[FINAL, FINAL] CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #7 (Apr 11, 2018): Thanks to those of you who have responded to the Questionnaire. The feedback is extremely helpful. If you haven't responded yet and you participated in the class - or even if you didn't participate - please fill that out and I will gift you 20 Breath of the Wild screenshots from my Switch.
[FINAL] CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #6 (Apr 9, 2018): We've reached the end of the homework extension period and this class officially comes to end. What a month! It's been a thrill to see each of you forge your characters, learn new things, share tips with each other, and offer critiques along the way.
This thread will be open indefinitely but it's officially at the end of it's "class lifespan" meaning I won't be able to commit weekly time to it anymore and I will unpin it from the forum topics list. I'll pop in occasionally if I see activity but you all are more than welcome to keep working on their characters here if you wish!
UPDATE: Closing post on page 44 and XP has been added to each participating account.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #5 (Mar 28, 2018): Week 4's stream is archived and available via the Past Events button on the Live Event page. Also a reminder that I'm extending the 'deadline' of this month and will be keeping this thread alive through the end of the first week in April. Hopefully that gives you all a bit more time to get your characters done!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #4 (Mar 26, 2018): Week 3, done! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. I'm quite impressed by the neutralization and retoplogy work I've seen. It's a lot of work and I can see that effort in the WIPs and especially completed submissions.
Week 4 - the final week - dives into adding color to our model, primarily in the form of creating textures. Check out this week's breakdown a little further down in this description and see you tomorrow at the Live Event!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #3 (Mar 19, 2018): Week 2 is accomplished and I'm finally caught up on submissions! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. We have some impressive character concept sculpts underway. In fact, I have yet to bestow a grade lower than an A this week.
Week 3 continues our 3-week character building production. Specifically we're going to look at pursuing an animation friendly version of our character - both how and why we would do this. See you tomorrow at the Live Event! Don't forget to RSVP.
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #2 (Mar 12, 2018): Week 1 is done! Thanks to everyone who submitted by Sunday. It's been a lot of fun seeing your caricature work and concept art choices.
Week 2 begins the 3-week process of building a character based on the concepts we choose. Don't forget to RSVP to the Live Event tomorrow - See you then!
CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT #1 (Mar 5, 2018): Class is in session! Today officially begins the BC2-1803 class. Please check the syllabus below for Week 1's focus and assignments. Begin watching the pre-recorded courses if you haven't already and begin looking for a cool, stylized character design for creating in 3D this month. The first Live Event is tomorrow at 2pm EST - SEE YOU THERE! 😎
Welcome to the CGCookie Class: Creating Stylized Characters with Blender! This class is designed to teach you everything you need to know about building stylized 3D characters. If you’re diligent in watching all content and hitting homework deadlines, by the end you will have a modeled and textured stylized character! It’s an intermediate-to-advanced class which means you’ll do best by having some experience with Blender and 3D modeling before committing to this class.
This is the second "Class" format where Citizen members are invited to focus together on a particular topic/skill for a month. Participation looks like this:
WHEN? The class will take place from March 5th through March 31st
Abstract: Stylization is any deviation from realism. Thus it’s a broad spectrum from slight liberty away from reality to extreme abstraction of reality. This week we're going to sift through various examples of stylized characters, noting their qualities, and categorizing a spectrum of stylization.
Goal of the Week: Train your eye and mind to stylize your perception. Practice simplifying and exaggerating reality. Loosen up your sculpting approach (gestural sculpting).
Pre-recorded course to watch: Art of Sculpting: Caricature Chapter
Week 1 Live Event (Already happened and archived!)
Homework:
Abstract: Story plays a big part in stylization. Not necessarily ‘narrative’ but background, personality, and purpose. The success of a character is strengthened by its developmental arc. The best artists create characters that are more than the sum of its pixels; more than the sum of its brush strokes and polygons; more than its final render.
Goal of the Week: Develop a story for your character; one that can fuel your creative workflow for the rest of the month. Then channel that story into the first stage of sculpting.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 2 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: At this point a decision needs to be made about our character sculptures: A) Leave it as a sculpture or B) optimize it for ‘production’. Leaving it as a sculpture means it’s a static sculpture that can be painted, rendered, or 3D printed but not animated. Optimizing it for production means you turn your sculpture into a model that’s easiest to work with up to and including animation. If you opt for optimization, this week is mostly a technical and problem-solving task. We need to both retopologize our mesh and also neutralize it if the sculpt is posed.
