of the model. I went a bit simpler with version two which I think ended up looking much better.

The jacket was not as hard as I thought it would be. I made a long big cylinder, gave it a load of loop cuts and expanded those to better fit the shape of the body. Then I deleted the top and bottom faces, and four faces directly at the front to emulate the open part of the jacket. I extruded and bent some edges for the lapels, and for the sleeves I deleted some faces from the sides, did some loops to make the gap circular and extruded it out to form the sleeves.

Doing the hat was a lot more sculpting. I made a cylinder, squashed it and deleted the top two faces, then made a UV sphere and joined it to the cylinder. I went into sculpting and shaped it into the right shape. I think I should have gone for a simpler design, or at least one that was more symmetrical. The shape of the hat was tricky for retopology and made UV mapping a bit tricky. I needed to decimate the model a bit before it was easy to work with.

For the hair I did two separate things. For the moustache I cut out the shape from a plane, then added a solidify modifier and shaded smooth. I needed to so a bit of editing to get it the right bend and position. With the head hair I tried something different. Following a tutorial online, I made a Bezier path and circle, mapped the path’s bevel to the circle, then messed with the circle in edit mode until I got the shape I wanted. I made a few of these for some variety. I think there were upsides and downsides to this. I think the hair looked pretty nice while fitting with the style, there weren’t any really bad clipping issues, and I think it looks a lot nicer than if I had left him bald. On the other hand it made a lot of issues with retopology and UV mapping. For retopology I did the same thing as the shoelaces, copied the mesh and decimated it.

Retopology was a bit gruelling. I had a lot of issues when it came to the hair, connecting the gaps between jacket and shirt etc. Eventually with some fiddling I was able to settle on a serviceable retopologised model. UV unwrapping was not fun. I have way too many individual parts on this model so that caused a lot of shrunk maps which required a lot of editing. One of the issues was that I had too many seams in the wrong places, I need to add more to the hair and less to the shirt and shoes. I also stumbled onto a problem of some faces not showing up when exporting to Adobe Paint, but after talking to people on Discord I was able to fix the face orientation and it got sorted out.

Applying the texture in Paint after fixing the faces was pretty simple. I used the blood effect we learned during our Warhammer assignment to make mud to add a travelled or adventurous side to the character. I do think the textures look a little too shiny, especially on the shoes, but that’s a small nit pick that I’m not super worried about. Getting the textures back into blender was no issue, I was able to get them exported and applied with no issue.

Then I started working on the props. This character being a researcher I wanted him to have a notebook and a pen/pencil. The pencil was easy with no issues, some cylinders with loop cuts used to make the lead tip. The book was a little trickier. I made a cube and flattened it out, then added some loop cuts to bend the mesh and make an open book shape. Then I added a load of cuts to the spine of the book and extruded the faces for the pages. I think the book could have been done a bit better, I would have like to do a bent pages look, I also would have liked to have some details on the cover, like a symbol or logo like how we did with the Warhammer. Something weird did happen though, whenever I exported it to Sketchfab I realised the book had the bodies textures applied to it instead of the ones that showed up in Blender. Maybe combining the book and body into one model is what caused that.

Overall I’m quite happy with how the model turned out. I think I definitely learned a lot and all the mistakes will help me do better in future projects. I know I can do better and I’m looking forward to the next assignments where I can prove that.