Week 9 was a very interesting week and overall exciting, it was the beginning of building our character and bringing it to life up from the designs and concepts we did last week. We started learning about topology, which at first I didn’t fully understand and honestly I thought I wouldn’t, but after some explanation I get topology.

In general, I actually quite enjoyed it. I think the fun is from taking it week by week, leaving no stress and just enjoying the process. This week I’ve decided to just do the head and the tentacles and any other detail in order to fully create a good topologized head. I gave my character quite an oval and wide head just like a squid’s. I also made the back longer to avoid it looking like a human head.

This was quite an interesting process, and with the help of the lecturer’s video’s I was able to create a nicely shaped head, a good pair of eyes and little ears at the side. Although I created these successfully, I did encounter a few problems, minor but needing sorted out. At first the ears eyes wouldn’t smoothly go into the sockets how I needed them to.   

After a bit of readjusting, the eyes came out perfect. Another problem I encountered was the fact that I wasn’t so sure how to go about creating the tentacles in a way that they wouldn’t be unrealistic. At first I extruded different areas of the face so that I could create some that would be smooth on the face, but when I went to scale and position them, it wasn’t working-out. After much thought, I resorted to using Bezier curves, which in the end worked out perfectly.

Using the proportional editing tool. I was able to resize them in a way that would look much more realistic size wise, and in the end the use of these Bezier curves were ideal, creating aa good bunch of tentacles.

After creating the tentacles, my characters head was starting to look much more like I had imagined, really putting me through the trust the process feeling.

I also added a hat ontop, the one from my sketches, and after following a quick blender tutorial I discovered online, it did the trick, giving my squid character that sharp and smart look I was after. When I created the hat, it made me much more excited as I finally saw my character come to life.

Hat reference: https://youtu.be/KpaqvfxGlAg

This week was a good introduction to topology and topologizing a human / squid head, giving me a good start on my character as I knew the body and clothes is going to be a hefty challenge but one I look forward too. For the rest of this week, I finished up the head and made sure it was fully formed, and the topology was clean. Although it came out just as I expected, I did have to do a bit of rearranging with the topology on the back off the head as it did mess up a bit, but other than that, smooth sailing!