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ThBLOCKING OUT CTHULHU.

primitives to define the basic shape of the character. Roughing out shapes of your character. Will post and briefly discuss screenshots.

This stage was what I was most nervous about. Even though I’ve practised basic sculpting having to begin the official model sounded nerve wrecking, however a start needed to be made. To ease my worries I looked at a few tutorials on basic modelling before diving into my sculpt. Viewing the videos below gave me good insight into the best foundation is for human proportions/structure. I’m not intending to go realistic with my proportions, however it’s good to take in knowledge on the basics before bending the rules.

This video demonstrates using basic solid objects as building blocks for facial features. Although it’s not something that’s needed for this module I thought it was a interesting technique to view. I can see how this can ease into getting basic facial structure down easier.

Video of taking a 2 dimensional design and melding to 3D.

I’m well acquainted with the bezier tool in Blender and intended to use it as a method of constructing Cthulhu’s tentacles. I found these 2 video’s showing the same technique. The taper in the tubes and bend them to sit how they like. This will come in handy later on when I slowly build on his face.

Alongside watching the lecture video on how to block out a character, I set to work getting the fundamental shape of my design down!

To begin I imported my reference image of Cthulhu onto Blender to accurately block of the proportions of my character. I added meshes that resembled the closest shapes of his body to gain a visual on his overall build.

To start my body block I implemented a cyclinder for his face, torso and upper arm, using a sphere as a joint/shoulder. To shape his torso I used a knife loop tool and have it go horizontally across his body are transform the top to match the width of his shoulders.

I then began building upon this torso, using my reference turn around as I went. I slowly formed the rest of his arms and legs using the same shaped meshes and tapering inward slightly the closer I got to his feet/hands. I ensured I scaled my meshes as I went to avoid any issues this may cause down the line (from our previous assignment module this posed many issues, so it’s better safe than sorry.) I wanted to visually see my character take shape to I slowly began shaping his to the background image to get a gist if what I was doing was working. I also applied mirror modifiers to both limbs to ensure perfect symmetry on both sides.

Moving onto the hands I added spheres and transformed them down to form a narrow shape and placed them accordingly. I was glad I went for a claw design over a realistic hand as I think this would be a bigger pain than it’s worth to replicate, so I placed individual transformed spheres at the end of his hand and remeshed/sculpted to form a claw-like form. I then proceeded to alter these using sculpt so it would curl inward, towards his palm. I began to smooth out his head, reposition and add another cyclinder to form his neck. I joined each object to what I thought would be easiest to sculpt together (almost like clipping masks and layers) and as I go I intend to join and blend to get a underbody I’m content with. I also made sure to join any mirror modifiers before moving forward.

I had a lot of trouble trying to remesh the hand as the fingers would fuse, I would very quickly frustrated at the issue, so I went back to a earlier save before I made changes. I then redone the steps above but thought it’ll make more sense to delete the arm joint/lower arm and elongate the upper arm to meet the hand to form the tux sleeve. I then inserted a face and bevelled inward, selecting that inner face and extruding it to give the illusion of seeing up the sleeve. I also adjusted the stance as his inner thighs kept merging as well, instead of an octopus I made a starfish (I’m so sorry..)

 

I did the same regarding the legs. It pained me to go back and delete my work however there was no need to have the under leg sculpt as I wanted the bottom of the trousers to has a rounded shape. I also attempted to remesh the hands again and change the voxel size to 15, this ended up as a better result. Once I was happy I set the scale and origin of each part.

As his head was quite angular I chose an unusual approach to his skull. I decided to implement a sphere mesh, delete the bottom and half of it’s faces and turned on a mirror modifier. I also ensured to leave a few faces in the front to alter to form his nose. I then used the propositional editing tool and shaped the sphere around his head like a helmet, pushing down the underneath remesh that was protruding. Turned on subdivision modifier for depth and I pushed the front faces and rotated to replicate the nose on my turnover reference. The front and sideview didn’t sync up as well as I wanted to so there was a bunch of guess work and back and forth that went into shaping the front and side designs, but I just began using the turnover as a very loose guideline as to where I wanted my shapes placed. I then had to connect and merge the vertices after applying my mirror modifier since I had to delete the inner faces to connect it. I saw people on discord have issues with remeshing with missing faces so I wanted to issue I got this right before moving on.

