Muscles and blocking
For this week it was all about the blocking process and how to go from primitive shapes to these mad crazy detailed characters. This is an extremely complicated and opination stage of the modelling process because according to Isaque Criscuolo post it can be very time consuming and by blocking out a character or a scene for an animation it can tell you everything like the volume or any mistakes within the composition or Shallotte. We also as the modelers had to trust ourselves a bit with this stage as not to go too far with the details as we were going to be retopology our models later in the term and we would have to trust ourselves on when to stop. To understand this in a visual way we were given two tasks such as learning the basic muscles of the faces so, we would understand how to model the muscles of the faces to inform us on how to know when we have the basic shape of the body. The we had to bring an alien head into blender and block that out/ sculpt it within a professional pipeline.
The idea behind the alien head was to take the provided images and draw over them with basic shape like cylinders, spheres. This was the easiest stage where I do feel I got the shapes right. Though I do think I could have taken a minute or two to have a second pass due to same of the shapes not translating to the different angles of the head as well as others.
The next step was to add the shapes where I made my first mistake of going too far with all the detail. There were just too many shapes which then translated to a very hard to model sculpt as they all came together to create a very lumpy sculpt. It think in the future I should look to use less shapes and focus on getting the form and volume right before hand.
Then it was time to sculpt the head and overall, I am pleased with how this turned out, though it does not line up one to one it still has the basic volumes the reference has. The thing I do like about the head is the depth and more organize shapes of it because it just makes it fleshier. Though it does not have a good sense of muscle structure because I’ve no idea how that mouth is supported to open.
For the next task it was simple we had to add clay to a skull and build out a human head with accurate muscle groups.
This was an actual fun class because I gained an understanding of the face and how everything lines up. Plus, I did like it being a physically object instead of something in blender which was a pleasant change of pace. Though I do think I could have made the eyes a bit bigger to help the eyelids retain more of their natural shape and see how eyeballs really sit in the skull.
my sculpt
For my actual sculpt I did the blocking out of my creature in z brush as it has a better capacity for high density polygons. For the torso and the legs, I deform some spheres to create the Shallotte. This was hard because my creature has fur, and I may have needed to look at the main body and workout how it looks without fur first.
The generaly advice was to model our creatures in a pose as compared to a more default pose like a t poses as a pose has all the muscle groups in a more relaxed state. I was having some trouble with this because I found it easier to model my creature with each paw on the ground so everything would be even. To help I made each leg by minoring each leg on one side. This led to me being able to pose them in a pose if needed I also did this for the head as it had more detail than any other body part.
