I’ve been doing a lot of sketching recently. Until recently, when I’ve been making models, they’ve been focused at making something ready to retopologise and rig, something I could put my shaders on to render. It’s difficult, and time-consuming…Having to thing about whether it’ll hold up from multiple angles, different zooms, if the retopology is sufficient for the posing it’ll need…It’s hard.
Yan suggested I should sketch more, and when I tried, it was quite fun. It’s a lot less stressful, I’ve found, when I sketch. Not having to worry about topology or think too hard on rendering. If I want an eye, I can just carve one in. Not have to make a particular cavity for an eyeball because it’ll need to be able to rotate by itself when it’s retopologised. It only needs as much detail as a sketch needs…Not realistic, refined details. It’s….A lot more fun and relaxing. I’ve found myself getting into it a lot more.
I’ve been sculpting a lot of heads recently. I really want to get better at them. The image on the top left is how they tend to look before I dynamesh them to smooth them out. I like to carve them out more than add volume; it feels more natural to me, and it makes it easy to make the planes. Then when they’re firmly established, it’s easier to keep the shape when smoothing it out. I was quite pleased with the top left one, for a sketch.
I’m also trying to sculpt different kinds of faces….More realistic, more stylised, boney, soft. I don’t want to be only capable of sculpting one type of face. Or end up as one of those annoying CGI character artists that can only seem to sculpt scantily-clad women.
The male character there is a TKB model I’ve been working on. The face below that image is his. It’s difficult….For practice’s sake, I’ve focused on trying to learn realistic anatomy. But the Yugioh manga is very stylised, and they have very sharp faces. I couldn’t see Bakura, or any of them, with a very realistic appearance, like a wide chin or such. Takahashi’s style favoured sharp corners. So I tried to adapt that to a more realistic style, to make a semi-realistic type, keeping the sharp chin and nose, but not departing totally from reality. I’m not sure if I succeeded or not…But it’s a work in progress.
I feel fairly satisfied with his body, at least. It’s definitely not perfect, but it is better than previous ones I’d done. I took a bit of a different approach to sculpting the legs, which seemed to work out. The lower legs look better than previous efforts…Though the upper half isn’t great. I should also tweak the arms a bit…They don’t seem quite right. Too angular.
I also decided to practice making clothes. I’ve hit a wall here, unfortunately. ZBrushCore doesn’t seem to have good tools when it comes to making clothes with any complexity.
I tried making a jacket. This is an important test case because the flaps are a bit complicated. They fold over, but don’t connect, to the main jacket. Core doesn’t have any modeling tools, so I made it by masking and extracting. But when I tried to merge them, the image on the right happened. The dynamesh fuses it onto the jacket, and, I think because it’s narrow rather than thick, creates holes. It’s very frustrating….I realised working on that Maya model, it would be better to be able to just sculpt the clothes. Then I don’t have to mess about with topology until I have to retopologise it, and case relatively easily add things like zips, seams and buttons. But if it can’t handle something as simple as a flap, it’ll most likely choke on anything reasonable. And I really don’t want to have to model it and then waste hard drive space exporting it into ZBrushCore and then time having to align it properly. I tried using 3DCoat’s retopology tools to make a basic clothing mesh and then sculpt it there, but it can’t handle backfaces and lacks convenient tools to model anything that isn’t directly on the mesh, so I couldn’t really get it to work. They’d advertised their new cloth simulator and the support they’d put in the retopo room for making clothes, but it’s not really convenient for anything elaborate….Seems to be a running issue with 3DCoat.
So I’m very frustrated because of that. Character models aren’t good without clothes. I need to get better and able to make those. Especially given that some of them are very character-important, like TKB’s jacket in our version of citron. I have to find a solution.
Riya's NPR Log 