Outwitters Tribute: Adorables - Soldier Final

INTRO

If you have been following my other posts, then you hopefully remember I was excited to get this last unit finished. This is the Soldier from the Adorables team on the beloved game, Outwitters on iOS (now discontinued).

ADORABLES SOLDIER UNIT STRATEGY

Soldiers are well-rounded units with a cost of 2 Wits. They can move 3 spaces and provide a healthy balance between offense and defense by dealing 2 damage and having 3 health.

They are easy pickins for Snipers and Heavies until you boost their health to 4 with a medic. Then they become a nuisance by being able to withstand at least 2 attacks from almost every enemy. Grouping them together or placing them in front of strategic positions makes for a go-to strategy. They also make it hard for the opposing team to pressure due to their mobile response to almost every situation, and they are easy to pump out at spawning spaces with several spare Wits.

MODELING & SCULPTING

I started this character off in ShapeLab Max on my Meta Quest 3 VR headset. Sculpting in VR is an amazing experience and the camera view and controls are super "handy." Then when I got the overall shapes that I was looking for I sent it over to Nomad sculpt for final shape definition. I'm still learning sculpting in VR so my character quality isn't as good as other ShapeLab veterans. That's okay because I am learning, and I have skills in many other software.

Once Nomad sculpt workflow was completed, then I finally exported over to Blender for final adjustments and used my Print Prep add-on for cutting and keying. I just finished re-coding the add-on to comply with the extensions platform requirements and this was a good test character to ensure the same functionality exists. Several bugs were found and squashed and the Soldier was cut and keyed extensively.

PRINTING WORKFLOW

You would think that after printing several of these characters that my prints would come off failure free. Nope! I am still about 3 attempts until I get everything working right. It takes a day and a half of tweaking and reprinting. Ironically the parts I thought may fail ended up printing fine and the parts I put a decent amount of time into were the ones that ended up failing lol.

The tricky parts on this print were the fork, white shirt, legs, & straps. The fork was the most time consuming. I tried printing support cut-outs to save on materials and making it more rigid. All it did was take even more time and entomb the fork, making it hard to remove. The fort was also too thin and during removal and sanding.

Tip for beefing up the fork. Since it was all quad topology with clean paths, I was able to loop select the side wall faces and scale along their normals to make the for a little wider. Then use Ctril + i to invert selection, and hide everything else. Then over to sculpt mode to mask all (except hidden faces), and then unhid with alt + h. Then I had everything except the side wall faces able to be smoothed over to the new scaled boundaries. I used the mesh filter brush set to inflate first and then smooth second. Viola, more robust fork weapon.

It took a half hour to clean and sand the fork, but it turned out really nice. Assembly went without too much trouble, and then I painted the sprinkles with my Molotow acrylic paint markers.

The final product looks awesome both in the light and glowing in the dark!

FINAL THOUGHTS

This makes the final character in the Adorables crew and it turned out to be one of the more challenging prints due to all of the different materials and clothing interfaces.

I started making these characters at the beginning of the year and have really enjoyed learning from each one. I hope you have enjoyed them too.