Ideas and Concepting
When it came to this modelling assignment, I was tasked to create a cute character. On a bus trip I decided to sketch some ideas for my character; a hooded spirit, Asian dragon, Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs.
A baby wendigo and griffin.
A lantern dragon, a ghost girl, spirit elk, and an elven king.
However, I didn’t end up choosing any of those ideas, choosing a creature whose name I heard mentioned in a video. Yamata no Orochi, a mythical creature from Japan with 8 snakeheads. Since there is no set design on this creature, I thought it would be fun to develop my own design. So here is my moodboard of some designs of the creature aswell as real life snake references. When researching, I noticed myself being attracted to vipers more than any other snakes, because of that I chose to have the base snake for the creature be a viper. I love the large glassy eyes which are quite cute but they have spiky scales to show that they can still protect themselves.
Since the snake has many heads I thought it would be fun to add different personalities to each head. I looked at King Ghidorah for reference to a multi-headed creature and how each head reacts to each other and to others. The left is aggressive and snarls, the middle is the leader and has its head higher than the others, and the right is the more curious and docile one that can sometimes wander away from what the other heads are paying attention to.
Here is a design of the Yamata no Orochi that I will be going with for this model. I chose a blue and orange colour scheme for some nice contrast, it’s mostly blue to have a magical and mythical vibe to it, with diamond-shaped patterns of the orange standing out. The leader’s head is in the middle, higher than the others as well as bigger and an inverted colour scheme to the rest of the body. It also has extra scales to look like horns with tips of red to add more interest to the more important head. For this model, I am going for a stylized look, not too cartoonish and not too realistic. A nice middle ground. This will give me more creative freedom.
Blender
I opened up Blender, set up the reference sketches of the viper head as image planes, and began modelling from a sphere, trying to get as close to the references as possible. I used sculpting tools like grab and crease and the dynotopo option to add extra faces for more details, like scales nostrils, and mouth. For the eyes, I placed a sphere and sized it up to have a cuter look and then copied and pasted it to the other side.
For the necks, I wasn’t sure how id go about making them so I researched the processes of making tentacles, tails, and snakes and found out that I need to use a Bezier curve. I scaled it to the head and then began extending it while shaping it with the move and rotate tools. I wanted to create the look of movement with the creature, so I gave the necks coiling and writhing bends. For the other heads, I just copied the main head and scaled them down, and placed them in the right positions. I realized I will need a thicker body for all the heads and tails to fit it so I gave it a torso.
With the same process as the necks, the tails were formed with little details of balls on the ends. I gave it only 5 heads as I was conscious that I may exceed the face limit of 40k, however with the tails, it makes up 8 parts coming out of the torso. I thought about the composition of the pose and wanted it to look pleasing to the eye, so the heads are facing one direction and are spread out for the look of magnificence. Then I tested some lighting on it for fun.
There was a 1 to 1 tutorial with an animator who checked out my model so far and he suggested things like remeshing and adding a lot more details and then adding a mask of the higher detailed mesh to have an authentic scaled look without exceeding the face limit. However, I chose a more stylized look so too many details would take away from it and steer more into realism.
Maya
I exported the blender model into Maya as an fbx file. Since the model is made of triangles I needed to perform retopology to it, beginning with the torso. I isolated it and set it to live mode and used the quad draw tool and tried to make each quad a similar size. The blender torso was then replaced with the retopo’d version and I moved on to the head. The head took some time to complete, to save time half of it was cut so it could be duplicated and connected later. For an extra defined lip crease, I extruded the line of quads inwards.
Afterward, I duplicated the head 3 times and placed them to the side of the model. Here begins the process of having different heads. For the leader’s head, I removed a face on the end biggest scale and extruded the sides to form the horn, as well as extruding extra scales around the head for it to be more special than the other heads. I moved and scaled about the faces of the horn and formed them to be a lot larger and slightly curved for a more imposing look.
For the open mouths, I selected the mouth crease faces and removed them, and selected the bottom part of the face, moving them down and making sure there isn’t any clipping in the back. Then I tried fixing the faces so they would look more natural. Then I went through the long process of extruding the sides to create the inside of the mouth that looks anatomically close to a viper’s mouth. I used the multi-cut tool for faces that I needed more accurate shaping like the bottom of the mouth and the tongue sheathe. I then moved and extruded parts to make the gummy areas where the fangs extend through, no fangs as I think it looks cuter.
