This week, we focused on how to add bones to a character model, then exporting them to Sketchfab. We followed along to Mike’s demonstration in which we were provided with an alien character model, and we were shown how to add bone constraints to give the character a simple rig to pose with.  I found this simple enough to follow along with as a first introduction to simple rigging.

At the end of it, I had my final pose be one where he was floating in the air.

I uploaded it onto Sketchfab, and played around with the lighting and environment settings by adding colour balance and bloom to it as well as point lights.

Posed Alien Guy – 3D model by dekkaan (@dekkaan) [d887e49]

Further Character Model Work

This week I also made further progress on my model. I began sculpting the body, which has definitely been the most difficult part so far. I made sure to reference images of my character by putting them into Blender. By following the videos on Blackboard, I matched them and used them to fit my own character. I found the body relatively easy to make, and I was very happy with how I was able to replicate the curvature and body form as I had never done it before.

I was especially happy with the hands I made for my character and I found a way to create fingernails for her by cutting shapes out of a plane using the Knife tool, then adding a solidify modifier to give them a thick shape. I did struggle to find a neat way to connect the hands to the wrists. I did it on my model by bridging edge loops however I am not totally happy with the result as I find that the wrists look too thin.

After finishing the body, I began working on the clothes. I created her waistcoat by selecting faces on the body, duplicating them and extruding them outward before separating them from the main body onto a separate object. I then worked around them using the sculpt tool to create form around the body and extra details for the bottom of her waistcoat. I created her sleeves by selecting faces on the arm and repeating the process, however I extruded them out further so that they would be more prominent on her forearms. For the collar of the shirt, I selected the rim of the shirt and extruded them upwards before creating a secondary extrusion to rotate downwards to create the fold of the collar. For the bow tie, I created a sphere which I halved and bridged the edge loops of behind before duplicating and using the sculpt tool to create the bow part on each side.

For the skirt, I found it tricky. I selected the faces of her waistline and extruded them downwards before adding the solidy tool to give the skirt thickness. However, I ran into trouble with getting the skirt to form around the body so I had to use the sculpt mode and smoothen a lot as well as moving vertices myself using the move along axis feature. It was tedious however I got it to work.

Afterwards, I selected the faces of the body and assigned colour materials to them so I would find it easier to know which part is where.