Intro:
For this assignment we were tasked with making our own cute character using soft modelling techniques, in addition to that we also had to design the model learn and use retopology, map the UV’s for the model and finally go about texturing the model.
Design:
When coming up with the design for my character I knew I wanted to take from old western themes and make a sort of cute lone ranger character from the wild west. Before doing any designing I went about online and searched up different attire from the old west from history, costumes and movie media. I looked specifically at movies such as “The good, the bad and the ugly” with Clint Eastwoods’ character and drew inspiration from his outfit. When first starting off I blocked out a few different shapes to a silhouette of the character before moving onto the details, I did this make sure the character would be able to stand out against others if put side by side against others and you’d immediately be able to tell who it is. after I found the kind of shape I was happy with I then moved onto the character design itself using clean lines to shape the details of the character, for example the cloak / poncho the face and the boots, once I settled on my two favourites and once I did some deliberation I finally settled on the puppy character. For the colours I took inspiration from Clint Eastwoods’ character in “The good, the bad and the ugly” with the colour of the poncho and the white line design on it, I considered going for a complimentary colour scheme however after playing around with that idea however I settled on a more analogous colour scheme using browns for the cloak / poncho, a saturated yellow for the scarf and dress part under the the poncho to contrast against the darker colours and finally used an off white tan colour for the characters fur and boots.
Designs:
References:
Modelling:
Before modelling I looked up a few tutorials online on modelling character in 3D, there I found out about the loop cuts addon and the the extra models addon and activated them to help model the characters ears and some parts their outfit later on. When it came to modelling I just started off with simple shapes to block out my character to the best of my ability using the reference I made before in the design stage to help guide me, I only had the front profile made so when modelling I had to change the scale on the side profile to help find my desired size for the character. To help fill out the basic form of the character I simply scaled different meshes into place, but there were more complicated shapes that couldn’t be made with normal meshes.
One of these being the boots, to make them I made use of meta balls and cubes to help simplify the process of making more complicated shapes, instead of using cubes, scaling them and using the boolean modifier to mesh them together, I used Metaballs and cubes which meshed the two shapes together for me, not only skipping the middle man of using the boolean modifier but also giving a much smoother shape that I’d be able to sculpt with later on.
When it came to the cloak / poncho I had used metaballs to create the folds on the shoulders, however when it came to the part of the cloak that draped down the character I used a bezier curve and moved the curve around the body, after which I create a cube and scaled it up, flatted it long the x axis and pulled it out on the y axis in order to get a sort of flat board shape, after which I subdivided the shape and added the curve modifier, doing this allowed me to use the curve I made beforehand to bend the shape around the character, this in turn would give me a smooth curve to work with when it came to actually sculpting the cape.
Videos Referenced:
Using this video I was able to find out about the add-ons “Loop tools” and “Extra Objects” and how to use them, which in turn helped me to create the ears for my character, in addition to getting a soft cube mesh to use as a solid base to sculpt off of when working on both the body and front part of the cloak.
Scupling:
When it came to sculpting I ran into an issue where the sculpt didn’t have a uniform scale which caused a lot of visual issues when trying to use to grab tool on the mesh, however after some research I found out that I just had to apply the scale to the model. Once that was sorted I went to each induvial mesh and used dyntopo with a detail size of 10px and detail flood filled the mesh, I then went and pulled out the mesh into the right shape, using the reference from before as a guide, I did the same thing again only with a higher detail size but this time I used a variety of different brushed to add detail to the character. for example the draw tool and clay strips tool, both of these help add volume to the mesh, I used this a lot for things such as the back end of the cloak. When I first made the mesh for the cloak it was too think and I’d end up grabbing both sides of it when using the grab tool so I and used the draw tool to add more volume to it and prevent the grab tool from dragging both side of the mesh, another tool I used a bit was the crease tool, it creates a sharp crease going into the mesh, and by using this tool with the ctrl key it can be used to make sharp edges. Using this tool I was able to create a crease in the characters boot and help make it look like the boot is segmented a bit, not only that bit I used the crease tool as well in the scarf to help give the illusion that the scarf is layered on top of itself. I did that process once more, adding more detail until I hit a detail size of 50pixels. By the end I smoothed out the sculpt, gave it the same form that matched the reference and added in details I couldn’t before with the chunkier mesh, I can use the boots for example, before hand they were just 3 meta shapes meshed together into a rough shape of the boot, but by the end it had creases, I managed to give it an arch between the sole and heel of the boot, I pulled out a rim of the boot at the top and put a devet to make it look like there is a leg going down into the boot as opposed to just the leg sitting on top of the boot.
