This week was our last week before Christmas, and by far the busiest week I’ve had. I managed to finfish up my character and get him into substance. Although I encountered some issues, I was able to get around them and really bring the Squid to life. I finished up the last of his outfit by sculpting the creases onto the clothes, any last wrinkles or dents, any ridges and even fixing some proportions I hadn’t noticed before. But most important of all, I built and sculpted his prop, which was his briefcase. I was originally going to create a very sleek looking briefcase, but in the end decided to go with my older vintage theme and made a brown, leather case with a shiny silver handle and hinges.

Adding to this design, I wanted to keep the creature aspect he has into his personal belongings, and although he is portrayed as smart and tidy looking, he is still a squid. I made a very beat up briefcase, that looks like it’s been through a lot. I wanted to give it the aspect that it had been in the sea and that’s why there’s plant-like ivy on the outside of it and other characteristics like dents and holes. The sculpting section was especially useful for this. Used the flatten tool, the draw tool, and the draw sharp tool to add various dents throughout the case, and in the end it worked out.

To add to the charm of the squid, I added some drawn on initials, for “Squid-Man” to add a bit of a personal touch. I have visions of him turning up to the hotel with the briefcase in his hand.

Regarding the character himself, before I went into substance with the character, I asked my lecturer If he had any advice for me, and one of the most useful things he told me was that instead of the tentacles covering his mouth completely, it should act like a beard going around the face. He also advised to me that I didn’t need to connect the tentacles to the face, only join them in the end, which I now understand why that was so useful. Now that I’m mentioning advice, i was also told by my other lecturer that I should incorporate flare into the trousers, which in the end turned out well.

Foer the briefcase, I found some good videos that helped me take tips from all off them on how I should build the briefcase.

Reference A : How to make #briefcase in #blender

Reference B : Blender Beginner Modeling Tutorial Making a Stylized Trunk Suit Case In Blender 3.0 Full Tutorial

Reference C : Game-ready suitcase Timelapse (Blender, Substance Painter)

Once I had that build i brought it over to substance, along with the character himself

Once I added texture to them, i brought them back over in to blender and started posing them. This was by far the easiest step as I knew exactly how I wanted to pose him. I wanted to portray him as a man who’s always on the go, and always wanting his questions answered, like how some characters are in Hotel Transylvania, so I used Genndy’s abilities to portray characters in such a way.

Although the armature was a bit fiddly and annoying at times, the skeleton worked out perfectly. I only encountered one problem when I was adding the armature, where my character needed to be rotated the right way on the axis so that the skeleton could symmetrize correctly, nut other than that it turned out very well.