Goal of the Week: Understand the concept of “production-friendly” and practice retopology.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 3 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
Abstract: Like Dorothy, our characters have so far lived in a black and white world. This week we’re leaving Kansas and adding color. There’s many methods for creating our character texture(s) including hand-painting, baking maps that accent the painting process (great for the less painterly character artists), as well as photo-sourcing. There's also a couple different formats: Vertex Colors and UV/Textures.
Goal of the Week: Get comfortable with painting textures.
Pre-recorded courses to watch:
Week 4 Live Event (Don't forget to RSVP)
Homework:
This thread is reserved for CG Cookie Citizens that are participating in the "Creating Stylized Characters with Blender" class. Its purpose is to serve as central communication for all participating Citizens (excluding Hobby plan Citizens) to ask me and each other questions and to post homework. As the instructor of the class, I will be monitoring this thread on a daily basis (especially Mon-Thurs) throughout the month of March to review homework and answer questions.
Free members are welcome to observe the thread but please respect that communication is reserved for Citizens.
Assignment Week 2
Currently fighting off sleep- been a long week. Sculpt is almost done, and will be added to this post some time before class. I just need to finish the face, which unlike my usual sculpting workflow, was left until the end. In the mean time, here's the characters backstory(sorry in advance for broken English).
Adam is the security officer in charge of mining outpost ZT-1049; located on a small asteroid somewhere out in the middle of no where. Following a brief rise to fame after becoming the record holder for flushing the most unsuspecting raiders out of airlocks and receiving several lawsuits from the Human Civil liberties Union, Space Y Corporation decided to transfer star employee Adam somewhere far from the public eye. Fortunately, Adam really doesn't mind the place. With a population of only 29 people he finds the job rather easy, and spends his days either sleeping in his private security room or eagerly waiting for the next raider to try and break in. Ed from TN-9430 was getting a bit too close to his record for comfort, after all.
Age: 26
Interests: Western films, Old guns, Airlocks
Notable Achievements: Flushing 432 raiders out of remotely opened airlocks(Current record holder for this)
Hobbies: Sleeping, role playing as a cowboy
6 AM update: Looking at it now, I missed a few things on the coat. Also I had an a few issues with the booleans towards the end, but those most likely can be fixed later on(sleep first, fix later). A bit more detail on the boots wouldn't hurt either.
Would love some feedback!
WIP of my sculpt for week 2. It is still very rough but i want to show something befor stream 3.
It is still missing things like Backpack or shoes but even at this stage i think i learnd a lot of stuff. I am definitely going to fininsh this.
Concept by: @katsu0073 (Instagram)
I got a kick out of the humor in your backstory. The airlocks... 😆 I like how down-to-earth Adam's space career is; ups and downs.
Your sculpt is a good representation of the art, with details matching, pose is pretty close minus the right arm bend. Your character has gained a little weight from the art to the sculpt. Not a lot - maybe "big boned" is a better way to put it.
If I had one big note, it would be that there's not a ton of visual personality with the character, neither in art or sculpt. It's all fairly neutral. Now that I've read the back story, there's key actions that could translate into a pose for this concept sculpture. Like jolting up at his desk, alarmed at the sight of raiders sneaking in on his security monitors. Or him at his desk sleepy since nothing has happened at his job in several weeks. Something like that would have sold his character a bit more.
Still, you've accomplished the assignment well. It's a B+ in my book 👍
I love this concept art! Dynamic pose with a lot of personality. Great choice, Hans.
You're well on your way with the sculpt! It's a very authentic translation of the art so far 👍 I don't see anything in particular to point out as "this needs improvement". Just to keep up the good work. I see a lot of potential with this one.
One suggestion would be about the hair. You may drive yourself crazy trying to sculpt all those locks. It may be easier and end up looking better to use the technique in this video.
Oh no Kent! It appears that ssilenthans is sculpting a member of the Battered Bunnies. Looks to me like there will be some direct competition with your K-9 Fox character. It will be a neat composition with the two having a "stand off" with one another.
