S2 WEEK 8-12
(Decided to keep the weeks contained into one long post for efficiency.)
After creating my concept sheets and going through some early concept art for my cute character. I started to refine my character. My character is going to be based on an ink cap mushroom and they’re an artist! Their mushroom cap and feet are going to excrete ink which I imagine they use to create their art, so I also decided to include a prop paintbrush to make that part of their personality visible.
I had a pretty good idea of the colour scheme that I wanted but I decided to try 2 different swatches that were similar to see which one I liked more. In the end up I liked the darker blue on the jumper and a more natural brown in the paintbrush. I wanted a very simple pose because this model is meant to be simple and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to create a good-looking complicated pose. So, the character is simply loosely holding the paintbrush and standing there.
Now that the character concept was figured out, I started with the character turnarounds to get a good idea of the overall shape of the character and to use as a reference when I start Modelling. It also helps me stay consistent when I’m modelling. When the turnarounds were done and neat, I added the colours. Now I was able to see pretty closely to what it should look like when I model and see it in 3D space.
When I started modelling initially, I created the base mesh of the character out of metaballs. This is helpful to use for certain projects — but for me it just got way too crowded with metaballs too fast. There were so many metaballs and the selections for all of them were everywhere and it meant when I tried to select one specific metaball I’d select seven others. This made my workflow in this stage very clunky and inconvenient. I had the base mesh pretty much finished created from metaballs when I had my one-on-one with Michael. In the one-on-one he gave me some advice for my model, one of them was to my dismay but convenience — to delete what I’d done and start over and instead of using metaballs just use normal shapes. I didn’t know this was an option and it was very similar to how I’d initially started my work in Maya, so when I deleted what I’d done and brought in some cylinders and spheres and proceeded to manipulate them into an armature for my character it was far more comfortable than what I was doing previously. Michael also gave me some tips for the mushroom cap to create the drips — showing me some examples with the snake hook tool, and also showing me how to pose my character after I create it in a t pose using the pose tool in Blender. The one-on-one allowed me to ask some questions and I left feeling way more secure and comfortable to continue modelling.
I started again by using simple shapes and moving them into place, I also joined objects such as the arms and legs so that they’d be symmetrical and easier to model and manipulate at the same time.
After quite a bit of work I ended up with this. I struggled quite a bit with this model with making the volume of the jumper and the arms seem good, and also the folds in the fabric. I didn’t want it to be too realistic so I didn’t add an awful lot of folds, but I added a few to make it look like a jumper and to show how the fabric flowed. The mushroom cap also took quite a while and a few different tries because I ended up unhappy with it 2 different times. I ended up remaking it one more time and adding some texture to the mushroom cap similar to the lines in my concept art, because I thought it would look cool and be better than just a flat surface with a white to black gradient. Looking back on the modelling of this, I do wish I’d made the turtleneck connected to the jumper. I ended up making the turtleneck part separate because there was quite a bit of difference between it and the jumper, so it technically didn’t need to connect seamlessly because it was thick. I do think it would’ve been easier to model if it had all been one piece though, but I finished the model already. If I ever do something like this again, I’d keep in as part of the same object.
This was it pretty much finished. The only other things I added were 2 small circles for eyes, and then I used the pose tool to manipulate it into the pose that it’s holding in the concept art, and moved the paintbrush into place. When I was modelling though I only realised when I was done that I’d forgotten to add the little metal part on the paintbrush. This isn’t really essential though, and can be done without so I wasn’t really bothered. With the model done it was time to retopologise.
I thought retopology would be pretty easy and monotonous, I was not prepared for how many issues I would have when I was trying to do it. I had so many issues with it. Initially, I exported the model from Blender as an fbx. to Maya, I wanted to retop in Maya as I was more comfortable with the program so I thought this would be easier than trying to retop in Blender.
When I brought the model into Maya though, the jumper of the model was black — and I didn’t know why. I spent around half an hour troubleshooting and trying to figure out what was wrong, but couldn’t find anything with the specific problem I had. In the end up I got so frustrated I decided to try and retop in Blender instead, since I didn’t have any issues with the model in there and I didn’t want to put more mental energy into trying to fix the problem with the jumper in Maya.
I didn’t know how to retopologise in Blender, however, so I searched up a tutorial.
This tutorial was very good and informative and I’ve no doubt if I ever try to retop in Blender again I’ll go back to it — but I ran into issues again with retopology in Blender. Not with the model this time. With the symmetry and mirroring, so I couldn’t even retop in the end up. When I tried to mirror the quads to each other they were warping inside each other, and the symmetry wasn’t sticking to the model and was going elsewhere and floating above the mesh, and the modifiers I was adding weren’t doing the right thing. I know full well I was having all these issues because I didn’t know what I was doing, and after 30 minutes of fighting with Blender this was all I had.
At this point I had simply wasted time and frustrated myself, so I decided to cut my losses yet again and circle back to Maya and try to retop in there again. Even though I was having issues with the model in Maya, I decided I might as well try again in a software I was more familiar with and comfortable in than try and fight with Blender and get nothing done. I started to troubleshoot the problem I was running into again, and after about 15 minutes of looking on different websites and forums I finally got an answer and a fix for the jumper mesh appearing black by stumbling across a 4-year-old question on the r/maya subreddit!