Created his cheekbones using a flat plane, and used my drawing as a reference/traced over to form the shape. Deleted faces, added subdivision and mirror modifier. I selected the faces and melded them around his base head shape. I also turned on the snap tool to ensure that the plane would hug the sculpted head as much as possible.

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When it came to his tentacles I tried 2 methods. One being using bezier curves, altering the size and volume using geometry and place it on his face. I didn’t like how this looked so I tried to find another method. I wasn’t entirely sure on the technique the other Cthulhu’s speed sculpts were using but I found an unorthodox method of doing his tentacles through this video.

The method he uses for the hair strands I attempted for my characters beard and I preferred this approach, so I formed the rest of his lower face using this technique. I ensured the mirror setting was turned on so the face kept a symmetric structure as best as I could. The tentacle process took a long time, however I preferred to settle on a good base foundation before moving on so I kept to this approach. I then proceeded to adjust the top of the head using auto-smooth to keep some angular shape.

Below: before and after of moustache. Second approach had a smoother and consistent finish which I ended up using to form the rest.

 

I added a cylinder for the tailcoat, deleted faces to form the opening for the legs and added loops to shape around the body until I was happy. I took the middle back vertices, and with proportional editing on, dragged upward to form the shape in accordance to my reference image. In between stages I added and shaped the shoes using sphere’s, proportional editing and sculpting tools until I was satisfied with the result.

Forming the ponytail at the back of the head using bezier/loop method. I altered these until I was happy with the shapes and adjusted them to fit the direction they flowed in. I ended up twisting the ponytail around to replicate a form of movement. If I were to go back and do this all again, knowing the steps later down the line, I would have simply modelled it flat so I could add boning and pose it accordingly. I found that I couldn’t use the sculpt tool because it was a flat shape, so I countered this by solidifying, applying the modifier and then the issue no longer persisted.

I began to add bezier curves to fit the top half of my character’s jacket to form a blazer, and bezier curves to the lower half of the tailcoat to form a trimming accent to the opening. I had to use proportional editing to ensure the shapes fit as close to the blazer as possible. I attempted to use a flat plain, solidified it, transformed to mesh and place it as close to the model as possible to form the jacket opening. I intended to join it to the coat and sculpt it/smooth over so it became one shape. I know now that this could have just been done more effectively with the sculpting tools when adding texturing after the reto process, it would’ve saved more time to fix issues down the line and would’ve simply looked better.

I ended up deleting the plane and adding a bezier curve to replicate the opening as I was getting frustrated with the previous method (again, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done this).

During the tentacle forming process I realized that working with the curve mesh was easier for the shapes I was trying to achieve and formed the top eyebrow tentacles using this method, looping all the way to the back to frame the head/back and side tentacles. This was a good method for me to hide the top of the shapes from sight and tidy the overall appearance. The pocket was formed using a cube, selecting the top face and transforming to grant a slant, using a loop tool and extruding faces outward to form a gold clip. I then extruded the inner faces to allow for a inner pocket. I’m glad I kept this as a hard surface shape as I didn’t have to reto it later on. Hard surface cylinders were used for the arm cuffs , extruded faces inward to give the small illusion that you can see into his sleeve.

Reflecting back on our Zumbat exercise I used the same approach when creating the wings. I added a flat pain, x-rayed it and traced over my other reference with the added accessories. I then deleted any unneeded faces and tidied the geometry. I decided to add a curve to the wing too and used proportional editing to ensure there were no gaps between the wing-the accent. I also ensured any tentacles end vertices were merged to ensure the sharp ends that were shown in my reference image. I also ensured to apply a solidify modifier to sculpt and alter the wings when needed. Proportional editing tool was used again to have the wing curve, this granted some life to the wings than it would otherwise be flat and lifeless.

Shoes adjusted using crease, draw and smoothing sculpt tools. I added shell accents to the shoes as he had shell buttons on his top and thought it would tie in the design nicer. I did this by adding 2 cyclinder meshes, using proportional tools, selecting vertices and merging downward to form creases. I also sculpted into these but I wish I left these as hard surface shapes because I needed to remake these during the reto process. I took these shells and added them to the jacket, adjusting each one so they fit the curve of his chest. I had also thought his head was too big in relation to his body so I later brought his head in at the sides using the transform tool and thought this looked a lot better.