Retopology:
For the retopology I had the character split up into different sections, one for the head, face, scarf, cloak, and body /w boots, after which I took them from Blender and into Maya to make use of the Quad draw tool. I then took each of these mesh’s starting off with the head, I made the mesh live and hid the other parts then started looking for where I could put in loops to create a clean mesh once I was finished, I was fairly puzzled in the beginning, I started off with the head which contains a lot of places to put loops with the ears and round hair spikes and there was a few times where I’d go back and redo the Retopology completely, after a some practice and using tutorials from flipped normals I slowly got to grips with the quad draw tool and got a fairly quick work flow. Once finished a piece I went and hid the head I was just finished doing the retopo on and move onto the next mesh, I repeated this process until I had a usable mesh for each part of the character. During this I had a complication where there was an issue with the normals of one section of the character that being the front part of the cloak, I tried taking this into Blender, recalculate the models and import that model into Maya by itself, however this didn’t work. So I went back into blender, deleted the old segment, created a rounded cube, flattened it out using the scale tool and going into sculpting mode and again using dyntopo set to 10px I pulled out the mesh using the snakehook tool again to fit the reference I was using before. I then imported that new mesh into maya and using the quad point tool I created the new mesh for that part of the cloak. Once all of the different parts had a new mesh created for it, I selected the entire model, saved and then exported the model as a FBX ready to be put into Substance painter.
Videos Referenced:
After using this tutorial as a guide I was able to learn about a lot of the features that the Quad Draw tool has, such as the smoothing feature using shift which cleans up a messy mesh, the extrude feature which makes it so that you don’t have to make points all the time and shift click and also showed me the loop extrude which makes a loop of faces, which really helped when trying to make faces around a loop. such as the legs and ears of my model.
Substance/UV:
When getting to the UV stage of the model I was getting too close to the deadline so I used substance painters mapping tools in order to automatically map out section of the model individually, doing so created a fairly messy UV map however doing so saved me a lot of time and allowed me to immediately start texturing my model. Before starting I knew I wanted my model to have hand painted textures, for the previous assignment I had experimented with just texturing with the base colour and it enabled me to create a very stylised look for the model and so I wanted to try and re-do that but for my cute model instead in addition to that I was also inspired by the sylised cel shading found in games such a Zelda Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda windowmaker with the very saturated colour schemes and bold shading. One of the very first things I did when going into substance painter was to bake my model so I’d get the ability to make a mask based off of the colour ID of my UV map, meaning that I’d be able to mask each individual island on my UV map. Doing this allowed me to use the polygon fill tool and fill out each island relatively quickly using the colour pallet based on the design reference I had made in the beginning Once I had filled it out and viewed the base colour only I could see that the colours would blend together and make it very difficult to see. Once that was done I looked up a tutorial on YouTube about making hand painted textures and used of the techniques from there to paint my model by hand first starting off painting on the model to get an idea of where it would appear on the UV map and from there switch back and forth from painting on the UV map and the Model to add my own sort of ambient occlusion in order to help prevent the colours from blending together and losing the shape of the model when looking at it from various different angles. I did this by picking the base colour and shift thing the value as well as the hue down a bit to get a cooler, darker colour and painting where two different points of the model would meet. For example in the cloak I added darker parts around the rim of the cloak, under the top parts of the cloak where they’d meet with the longer part and on the inside of the cloak, doing all this helps bring out the shape since there isn’t any light in the scene to do that for me. Finally I added the white details, on the eyes and cloak. For the cloak I again took inspiration from the “The good, the bad and the ugly” with the poncho worn by Clint Eastwoods character, with the dashing lines going around the edge of each cloak segment, not only that but I also took inspiration from an art technique called zentangle, which is used to create patterns, I thought it may look fitting to put it on with the cloak to add further to the hand drawn nature of the textures.
Textures:
Referneces:
Video Referended:
With this video I was able to learn how to use a few different features and techniques to use in substance painter, an example being the wireframe, this really helped me out when I was trying to paint on the model but couldn’t really see which part I was painting due to the fact that the “base colour” would make it look like the different shapes are blending together when looking at it from different angles. In addition to that it also showed me the polygon fill tool which game in really handy when try covering large areas with a specific colour, it really helped speed up the colour blocking process. Finally there was the knife painting hard brush which was used in the video, it showed clearly how to go about using it, blocking out different colours in different areas and then going back and softly blending them together.
Reflection:
Overall I’m please with how the model came out, especially with the amount of time I had to make it I’m a big fan of hand painted texture style and am pleased with how the model itself came out I never thought I’d be able to make something to that sort of standard after never touching any sort of sculpting software before. If were to go back and start this project off again I’d definitely spend much more time working on things like the retopology and uv mapping which I had to rush in order to get the model done and out on time. It’s been a good learning experience and I feel that now I’d be able to make some models and the like on my own with the help of YouTube tutorials to guide me where I’d get lost.
Year Reflection:
During this module I have learned quite a few things, going into this I had never really touched any sort of software relating to 3D modelling so coming in as a beginning I had much more to learn as opposed to the modules at the start of the year relating to 2D art. I feel like the programs were introduced to me and broke down into a nice concise manner allowing me to fully grasp the program we were using at the time (Maya). I a lot of techniques and tools of the trades found in the program as well as what to look out for when modelling something, an example being ngons. When it came to the soft modelling part of the module I’d learned a lot from there also before that I’d never even heard what retopology even was or how dyntopo was used to give yourself more polys to allow for smoother and much more detailed models not only that but I’d also learned the process of how a model is created from start to finish, starting off with a concept sketch and ending up a fully modled. retopo’d, uv’d, textured model. It really gave a good insight and will defiantly help when I begin working on my own projects and the process of coming up with my own ideas and now being able to execute on those ideas.