Cute Character Blog

Brain Storm

When starting on ideas for characters I initially just started sketching randomly.

 

Immediately this character stood out, I really liked the idea of her kind of being an inspector in her imagination. The contrast of her being a child and being a serious inspector in her mind was one that I found quite funny. And I wanted to play around with enhancing that contrast more, as well as making her more defined shape wise.

One of my ideas to enhance the contrast more was to change her hat to a kids hat, I played around with these ideas until I found one that I thought fit best. On top of this I made further smaller additions, such as adding hair around her eyes and a pony tail out the side of her head. I also tried to apply big medium and small design theory to her, in an attempt to make her silhouette more distinct. All of this I feel made her character design more faithful to the type of character I was thinking of.

Character Turn-around

My this was the finished design I ended up liking the most. As I felt it not only visually showed off and displayed her character, but it had nice shapes and design ideas, with a clear silhouette in my opinion.

Creating the mesh in Blender

I created the mesh by using a 2D reference image, and sculpting the model around it. When creating this mesh I wanted to make sure I captured the stance correctly as it displays a lot of her character, I also wanted to make sure that the proportions were properly replicated, and that the overall style translated to my sculpt.

 

Creating Coatless and Hatless Mesh

 

This model would be used for her shirt and head. To make this model, I modified the original base mesh by using the smooth and grab tool, I’m quite happy with how it turned out. However when trying to export it I ran into an issue.

Layout Mode

Sculpt Mode

When I would leave sculpt mode into layout mode to export, the model would revert back to what it was originally. Even after I had applied the modifiers in sculpt mode. After some researching however I found a useful fix for this.

I simply had to click ‘Apply Base’ and the layout mode would conform correctly. This is a very easy fix looking back, but it took me a long time to find. In the future however I will be aware of this and adjust my workflow accordingly.

Retopology

Retopology was a new challenge. Because not only do you have to consider capturing the original shape of the mesh, but you also have to consider making the pattern you place your polygons in,  a clean and beneficial flow that will benefit you later down the line.

Head

Since the head I modelled wasn’t symmetrical, I decided to only model half of it and mirror it across. Then simply reverse the normals and merge the edges together. This was successful.

I feel like I did a pretty good job with the head retopology, I left a space for the eyes to go and I originally left a hole were the mouth was, however after seeing my model from afar I realised it would look better without the mouth hole, as it compliments the style of my model more. I would say looking back, the flow of my retopology could definitely have been improved upon further. But for my first attempt I’m quite proud of how it turned out. And it was very useful for the purpose of this assignment.

Feet

The foot retopology could’ve been done better, since none of the quads loop in beneficial ways. Even though it gets the job done in this instance, Its always good practice to do simple retopology right. I also used the same method for duplicating the boots as I did for the head.

Body

I feel like the body’s retopology from the neck down to the lower legs is really great. It successfully simplifies the shapes into clean, easy to manage sections that can be more easily organised. I’m very happy with the retopology of the body.

Coat

The coat retopology is great in some aspects, especially the Lower half, however when I got to the shoulders/arms the pattern gets lost a little bit. I know what I could do to avoid this from happening in the future however. And I will try my best not to let this happen again.

Added Pockets

Hat

When modelling the Hat I noticed a mistake in my original model.

The opening at the back of the hat didn’t line up with the middle of the hat, which meant that I had to remodel the back of the hat.

I feel like the hats retopology is quite good, Again it just makes everything work so much easier, creating edge loops, selecting rows of faces. With the way that its organised doing those things wasn’t nearly as much of a pain.

Hair

The Hair had to be readjusted several times to fit into the hat and over the head. I also added jaggy bits to it to make it more hair-like.

The hairs retopology was ok, it definitely got the job done, however looking back it could have been even cleaner and more organised that it was.

Conclusion:

Overall, I feel like I did a pretty good job with the retopology of my character, however I am very aware of what I could have done differently to make the retopology smoother, more organised and overall cleaner.

Combining Everything

When combining everything there was a few adjustments needed to be made.

Such as making sure the inside of the coat went convincingly far in enough.

I added a hole in the hand so she could hold the magnifying glass

With the help of my retopology I easily created bevels at each end of her body to create a shirt

I also Pushed in random parts of the body, like the face and the back which were visible from outside of the coat.

Loads of other small tweaks were made, such as moving the neck down, Widening the hair near the eyes so that it covered them and adding small details like pockets and sleeves by utilising bevels.

UVs

I used the camera based UV method and organised them all accordingly. This took a painfully long time, but I think I’m quite happy with how they turned out,

These would then be saved and exported into Substance Painter.

Substance Painter

When I first imported my model I noticed this.

So I quickly hopped into Maya, reversed the normals then exported it and imported it into substance again. Then began texturing.

The texturing went quite well in substance, however I believe due to GPU restrictions I couldn’t draw directly onto my model, to add highlights of her nose and mouth, which was a bit of a shame.

Sketchfab

When I exported the textures from Substance over to Sketchfab, some of them like the coat, worked fine. But others, like the skin ended up being completely messed up for some reason.

I spent a long long time trying to figure out what was happening here, playing about with my UVs, baking the meshes even experimenting with scaling them in substance. However unfortunately I just couldn’t ever figure out why this was happening and get to the bottom of it. So for the textures that didn’t export correctly, I instead just used the normals and roughness information from them. And used the sketchfabs base colour option to provide the fill colour. This was quite a draining stumble towards the very end, but I’m still really happy with the final model.

 

Finished Model

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-names-inspector-b817d0d29e0441faaea26cd57fbee313

 

I’m quite happy with how my model turned out, even without some of the desired textures. I feel like her character, and the contrast is still very much visible in the 3D rendition which was one of my main goals when modelling her. I also feel like the lighting adds to the mood of the scene, as if its taking place in her imagination. Overall I’m very proud of this model!

Conclusion

 

I feel like throughout this exercise I learned an unbelievable amount, and I feel so much more confident when tackling 3D modelling than I did before. I feel I’ve learned a lot from this project in particular, for instance learning to make use of multiple programs to create a model was a huge learning experience for me.   

I now feel confident when it comes to creating practically anything in 3D space. Which is needless to say a step up from a few months ago when the 3D workspace felt so new and daunting. I now feel as if I’m able to see the possibilities and utilize the benefits of 3D animation, which is something that I’m very happy and excited to dive into further. However, I find that when it comes to actually putting complex textures onto my models, that’s where I think I still get stuck the most.  

Something about it whether it be utilizing substance painter or generating effective UVs. I just don’t think I have wrapped my head around it fully yet.  However I will keep learning, creating and revisiting models to improve the most that I can on this aspect.