This year, I’ve really been wanting to improve. Not just technically, as always, but mostly in terms of my output. Finishing models and not being so perfectionist about them and scrapping them like I have done in the past. I’ve been working hard on that, but it’s very difficult. I realised, at some point my goal just slipped. I started just wanting to make art of the characters I liked, and then it became “Make good(TM) art”. I got into the habit, and lost so much time just studying and redoing.

I’ve been trying to change that this year, but, to my horror, it’s already March. Almost the end of March. I’m honestly not sure where the time went; it seemed like it was just January. I’ve been bogged down with bad mental health and work, and somehow the time slipped right past me. Seeing that, I wanted to push myself. So I decided to make another model. This time, I wanted to try two things. One, making a slimmer base mesh that’s easy to transform into what I need, and two, making a model of Heat.

I’d been struggling a lot in technical ways. Things like, the massive difference between the density requirements for a head and the body. Keeping important details without having to dynamesh the whole thing to a heavy and hard to smooth polycount. How best to make a reusable basemesh without leaving it too rough and undefined; having solid anatomy but also making it soft enough to be versatile. These kinds of things cause me a lot of frustration. I often wish that it was more like real clay might be. Reality doesn’t have a polycount; if you want to smooth something, you can just smooth it. Or tricky angles; you can just rotate your model with one hand, and your tool with the other. The angle you’re using isn’t view-dependent. I found, surprisingly, that it felt like it would be a lot easier if only it was a bit of clay in my hands.

Still, I did try. I made a relatively basic mesh. Just defining the anatomy a bit, but not going overboard.

I’m still crap at legs, and struggle to soften forms in a way consistent with skin. Just using the smooth tool is insufficient; the effect of skin isn’t just smoothing it. It also fills in the gaps, and, with some things like back muscles, for example, can make them seem to take on a different shape, or connect into other muscles that they’re not attached to. It’s very difficult.

But from there, I was able to build it up into a more muscular body. It’s a bit more muscle than the character I was aiming for actually has, but I’ll call it artistic licence.

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I’m actually fairly happy with the torso. It has problems, but it’s not terrible, exactly. The legs aren’t good, though.

The head, hands, and feet, were ones I made separately and attached. I had trouble here. The resolution the body needs to get a reasonably level of detail is only about half, or maybe 2/3, of what the head will need. If you dynamesh the head to match the body, you can’t get an adequate level of detail. But if you dynamesh the body to match the head, if you want to tweak things, it becomes more difficult. And it results in a larger file size, making saving and loading more of a hassle. At times like this, I’m very envious of traditional sculptors. To sculpt without ever having to think about a polygon count or something technical like that would be lovely.

It’s also hard when you have to make a mouth cavity, and eye cavities to make them something you can rig. It’s difficult to do those without losing parts of your original face structure, mouth shape, etc, I’ve found. Still, I did that as best I could, and then moved onto clothing and armour.

That’s an area I’m still incredibly weak at; I just don’t have much experience, and the logic of the way clothes are put together, and fold and crease, is completely different from muscles and bones. I’m also not sure, when it comes to technicality, how to put it together. A lot of things would be easier if I only had to consider them as a statue. But models for posing are completely different. I made most of the parts I needed, though they’re not good. The leg parts, I just became frustrated and did a very simplified version. I wasn’t satisfied with it, but it was still something.

Then the last problem was topology. I’d found before that automatic retopology wasn’t quite reliable enough, giving me so-so results in important areas. I thought it would be best to at least do the face manually, but because it was too hard to attach a manual face to a mid poly model, I ended up just manually retopologising the whole thing. It was good practice, but horrible; it takes much too much time, and the ZSphere retopology ZBrush allows didn’t work well on the hands and feet. I ended up having to do them separately and awkwardly attach them.

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I later did some tests; it might be better next time if I just do a very low poly auto retopology on the body, make a manual head and attach it, then modify the topology manually as needed and subdivide to the resolution I need. Either that, or I’d have to suck up ZRemesher’s really high poly results.

The trouble with that is performance. In the end, after all that effort, I ended up not even being able to use my model, ugh. The polycount needed to keep most of the details from my model seemed to cause Blender to choke. It kept freezing up on me, and then just crashed outright, without even freezing. It can’t seem to handle it at all. Ever since 2.8, the performance has been bad, and it looks like the recent version is even worse.

If I can’t even do anything with the model, it might as well be a statue, and then I wouldn’t have had to bother with topology or any of that in the first place. It’s incredibly frustrating to have spent my days off on it and then have the software screw me over. If it can’t even handle the character, how will it handle it rigged, in an environment?

So, I’m feeling very frustrated. Wondering why I bothered if it can’t even handle it after all I did. I’m feeling torn. I sometimes just want to give up….But I really want to sculpt and make art. I’m not really sure what I should do. I need to think it over and work out how to make things work, or if I should just give up on it, or change things a lot.