I began modelling my character following the demonstrations Mike provided. The head took a while to model and sculpt because I found it pretty difficult to adjust it to The Owl House style. It was mainly trial and error of tweaking the eyes, trying to match it up with the reference because it looked like it was bulging out. The loops really helped with the fixing and made everything so much easier to navigate.
I originally planned to block out my character (as you can see below) but decided it was going to be easier with this week 9’s tutorials instead.
The body was a lot more easier to understand for me and I think it turned out pretty well! I pretty much had the reference pasted into Blender and extruded and shaped the edges to match it. To save time I also just decided to model the clothes as a part of the body. There’s not much to talk about for this, it wasn’t too hard and not much different from the tutorials.
After all that I had to do a lot of custom additions to my character! I made the cross detail on a plane using the knife tool and applied solidify to it. The collar was kind of tricky and I don’t think I used the best method to do it but basically the skin/body faces were duplicated and sculpted into shape to fit on the model. The eyelashes were pretty tedious to adjust around the eye but turned out cute!
I wasn’t sure where to begin with sculpting the hair so I looked at a tutorial but didn’t really end up following it because I ended up figuring it out by myself while in played in the background (I did however follow the mini eyebrow tutorial they gave). The process took two tries because of mirroring problems but I really like the end result! It’s not exactly like the reference because the curls were hard to work with and after I was finished with it I realized I could’ve probably used curves which would be more accurate and likely easier.
UV unwrapping and mapping was weird to work with. I watched a video on unwrapping a basic human model to get an idea on what I should be doing and what the end result should look like.
I moved on onto modelling the staff prop for my character. This was really simple to model and unwrap as the shapes were pretty basic! I started with a subdivided cube and messed around with disproportional editing.
Continuing on with my character model, I textured everything in 3D Substance Painter. I messed around a lot in this because I couldn’t decide if I should just stick with flat colours or add actual texture onto the clothing, hair etc. It looked really weird with textures and didn’t fit the style as the realism were clashing with my very stylised character. I ended up with flat colours which I adjusted the metallic and roughness of.
While painting the extra collar details my model just turned to a checker pattern for some reason but I fixed it quickly by saving and reopening the file. Wish I knew how the problem occurred. It was also around here where I noticed applying colour to the 2D and 3D viewport was difficult because there was a problem with my UV unwrapping/mapping… There was moments where I would paint on one section but it would also affect the other sections which was annoying to deal with but it ended up working out after a lot of cleaning up.
I messed around with actual textures for the staff as I thought it still looked like it fit into the world!
Then the maps were exported to Blender and I messed around with the shader editor (brightness/contrast/hue/value/saturation) for a bit because the colours were off and it was too shiny.
Next I posed my character which was shockingly hard because I completed the demonstration just fine. Making the armature was okay but when I started posing it my character was deformed weirdly. The abdomen sticking out I fixed but I’m really confused on how skin colour peeks through her clothing when I have no skin under the clothes in the first place. It looked like there was a duplicate mesh but I checked the model and it was fine. The armature also twisted the dress a lot so I ended up not posing the arm-torso area. It was pretty disappointing that I couldn’t figure out what’s wrong, I couldn’t find any information online that was similar to my problem.
You can kind of see what the pose I was going for. In my head I wanted it to be cutesy but also in action.
After that struggle, I just moved onto finishing everything which was just a simple sculpted background, applying modifiers and adding ray tracking.
Uploading the model onto Sketchfab also didn’t work. I tried to search for the reason which I initially thought was missing textures because of the white-grey-magenta colours but that wasn’t it after triple checking. It also shows up fine on Blender.
I ended up just adding the other details like lighting in Blender because I couldn’t figure out how to fix Sketchfab. Not the best week but I’ll best better next time.
Renders of the Character