For the tongue, I just added a cylinder and subdivided it into 6 faces as I needed it to fit perfectly into the mouth area when target wielding it. I moved the forked area out through 2 sides and then used the multi-cut tool to add extra faces.
The necks and tails already had the quads so I did not need to retopo them. However, I still needed to join them to the torso. I had to remove faces to the correct amounts of faces and aligned them so they would smoothly snap-in with each other creating one shape with no seams. The most difficult part was the necks to the torso as it was a messy affair of calculating and deleting faces so they would fit between not only the torso but also some necks that were clipping. Since Blender’s remesh joined the necks at areas I did not need I decided ill do the joining in Maya. I was finally relieved when the necks and tails were one object with the torso.
For details of the scales, I singlehandedly extruded every single one and scaled them to be more rounded and natural. The leader’s neck naturally has the most scales.
After that, the arduous task of connecting each of the heads to the necks approached. To save time on similar heads I just copied and pasted them for easier target wielding and moved them how they should be placed.
There was some clipping between the necks but I moved the verts so they would only barely be touching, giving the effect of the snake being fleshy and squishier. Then I added the tongues to the leader and a side head. I connected the faces of the tongue to the leader’s head. I gave all the parts materials and then connected them as one object using the soften edge option to avoid any noticeable quads in lighting. I used the auto-sort tool on UV maps before moving to substance painter.
Substance Painter
I expected this to be the easy part but alas it definitely wasn’t and it proved to take me quite some time to paint it. Firstly I gave it a base colour of blue and then on another layer I painted it yellow, adding the according coloured patterns to the body. I then added a lizard skin material to it for the extra snake-like effect and lowered the opacity so the colours in the layers below would be more prominent. I liked how it muted the colours a little, making it look more natural. I then painted details with a black brush, nostrils, mouths, and even a mustache on one of the heads. For the mouths, I realized my mistake of not setting them as separate materials yet I believe the seam would’ve looked unnatural so I stuck with this. I just tried to make it look as realistic to gums as I could and I quite like the sheen from them in lighting.
For the undersides, I used the highest tint of yellow and a larger brush, going around carefully so I wouldn’t paint on other places I don’t need. This took a while as the close contact and twisting of some necks needed some extra navigation. When I checked the model so far, it still looked bland to me so I added some dark brown lines on the undersides and torso. Then adding shading to the underside scale I decided to give shading everywhere else, like the eye area and the scales. For the leader’s head, I also added an extra pattern around the eyes and gave the horns red tips and some scales blue tips. For that head’s eyes, I made them dark and beady with a white slit, while the others just had black beady eyes for cuteness.
I played around with some different colour schemes and I did really like the black and the desaturated one, however, I decided to stay with the blue and orange. And For a finishing touch, the balls became shiny gold accessories on the tail ends.
I imported the model into Sketchfab and applied all the textures to it and added cool lighting and postprocessing effects. And VOILA the model is complete.
Conclusion
I’m overall very proud of this project, especially since it is my first blender model and the complexity of the number of different heads. The middle head is sterner and commanding with a more imposing design where the ones with the open mouths are smiling for the camera. The head looking away is more curious and a dreamer, flicking its tongue out for information and wandering, whereas the head near the middle head is looking up in admiration with its little drawn-on mustache. I very much enjoyed this model coming together and find it satisfying that I could turn my imagination into a 3d object. It was overall a pretty smooth experience without too many obstacles. He may not be cute to everyone, especially people with a snake phobia, but he’s definitely cute to me.
I’ve made it quite a long way in the past few months, from a simple vase to a multi-headed mythical snake. I learned how to use 3d programs, model in them, even animate those models, especially during a time where I was extremely unmotivated. For that, I’m very proud of myself. I would’ve very much preferred to do everything on campus, of course, working with others, but overall the experience was alright. I am very excited to see what next year has in store with this course and what I will learn and how I’ll be challenged.
Here is a photoshoot of Yamata no Orochi.
https://skfb.ly/o6rMA