Week 6/7 (second term): Kicking off after the Holidays, it's time to make a character that will be residing in my little sci-fi room (see previous project)! Been kinda dreading this task since it's about character creation, and I definitely don't feel like it's within my comfort zone to be making organic stuff such as humanoids and animals. This first "block out" phase wasn't so bad though, and things went much more smoothly than I ever would've thought!
From here on it can only get worse though, lol XP I mean, making a rough draft of a 3D-character as if she would be something out of a mid 90's game is one thing, but next week we're supposed to be working on the face! And after that comes a high-poly version of this very blocky Mechanic that I have now... Welp, fingers crossed that no matter how much of a struggle, it'll still be as much fun as this phase turned out to be!
Week 8: alright so I have now made my very first face/head and to my big surprise, we were supposed to go old-school style and make it polygon by polygon! So no real sculpting worth mentioning this time, just a bit of smoothing really. Although the tutor in the videos did use a few more tools than I did, while he was finishing up his head in a time-lapse, and especially around the ears and the nose. But I wanted to stay more true to the original work: a very cartoony character with not many details going on. This also means that I'm going to make a few changes to the color scheme that my little sci-fi room has, as I don't quite feel like the character fits the current atmosphere I've got going on with it.
As fun as this homework was, I couldn't help but laugh at my own results - as I had ended up making more of a male humanoid alien rather than a female human! XD I bet the mentors at CGS must be having both a blast and a headache when it comes to this particular week of the course, looking at so many weird-looking and even horrifying faces! Thankfully my mentor didn't really comment on it and took care of the "weirdness" in ZBrush while also showing me some of the basic tools and navigation (there's a screenshot included of her working on my character).
I'll upload a small bonus here too: an extra face that I did immediately afterwards, just to get in some more practicing with polygon-building! Even if I most likely won't be doing polygon heads like these ones ever again, but instead jump straight into ZBrush since it makes much more sense that way, I still felt like it was good practice of both Maya in general but also understanding a little more on topology and the anatomy of a face/head. Quite happy with how this second face turned out, where I was using a slightly more detailed reference picture :)
Week 9: Ok so this week has truly been a blast, though I kinda sorta neglected my homework! The thing is that I decided to get started with learning ZBrush and thus spent two days on 1) getting an old tablet and pen to work with my PC and 2) understanding how the software works. And I had a blast doing so; time passing by so quickly that I didn't quite think about what I was actually supposed to be doing this week, or much time would be needed for that! XP The result of my "doodling" can be seen among the freshly uploaded pictures, where I created some kind of Goblin-ish creature. Pretty sure I went a little too far with him and that I should've spent more time with my character's head ^^'
Speaking of which, I also ended up scrapping my old poly-head because the wireframe and overall topology made it frustrating to try and work with in ZBrush! Instead I loaded up the female head provided by the software and made some aggressive tweaks to it, to make it look more like the character in the concept art. That way I really got to practice using the different brushes, while still saving some time not starting out with just a regular sphere.
Apart from all that, I spent these last two days on turning a few of the objects into high poly, but I'm still doing all of this in Maya - even though it might be better and easier getting at least the clothing to look right in ZBrush! But since I'm still so unfamiliar with the UI and how the different brushes work, I figured that it'd be for the best if I set ZBrush aside for this part of the project. I'll probably get back into it once I get to the hands/gloves, but everything else will be modelled in Maya.
Week 10: Yiesh, this has been such a trying week for me - I'm pretty sure that I've poured at least 35 hours into finishing up on the high-poly stage! .__. I totally see how one might easily get burnt-out with this kind of work; spending hour after hour trying to make the perfect mesh and wireframe.
Tried my hands on sculpting the hair by using the Clay Buildup brush and then smoothing it over as I made new "stripes" that were overlaying each other. Not too bad for a more cartoonish character like this one, I think! Other than that I felt 0 inspiration with how the jacket and pants looks in the artwork, but I'm thinking they'll look much better with some actual textures on them - but also details like creases and folds! I'll probably try to sculpt the folds and then add small creases in Substance Painter, much like how it was done in Term 1 with the leather pouches. That way I also get to practice using those tools again, since I really liked how it turned out back then :)
PS. Obviously I've also still got the gloves left to work on :P
Week 11-15: Soo this past month has just been crazy busy for me, trying to finish my character and the whole scene before this next term – which starts two days from now!! Hence why I’ve been so quiet here and stopped with the weekly updates; I’ve been redoing the face two times, the hair three times, texturing and re-texturing, layout out the UVs again and again... And the past two weeks were supposed to be a holiday break in-between terms, but I’ve spent 12 of those 14 days on getting to the point where I can now consider myself more happy with the final result!
I’ll admit that by now, I’m pretty tired of this character lol XD Naturally the biggest reason to why it took me this long was learning ZBrush now instead of later, which I’m hoping will give me a good head-start for the third term! But really, I’ve also come to understand how easy it is to never feel happy with your own work, always wanting to do try and better.
Anyways! What I did with the hairpiece, as recommended by my mentor who has been doing a lot of stylized characters, was to create a bunch of quite bulky strands of hair and rotating/moving them into place – so that they overlap in a nice-looking way. And it definitely looks better this way imo, but took a surprising amount of time to get it right!
Another thing that took me some time was to reshape the jacket and pants to make them less squarish – as I’ve been dreading ever since the block-out stage X) And here too I went back numerous times both to work on the details, such as seams and folds, but also ended up re-meshing the low poly version to better fit the high-poly one, since it went through some shape-changes in ZBrush.
At the very end of all this, I learned some basic rigging through Mayas “Quick Rig” function, which I then took a step further by doing some manual rigging, to get more control over the character! This was due to the tutor using the soft selection method instead, moving each part a little at a time and then fixing the mesh when needed... which seemed like an awful amount of (tedious) work, with high risk of screwing up the mesh o_O And although the manual rigging and turning of joint-handles did take me some time as well, I still feel like it was the better way of going about posing of the character!
All in all I’d say that I’ve poured too many hours into finishing up the character, but then again it’s my very first time working with something organic and the whole ZBrush experience was quite time-consuming, but also rewarding and fun!
Looking forward to the next term when I’ll be sculpting a kaijuu (basically Godzilla with a dragon-like face), but also very much looking forward to now having two whole days off ;P
Very cool. I've always wanted to try modeling a character like this. Keep on going, is looking great.
Thanks! And I'll give next week my very best to make the face look like a face! ;D She's going to be kinda cartoony-looking though, so at least they're not trying to make us aim for anything photo-realistic - which should make things a bit easier!
Definitely enjoying giving character creation a go like this ^^