We were introduced to our new assignment and aimed to familiarise ourselves with blender’s sculpting tools and features. As I love character design and modelling forms I was excited to get into the basics of freely altering a shape without many restrictions, however the task appeared daunting when looking through the tools and putting them into practise.
Our first goal was to explore the tools and create a rock formation. I had found great difficulty playing around with the shape and wondered what I could’ve been doing wrong, however I found that the software wasn’t compatible with my tablet since the drivers weren’t installed and once using a compatible tablet I was able to have a better experience exploring my sculpt. When having issues I began to become frustrated and researched the outcomes that sculpting could potentially lead to, which led me to discover YanSculpts artwork (although I am FAR from this level of practise, I adore the detail of their models and strive to achieve the knowledge and skills necessary to produce such quality of work.) I also briefly looked into these two tutorials to grain a greater grasp of tools and techniques relating to basic structure of models.
Happy that I found the underlying issue I began testing the tools to create a rock formation. Noting recommended tools from lectures I tested and switched between tools to fully put what I saw from videos into practise. I added a cube mesh and learned the importance and reasoning behind why remeshing an item is necessary for sculpting work. Also familiarized myself with dyntopo topography settings before using clay strips, grabbing, scraping and other tools to form a basic, recognisable shape.
This was what the rock looked like in the beginning stage before diving into further settings (not setting to smooth, dynotopolgy wasn’t successfully applied. Drivers/not used to tools. Began to become frustrated.)
Once I recognised the issues and delved into the other lecture videos I found the issues and made sure to follow through with the proper set up. I wanted to see what I could apply after the sculpting process to do a light bit of “storytelling?” So I attempted to add scratch marks to each side of the rock and turn the roughness down to make it appear as if it was just raining. I had a LOT more fun once I recognised my errors and got excited about the outcomes in which I could create. I wouldn’t lie when I say this looks more like wet coal than anything due to the colour, but it more or less gave me insight to use reference so whatever material I create it effectively carried across.
Before initially forming my second rock attempt I moved onto sculpting a head, as suggested to in class. As we were to create a monster for our final model I decided to create a monster looking character to fit the bill. I hadn’t watched any other lecture videos going further in depth so there were a few things that could’ve been improved upon. This was the result of my own experimenting with tools, beginning with a cylinder and grabbing areas to form the basic shape of the head. I took a skeletal approve to his head, wanting to exaggerate on the shape (unrealistic proportions, as I wanted to make a non-humanoid character with a lot more freedom on design.) I mostly used the clay strips tool to form defined areas of the face and sunken-in parts that formed the eyes and mouth. A mask was placed on the upper part of the brow bone so I could alter the lower eyelid/cheek bone to change his expression to anger.
I used another cylinder as a neck and carved into it using the strip tool again for neck definition. Adding a sphere mesh and scaled it down, I adjusted these into the eye sockets and edge looped/extruded inward and bevelled to create the eyes. I thought the top of his head looked bare, so I added cones and mirrored downward to enhance the design, furthering this idea by adding and sculpting ears and placing fangs inside his mouth to follow to design of sharper shapes. I transformed a sphere and placed this inside his mouth to form the tongue. (All this, admittingly, without ensure the dyntopology was turned on. However, despite this, additional details could always be added later. Blocking in main ideas/shapes was the most important so this didn’t harm the sculpt too much.)
I was more or less going with the flow when planning the model and it looked like a Hell Boy character, so I decided to go with that colour scheme to see what materials would look like applied to the sculpt (applying any modifiers I had before this.) I selected whichever faces I intended to colour/separate. I turned down the roughness of the skin as I wanted the eyes, mouth, gangs and horns to have a glossy finish. I was happy enough with the colours applied but I felt as though it was a little basic/flat despite adding the horn details.
A step further/adding details:
I wanted to see what else I could do to improve the test sculpt now that I became more aware of my sculpting tools. I remeshed everything and added smooth, then proceeded to use the smooth brush to blend areas. Having the dyntopo setting turned on and altering the subdivisions makes the world of difference. With a few added details and tweaks to my model I feel as though it makes the face less goofy/more expressive. I’m really happy with the results and can’t wait to move onto sculpting more!
Final result (this came out a lot more sinister than what I was anticipating.)
