I am extremely happy with how my character turned out, his overall aesthetic is pretty simplistic but holds a lot of detail in his body. If I were to do this over again I would tackle the retopology a lot faster than I did this time, make sure that the retopology will work well with UV mapping and also make his item more detailed, maybe give him a loin cloth or something along those lines and probably add more detail in the feet. All in all I am pleased with the outcome, the sculpting was a fun new experience for me as I hadn’t touched it before. This project makes me want to go and design more character as now I know that I can, and I know how to get through ever process along the way. If I could go back I would also give myself more time on substance painter, I need to use it more as I am not that good at it yet, but I do think that I could become a lot better than I am now. Realistically I do believe I could have done better but stress got the better of me and I felt the need then to rush it, which I hope doesn’t show in my work.

Retopology is now something that will forever give me nightmares haha, This was hell to do, I got the hand of it quickly enough but it was a very tedious task for such a large character design. I believe the more I did it though the faster I got at it, I gained tricks to help speed through it. But this was definitely a humbling moment for me, it let me see a lot of the flash in my character design and gave me an opportunity to correct them, One of the main flaws was in the knees The different primitives that I used to bulk out the character started to clip through each other, which was very odd because everything was fine whilst I was sculpting, I reopened blender a day after the sculp and the mesh went crazy, but thankfully retopology fixed this issue and let me continue without having to worry about any underlying mesh.

I believe the finished mesh came out great, but whilst doing it I wasn’t thinking of making dedicated lines for the seams when doing the UV mapping, This came back to bite me as I couldn’t get clean Seam lines. Overall though I am happy with how it turned out and have gained new insight for next time.

At the beginning I knew what type of pose I wanted, so I built him up from that pose, but I did decide to do a regular standing pose to see if I thought differently, but doing this just reinforced my thought on the base pose. The armature was relatively simple to do and all of the weights of the mesh worked right, so I didn’t have to do any weight painting thankfully. Doing this was still good to see if the model could be posed without editing the weights.

I decided to play around with a couple for different lighting effects, to see if I could accentuate the characters design and vascularity, this wasn’t a set task but I thought it would be nice to see the character done in different settings. This was fun to play around with and gave the character more personality.

After having the characters base done, it was relatively simple to add muscle definition, I built up every muscle group one at a time to keep it anatomically accurate (Minus the sex organs). Whilst doing the base I kept in mind where I would put each muscle group, this lead to a very easy sculpting process that I think turned out very well. The face in these images was just a test to see what I wanted him to look like and I hated the direction in which the face was going, so I decided to make that more extreme.

For some ornamentation I decided to add prayer beads and horns (This is not his item), I thought that it would fit the overall aesthetic, and I believe it worked well. The horns to relate back to my prior Oni design and the prayer beads started as more of a collar for the monster but I wanted to change it up a bit to fit the style more.

As I said prior, I really didn’t like the way in which the face was going, so this is the changed result, I went with a more bull inspired, daunting look. It suits the horns as it became heavily minotaur inspired, I loved the thought of making a barbaric best, just something so over the top. At this point I was exceedingly glad that I didn’t go with the original design, It just had more of a stylised approach.

We were tasked to design a character based off of Genndy Tartakovsky’s style, the main prompt was to have the character look like it was staying in the “Hotel Transylvania” hotel, but we were also informed that we could make it look like it was in samurai jack also. As soon as I heard about the assignment that we were given, I immediately though on an Oni inspired character, a way of mixing Genndy Tartakovsky’s samurai jack design with his hotel Transylvania style, this way getting a nice mix of his overall aesthetic. So I started to bulk out a rough character design (as seen below), It was more of a humanoid base, although I did like this idea, I though it was to baseline and wanted to explore a more extreme model…

So that’s what I did, I went a little less Oni and more Japanese inspired freak of nature, I though this would be a really fun task as I knew I wanted to do proper anatomy reference on my character and see if it would fit well, I bulked him out to be an extreme, sinewy beast. I was very happy with the way this base came out and was really excited to start sculpting him. As soon as I got the base shapes down I could see the direction I wanted to go with him.

In conclusion I believe that I have done quite well in the modelling process, I have learnt some very valuable techniques that I can proceed to use in the future. I had a lot of fun with the design and particularly liked week 4 and 5 as I could mess around with different designs and build my own models. Blender seems very intimidating at first but once you get the swing of things it is very easy to get what you want and can be very enjoyable doing so. If I could go back and change things, I would give myself more time to do the helmets paintjob on substance painter, and would have did a lot more with the Zubat design, other than that I think that I have done well. There are lots of tutorials that I have looked up to help me make the models look even better, more stylized and overall more fun to look at. The classes have also been extremely helpful in showing us the tools, some of the modifiers and letting us know the terms used within blender so that we could go and watch tutorials without being confused by the terms used. Mike has also been very patient with questions and very helpful and is overall a really nice guy.

in week five we were tasked to model and paint a helmet, i loved the process of modelling it as it was all personal choice as to what we could do, it was nice to see the helmet in different variations and styles, i came across no problems whilst modelling other than the mesh when i was using the Boolean modifier, i however had a really bad time trying to UV unwrap it, i struggled to find the right points and i still believe that i have not unwrapped it right.

In this week i really wanted to put my own flair on to whatever task we got, and we had been given the task of making a sword fly into to a rock and have particles scrape off of the rock, i decided instead of a sword, that i wanted to do a war axe, i pushed myself to see if i could make one simply off of a picture and not a tutorial, i believe it turned out well and am happy with the outcome, the animation was really tricky at the start but i then realised it was the same types of animations that we had already been taught.

I found the Zubat quite easy at first, but it quickly showed me how to stop clipping whilst using the mirror modifier and the merge them instead, the use of the Bezier curve was also quite tricky but I soon got the hang of it and now it has become a really useful tool in my arsenal. The painting on him was very easy once I figured out about the selection tool, otherwise it would have took ages to actually do. The wings were another thing that I was messing about with and to do this I decided to subdivide a plane, cut out the bits I didn’t need and then put on a subdivision set to curve out the edges.