To model my character, I followed the tutorial videos that had been provided by my lecturer’s. Of course, I had to make several of my own altercations that didn’t quite follow the videos to better suit my design. Starting with the head of my character, I did have to alter the proportions quite drastically since my character has a much more animated face with a smaller mouth and much larger eyes, however this was simply enough to do after modelling a very basic human head and face. My character also has a few more specific details to her face such as the tufts that come out from her cheeks, and to achieve this I used cylinders and scaled the tip down to be much smaller, and also used the sculpting tool to adjust them better to fit the face.
The next thing I focused on was her hair. Initially, I was completely clueless on how to achieve the venus flytrap look for the buns in her hair whilst not making it look too messy, but I eventually found a solution by creating a uv sphere and using the knife tool to cut a sort of zizag shape out of the sphere too resemble the teeth of the plant, rather than doing this for the entire sphere, I simply used a mirror modifier to reflect the shape of the teeth. After finishing one uv sphere like this, I applied another mirror modifier around the head of the character so that it would align on her hair. For the bangs of her hair, I followed the same process with the tufts on her face of using cylinder’s and shaping them to fit her head better.
Her body wasn’t too difficult to model, however it definitely does look a lot drastically different in comparison to the basic human anatomy of the lecture tutorial videos. She has a much more thin body with very spindly arms and legs with large feet. When I was altering the body shape to follow my reference, I did initially worry that maybe her design was straying too far off of basic anatomy, however I continued to follow through and copy the design and it did ultimately work out in the end. I personally think that her feet were the most difficult to model, however I loosely followed the tutorial for modelling hands and made altercations more specific for my character such as only using three faces for the toes and obviously didn’t extrude them as much since her toes aren’t incredibly long or anything.
When modelling her dress, I followed the same thing I did with the buns in her hair with using the knife tool on a uv sphere and then applying a mirror modifier to this. For the chest and back of her dress I used cylinder shapes and rescaled them to be much smaller, I then extruded the bottom of these to reach her dress. For the sides of her dress I Simply used a plane, used the knife tool to cut a curve in it, and then used sculpt mode to reshape it to fit better on her torso.
The next thing I got to was UV unwrapping my model. I first marked seams on each part in areas that I thought would be more appropriate due to being more hidden. Unfortunately I didn’t double check this with a checker texture, and now that I’m looking back on it I am aware that I absolutely should have done that. I also added a multiresolution modifier in order to add more details to my model with different sculpt tools. I used the bake tool and then saved images of my baked UV maps. I then exported my model into Substance painter with the baked UV maps and got to work on texturing my model. At this point I realised I should have used a texture checker on my UV unwraps first, since I may have marked my seams slightly wrong and lost some detail on my textures to them turning out quite blurry.
After I finished texturing my model in substance painter, I exported the textures and went back into Blender. I applied the textures and base colour through nodes and repeated this process for each part of my model since I hadn’t merged every single part of my model just yet, I now recognise this as another mistake however at this point I didn’t see anything wrong with not merging everything just yet.
Rigging my model was probably the most difficult part as I kept running into difficulties. I created my armature following the tutorial, however since my character doesn’t follow basic human anatomy, many parts did not work as I had hoped. For example, parts of the head and hair would often move with my characters arms and legs, and sometimes if I were to move the head armature, the hair wouldn’t move with the head of my character. I tried to fix this by applying more armature throughout the head, however I’m unsure if I wasn’t following correctly because this didn’t quite work for me. Instead, I used the weight paint mode and renamed all my bones to be easier to follow. I made sure that only parts relevant to the bone would move with that bone through this method. There was definitely still some much minor issues with rigging, but it wasn’t as major as the initial issue’s I had been having. Posing my character wasn’t too difficult since she does have fairly basic anatomy and the bones followed her anatomy quite well all things considered.
For her prop, I modelled a fairly basic closed umbrella for her to hold in the final pose. This was fairly easy to model using cylinders.
Exporting my model to sketchfab is where I had the most trouble. In the tutorial video, the entire character had already been merged before being textured in substance painter, however I did not do this with my model. And so when I imported my model with all the relevant textures into Sketchfab, I couldn’t select several normal maps or several roughness textures. I now acknowledge this as a pretty major mistake on my behalf that I did not notice until it was already way too late. Thankfully, Sketchfab was quite easy to work with aside from my issue with my UV’s all being seperate. I enjoyed working with the different lighting and shadows to make the presentation of my model look a lot nicer.