To fix it I had to go into mesh display and reverse the normals, and it was fixed!
Now I could finally start my retopolgy. I wasn’t very confident in this.
As I was starting my retop – I ran into the same issue I had in Blender with the symmetry tool not working and not connecting to the mesh — I don’t know if it would’ve been much use anyway since most of the model wasn’t symmetrical. Not knowing of any quicker method, I slowly started to retop my model by drawing individual quads, or making a big quad and dividing that using CTRL. Retopology on this model took around 5 and a half hours. I have no doubt that there was a simpler and more efficient way of doing this but I didn’t know how. It’s also quite messy in places, but I did try my best and it does get the job done in the end. I found out 2 days after I retopologised the reason my symmetry tool wasn’t working correctly, and if I had known that at the time it would’ve shaved ages off the time I spent on it. If I had to redo this, I’d be more efficient and neater with it, but since it was my first time properly retopologising and I’d never done anything like this before — I am pretty proud.
Here is the final model with its retopology done.
We had to make our own UV’s for our models. So, after I finished the retop I started with those. To create new UV’s for the model I referenced a tutorial from earlier in the year Alec gave us demonstrating how to add UV’s to the model of an arm, and I took this and applied it to my own model. I ran into some areas of bother and parts of it were very complicated and confusing. There were also areas that were a little tricky to UV because of the way I had retopologised in places. I had problems with the back of one leg and where the arm meets the jumper where the arm is by their side. I managed to figure out ways to make it look decent, and started to UV the entire model. I was quite used to UVing at this point, so I knew what I was doing and ran into not a lot of issues apart from the ones I just mentioned. In future projects, I’ll try to retop more neatly so I don’t have areas of difficulty in my UVs, but everything ended up being good in the end.
I had all of the objects the mushroom character is made of UV’d separately, but when it was all done and I was ready to move onto texturing I selected the whole model and laid all of the UV’s out together in preparation for texturing in Substance painter.
When I imported the model into Substance painter it was all well and good – I baked the high poly mesh onto the low poly mesh and was ready to apply textures, but when I went to apply a colour mask to the model like I’d done in models before I couldn’t there was no separate colours and it was all grey, this was very confusing for me as I was pretty sure I’d selected everything I’d needed to when I was baking my textures.
I tried to figure out the problem by myself for a bit but since I didn’t really know what the problem was in the first place, I only confused myself further. I thought it had something to do with the materials all being the same but this had never been an issue when I’d imported models before. After giving myself a headache, I decided to message Alec and Henry on Slack for help — and even though they were very busy marking final year projects they still made time to help me with my small question which was very nice of them.
The issue in the end up had an incredibly simple fix and I was just being silly and forgetting to select one small box. When I was baking my textures, I’d forgotten to set the ID’s to colour source the mesh ID / Polygroup. I felt very silly for forgetting a simple thing and being so confused for so long, and bothering Henry and Alec when they were busy — but it was very appreciated and now I could finally start texturing my model and enter the final stretch.
It worked after I selected this!
When I was texturing, I used a mixture of paint layers, materials and smart materials. The face, mushroom cap and legs are a creature skin smart material, the jumper and turtleneck are a baseball cap smart material, and the paintbrush is a walnut wood smart material, with the tip of the paintbrush being rubber material. I created the blushes on the face with a paint layer with a skin base texture in a grey colour, I think it looks very cute! I laid out the base materials and colours but nothing really created the shine of the paint that I wanted on the jumper, mushroom cap, legs and paintbrush. I experimented for a while using different materials and paint layers — and settled on a paint layer with a gouache paint texture. I went in and created the white to black gradient on the mushroom cap and legs using this, and I thought it created a really fun texture, like my character was actually making ink from its cap. I went in after I finished the legs and mushroom cap and created more texture similar to the concept art by drawing in little lines and shapes into the cap and legs. I think this gives it more of my own artistic style influences and it makes me very happy. Once this was done, I went and added the ink details to the sleeves, the stain on the jumper and the tip of the paintbrush.
In the end up I was very happy with the texturing. I was surprised at how much it looked like the character I had drawn, and was very proud of what I’d done. I could finally import it to Sketchfab and create my final render.
In Sketchfab I imported my low poly model and reapplied the textures. Not having the high poly mesh being used as a shell any more I can see a few issues with the mesh — most of them around the turtleneck, but nothing major and I think it looks very good, all things considered with how many issues popped up for me in this project. It was very cool to see it finished and in its own space, it looks like it could be a cute little NPC in an RPG, and I’m very proud of that!
Here it is when it’s in default Sketchfab:
And here it is finally, after adding a little post-processing flair:
Finally, the final outcome!
This project was personally the most difficult for me this year, but it was very rewarding and I learnt so much and have so much more respect for character modellers. It challenged me a lot but meant I learnt how to use Blender to a much higher degree than what I thought I would this year, and I’m excited to continue learning it. The Blender aspect of the project wasn’t actually the most challenging part for me actually – it was the retopology and all the roadblocks I ran into while trying to get that done. All those issues were important though, because now I understand how to retop much better and know how to navigate the problems if they ever come up again.
In terms of my outcome, I’m super proud! I think my little inky cap artist is very cute and a great first attempt at a character model since I’d never even touched Blender or tried to model a character before this.