Class Sculpt Workshop

Character Design

Research

I grew up watching a lot of the animations Genndy designed and never really thought about the message he was trying to portray in each character he did. He likes to break the normal with designs and prefers to use sharp, blocking character designs with disproportional body anatomy. I gathered some images on a whimsical board to look into his style more, and he consistently uses either large blocky figures or thin sharp figures when designing his characters. Just by looking at stills of his characters we can gather their personality or role within the show they are from, I think that this is a fantastic trait to have as an artist as it is an extremely challenging thing to do. It’s easy to read a character within an animation but to be able to view a still image and be able to read the character takes some amount of skill!

I also watched a YouTube interview Genndy had done, in which he goes through his work and speaks about his influence and mindset in its creation.

Sketches

This week I focused on looking into creatures and references and sketching out some ideas of what I wanted to model.

This week we were given the freedom of creating a helmet and texturing it. As an avid Star Wars fan, I chose to do Boba Fett’s helmet. The design itself wasn’t too technical but I still did face a few difficulties, especially when UV map prepping for texturing and I had to go back in and make more seams a few times to successfully texture in Substance.

When using Substance Painter I wasn’t too sure about how to add a translucent effect onto the plastic visor, but as it was a separate object to the main helmet I decided that I would be able to apply this through blender once the textures were imported into Blender.

After getting the textures into Blender I proceeded to experiment with different lighting and angles for a render shot. The first image above is taken with a high “sun” light and a small red area light placed inside the helmet facing down to illuminate beneath.

This was my final render where I placed a low “sun” lighting to still allow the details to show and the place another red area light in front of the helmet it give a slight glow on the edges.

In class this week we learnt how to texture by using Substance painter. I had a little knowledge of this software as we did use it in College, however I most definitely needed to go back to basics and learn it again as I had forgotten a lot of controls etc for it.

I chose to base my sword design off the Moonlight sword from Elden ring.

I had a bit of difficulty with the handle and getting it to UV map correctly. So I had to go back and simplify it down a bit more as I had caused myself issues with it becoming too technical.

I kept my render very simple and dark, but added a subtle spot light below to light up the handle. Due to me adding the emission onto the blade it didn’t need to much extra lighting added as this was the main feature of the sword.

This week was certainly a challenge but I enjoyed the modelling process. The hardest part was modelling the straw and the bevelled bend.

The second tutorial was a flower and vase. This one I thought would be harder than it was and I didn’t find I struggled at all with this. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m starting to get the hang of Blender or if I just found it an easier exercise.

For the homework we were tasked with modelling and animating Zubat from Pokémon. I didn’t find this workshop too hard until I came to texture it and then I started to face some hurdles but I was able to rectify these after messing around with Blender for a while.

Link To Animation:

I felt this week got very technical, very quickly and I got a little in out of my depth while doing this workshop. I struggled with following the video tutorial as it used a lot of hotkeys and there was no explanation as to what these are and therefore I got lost and couldn’t work out how to proceed in the workshop at times. I was persistent however and was eventually able to get it done as best I could.

For homework we were tasked with modelling a Tie Interceptor from Star Wars, which I really enjoyed doing as I am an avid Star Wars geek! I did find it challenging but was able to follow along with the tutorial and did not struggle too much.

Link To Animation:

I was very excited to start 3D as I had not really had a chance to use Blender and it has been something I always wanted to learn, especially after using Maya for so long. I did struggle getting used to the controls within Blender as it was definitely chalk and cheese to Maya software. I enjoyed the snowman workshop as it was simple enough to follow the video tutorial although I did still struggle with certain aspects.

Link To Animation: