The detailing stage was more of a learning process of slowly understanding the brushes settings that worked best for me, it helped watching the Friday demonstration of someone who is much more professional than I am in the field show us how she went about, it was encouraging.

The brushes I used the most were: the clay tubes, damped track and move tool often.

I relied on my concept art, the detailed version of the obese man and pictures of sumo’s for the chest area, my lecturer recommended I had a look at how the folds of fat connect around the body.

This is the model in zbrush with divisions before adding those details back in.

this is after, with the addition of fibre mesh: to get look of peach fuzz and hide which helped differentiate the human skin and cow hide.

The body was a simple but long process of slowly building through different subdivisions the details back in. the hooves however, I wanted to get more details in because it felt very smooth, I looked at some references of cracked cow hooves and added in a little detail of dirt stuck on it as well, I repeated a similar process for the horns but with some cracks and no dirt bumps.

 problem solving:

-The nails, my lecturer suggested I cut them with the tool in zbrush, which was a bit buggy, but it eventually worked. Although if I wanted to fix the topology and remesh it created a lot of holes in the model and I reached a point where I worked too much on such a small part of his body, so I took for reference what I did with the damped track and the ears and slowly carved into them, getting the same effect I wanted in a shorter amount of time.

-The cloth I feel like I spent too much time on, more than needed, but I was trying to perfect it. I wish I had simulated cloth sooner, because the cloth looked great as soon as I did.

My first style, was missing the rips

I liked the rips on the second cloth a lot more, but the wrinkling was out of place and didn’t make sense.

My lecturer suggested, at an earlier stage, that I try using the fabric tear plugin in zbrush but I ended up not using it in the posing stage because it slowed down my computer and blender was stuck at 0.05 fps which wasn’t working for me.

I eventually went back to my concept and built the cloth from there and reattached it to the original cloth. Which looked better after I simulated the cloth on blender, which my lecturer recommended after I voiced my concern about not liking the end result.

-For the Fiber mesh, I followed the video done in class and used an online image of a hair alpha initially but later switched to this current one whish was used in the class exercise, did it section by section with different lengths and amounts of fibres depending on which body part it was on.

For the retopology stage, I was intimidated to start it because it almost looked like an impossible task, but I took our lecturers’ advice and started off with the loops on the elbow, knees, belly, shoulders, thighs and all the little holes on the face and gradually built around it section by section.

The face was a bit easier than the rest, because I relied on the class exercise we did and took some inspiration from how I did my fox model’s snout last year.

these are the references of retopology I used in the PureRef’s  bellow:

 

This is how I used my references specially when all the polygons were all over the place, I used the marker in blender to draw the paths out for myself to make it easier for my eyes to follow the flow, I gradually adjusted them and went back with the loop cut to make sure I got it right. I wanted to make sure I had some muscle shape and fat into my retopology, to help push details out of my model, especially for the fat folds on his back, I wanted them to keep their shape and also have a nice silhouette when I got to the posing. I also used the same idea for the bumps on his ears to keep their shape and not have a stretch in the topology.

 

 Problem solving:

• I was able to fix the diamond shape I was getting with the chest, which was an easy fix, instead of meeting at one point, it was more of a lattice.

• I had a long issue with the hands, I was unable to get them to connect with the rest of the body while still having enough polygons to get the shape that I wanted, my first attempt wasn’t right my lecturer pointed out how I was using later stages of a hand retopology as a reference trying to get the same loops but it messed up the topology of the hands. I used simpler references and went about it patiently. I still had a problem with the vertices count but I manages to work my way around using what I learned in the topology puzzle exercise.

Before:

After:

 

I added nails and a demo of the cloth which I later went back and altered multiple, times to get the look I wanted, which best matched my concept.