3D Digital Lit. Assignment 2 – Development of Cute Character

For this assignment I had an idea to either pick an unused concept from the animation assignment or create a new concept.

I had a discussion with Henry about the options and he felt either way could work, just as long as I’m showing enough sculpting block outs and refinement in my sculpt.

My unused concepts:

Other concepts:

Pure ref inspiration board

I did like the frog idea, and it would be really cute and have nice shapes but I still wasn’t exactly sold on it for my sculpt, so I went back to concepting.

Finalising an Idea

I thought about more ideas and finally decided to take inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons which is one of my favourite hobbies. Dungeons and Dragons has taken lots of inspiration from different aspects of culture and myths, and it’s easy to create your own creatures and stories based on anything you want as well. In the game that I’m currently in we had a pet Feyote that the Dungeon Master created, it was really cute and mythical when described and I always loved the idea of it.

I did this concept for my idea of the Feyote, I wanted to create a stylised sculpt style. I pushed some shapes of the concept like his tail, chest and shortened some aspects like his legs and face as I wanted to make him more cute and gentle.

Blocking out the Feyote

To start off, I researched a lot of coyote, wolf and dog references to help me out. I found a great side profile of a coyote and used that as my block out reference. I tried to add and manipulate spheres to the overall shape of the feyote, I sort of tried to think of bones and muscles when adding some of them in. After I was happy enough with the block out, I combined, smoothed and started to build on more shape and definition with the clay strip tool mostly and smoothing out. I pretty much binged a lot of Flipped Normal’s tutorials on how to use Blender and Zbrush, as well as any other tips and tricks that I could find on YouTube.

I subdivided the model to a lower poly count so it would be easier to make bigger movements and changes, I used the snake hook tool to drag out his little ear tops.

Moving to Zbrush

I had the opportunity to use Zbrush and thought it would be beneficial to become familiar with it as well, knowing it has really powerful tools and many brushes that could help create the look I wanted.

As I did when I was using Blender, I used these tools mainly to create form and build detail and structure into the feyote’s body and face also using symmetry at first.

The face was the area I spent the most time on because of the details I had in my concepts. I spent a lot of time just building up shape and form, I tried at first to get a more realistic approach of the coyote before trying to stylise him. His face in the first image here is very square as well as the fur around his head, his eye shape wasn’t right as well so I went in mostly with the move tool, dam standard, orb crack and clay build brushes to correct them into the realistic coyote’s eye shape which suit the style I wanted to go for. For the eyebrows I masked out above his eyes, softened the mask edge and then went to subtool>extract. I then used the snake hook tool and move tool to adjust the shape and flow of them. For the braids, I added spheres, shaped it into a rough shape, and used the clay build tool to replicate a braided look as well as for the braid ties.

At this point I smoothed out any harshness that I felt effected the cuteness I was trying to achieve, as well as pushing more rounded features and adding tuffs in his ears and matched the style to his face tuffs. I used Dynamesh to reproject quads across the model which helped when using the snake tool to make the fur and when making big differences to the model. Referencing my own concept as well as all the references I included above, I kept refining his hair but wasnt very happy where it was. So I used the orb cracked brush both for the high points and low points of the tuffs, adding more depth to the face and to emphasise the chunkiness his fur has, and to replicate that chunky sculpted look I like.

Retopo in Maya and Projecting in Zbrush:

For uving the feyote I just spent a good amount of time with references from the internet of a UV’d dog and Henry also mentioned the dog model in Zbrush would be helpful to look at also. I had some issues with the tips of the ears, tail etc. The polys I was creating started to overlap, so to fix them I used the multi cut tool and then go into edge mode>shift+right click>delete edge on the unwanted edges without leaving any vertex points.

UV references:

Final UVs of the sculpt!

I still hate Uving and no one can change my mind.. But I am getting more used to it.

Reprojection in Zbrush

The next step was bringing the retopologised mesh back into Zbrush as an .obj. Then I overlapped the original dynameshed model with the updated mesh. I then sub divided and used subtool>project to project the details of the original high poly to the clean low poly. I did this mulitple times until it had the level of detail that I wanted. This also maintained the uvs created in maya and allowed me to sculpt freely with a clean low poly. This also benefitted me when posing the character down the line.

Back to sculpting in Zbrush

Adding more height and volume to hair tuffs with the clay build tool. (favourite brush next to orb crack)

The fur brushes I used – they saved a lot of time and the way they are styled was perfect because how they could be leaf like and match well with my modelled leaves, as well as giving that stylised chunky look.

toe beans masked and extruded out.

Posing the Feyote

To pose the character I tried out tpose in Zbrush, it merges all your separate meshes in your subtool and creates a low poly replica that you can use to mask and move your character how you would like. Using this Zplugin tool will update the higher mesh as you manipulate the lower poly mesh. This should be used at the end as its quite destructive to your model. I wanted to create a playful pose as the Feyote gazes at the fairy, with a curious head tilt that canine like creatures do that just boosts that cuteness.

I had another idea of having the Feyote in a Dungeons and Dragons miniature style, I took a lot of inspiration from mini’s that I have but in particular the ones on the Magic Madhouse website

Although I didn’t think it was really how I invisioned the final outcome it was fun to play around, maybe it’ll be the start of a 3D printer project some day!

In the end I just modelled a simple fairy with a sphere and cubes shaped into wings, as I didnt want to pull away too much attention from the Feyote and it was more of an addition to the piece to give purpose to his pose. I added a single poly plane as I wanted to try out a painted terrain look like I have seen on sketch fab. Once I assigned them all separate materials to make sure I could texture them individually, I combined all the pieces of the low poly mesh and moved everything to substance painter.

Texturing the Feyote:

I notice that sometimes as a new user to any programme I think the first instinct is to add as much as you can to show that youre using the features. I really dont like the look of an overly busy texture on a model or sculpt, especially if any of that texture is going to obscure any work you did on the model. I wanted to keep my Feyote clean and painterly, I used a lot of fill layers and black masks to build a layered colour to the model as well as adding an an emissive channel to the file to create fill layers with just the colour and emissive selected. I used a simple approach to colour using baked ambient occlusion and curvature to create edge detail and depth to the shadows of the model. I also added a baked lighting layer which enchances the stylized appearance and is a common tool used in 3D art when using flat colours. I wanted there to be some glowy effects on both fairy and Feyote, not too much to distract but enough that it would feel like they both belong in the same magical world.

I noticed when applying texture maps to sketchfab that there was this blocky area of the texture. With a past assignment I found flipping the normal map can sort out the issue but it actually made it more present. I had a look around and it seems it could be a baked lighting issue? Unfortunately I was pretty close to the hand in time, otherwise I would have spent the time to fix it.

Final Outcome