Thanks for updating the post with your concept art. I think the sculpt is coming along nicely! I like the pose and the details your forming. The coat feels a bit too chunky, both in thickness and general volume. For me it's making the pose more difficult to read, especially compared to the version without the coat.
What's making this difficult to grade is that there isn't an explicit design of this character among your concepts. They're more like utility sketches. Perhaps you're designing the character as you sculpt. So in that way I can't tell if it's an authentic translation or more of an exploratory sculpt.
Either way, I like what you're doing. Still unsure about the coat currently though. It's a B in my book 👍
Here's my WIP for BC2-1803 Week 2 homework. It's my first time sculpting asymmetry + pose mode, was struggling trying to match the concept art and having things make sense in 3D space. Still lots of things to be done and tweaked. It was a blast sculpting this character ;)
A lot of good stuffs going on this week, you guys are doing a fantastic jobs, I need to keep up with you guys ;)
Ach. I work so slowly. Here is another update. I find it difficult to sculpt a face without the eyes being colored and sometimes coloring the face helps me adjust other things. Trying a dramatic 'bat'-angle and some experiments with hair.
Lol, I was kinda lazy and laid back abit this week, I thought this character was simple but it turns out not to be so. Your sculpted character is incredible and you did all that by using a mouse?
Homework Submission - Week 2
Late! Due to previously mentioned hard drive failure. But, done.
Reference for....reference:
This was really challenging to sculpt. I kept seeming to want to naturally add more realism to the sculpture; but the concept art is cel-shaded cartoon style, which is very simple, and it forced me to keep having to go back and simplify the sculpting to maintain the style. I'm not 100% satisfied with the face likeness, but I'm going on the notion right now that the likeness will come closer during the texturing phase.
I've left Indy's gun and whip/bag out for now, I'll add it after the character retopology is done.
Backstory - well, it's Indiana Jones! Doctor Henry Jones, Jr. formally, he's a professor of anthropology who teaches archaeology classes at Marshall College in Connecticut. But when he's not teaching, he often goes on expeditions for the university to find or retrieve historical artifacts. These expeditions take him all over the world and occasionally into conflict with rival archaeologists, and representatives of foreign governments and militaries who are drawn to the mythical powers some artifacts are alleged to have.
Homework submission wk 2 (work in progress) -
I started with this as a skinned mesh, and ended up in the 9th level of clay strips hell.
So I went back to step one.
Here's my pre-sculpt, after taking the skinned mesh on the left and splitting it into a body shirt and robe.
It feels like this will help me get a better sculpt... (I don't see how I could do worse than my first go at it lol.)
Absolutely killed week 2 malhomsi. The lighting of your render really makes it pop. Curious did you use just a simple diffuse or principled shader?
Unfortunately I got no work done for Week 2 so I will need to play catch up.
My sculpt is essentially already in a neutralized position, so I'm going to take the opportunity to polish it some more before I retopologize.
I found out that due to the pose I choose some things bended really badly when trying to neutralize my character, practically making a mess of her proportions. I decided to cut her in pieces and use some vertices with the skin modifier as a guide. Before continuing, what do you guys think of her proportions?
I may need to do some work on her upper legs, some muscles lost their shape in the process.
You may still be on time, depending on how much free time you have. Week 1's homework is a cartoony head sculpt and to choose concept art for a character you will use the rest of the month, Week 2 is sculpting said character and write it's background. We just started week 3, we have to retopo a robot sculpt and decide if we will do the same to our character's sculpt or to keep perfecting it.
Some students used their chosen character for the head sculpt and continued it for week 2, you could save some time doing this.
You won't be the only one catching up, so don't worry. Hope you can join us!
I'm pretty far behind the class and hoping to catch up on the required courses--and figure out how to fix all the sloppy creasing and clothing edges I have going on.
It occurred to me some of my troubles may be I've been sculpting strictly in the dyntopo Subdivide Collapse mode? Would Collapse Edges help me get rid of some of the lumpiness I have going on in the robe & shirt? (I'm not exactly sure when to use which mode.)
This class has been a blast even though I'm not quite ready for it. I'm seeing some pretty great stuff in this thread!