saskiaraynefmpyear2

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Project Evaluation

Media And techniques:

The program I used for this project was Blender, as this is the program I am most familiar with and work with often. As I took the initiative to learn something completely new, there was a lot of research and things to learn for this project. 

I learned fully, from scratch, how to sculpt and model a character in 3D. Research helped a lot as I had to constantly go back to tutorials to see what techniques other people used, and how they modelled and sculpted their own characters. This was useful when it came to things such as trying new techniques to make a face without it ending up looking weird. It was also helpful when modelling things like the main body, as people would tell you about the right proportion to use and how to sculpt the details of muscles.

Blender was a good choice of program, I feel like, to use this project. As I said, I am already familiar with it, and so I know my way around it pretty easily, and I know about the shortcuts used for a productive workflow. It also worked well for my character modelling, as I wanted to make something more stylised, and not realistic - if I wanted to do realism, Zbrush 100% would’ve been a lot better of a program to use for this. Zbrush would’ve made things a fair bit easier for me when sculpting, as it is a sculpting program, but I managed to reach my goal with Blender, and I am fairly happy with the result.

Purpose/ Theme/ Concept:

A lot of the time I came across a lot of problems, which is unavoidable as this was an entire new area I was going into. If I did come across some issues, which most of the time was something not being sculpted right, I would try again, and watch some tutorials or speed sculpts to get a general idea for how most people would sculpt something I was struggling on. 

For example, I had a lot of issues sculpting the face, so I kept retrying different artists' ways of sculpting a face until I came across one that worked for me. A lot of the time, the whole process was to go with the flow, see what looked good and getting criticism from classmates to further improve my work, and this seemed to work out well as in the end I had something I was content with. 

My proposal was pretty broad, and all I wanted was to create the body of the character, so overall I didn’t need to change my direction or change anything to hit the themes of my proposal.

Outcome:

Overall, I feel very happy with what I have ended up with. I feel like, even though some of my expectations weren’t met, like posing and making the FULL body of my character, I have ended up with something I am proud of, and I can take a lot of the skills I have learned from this project to make better characters in the future. 

In my brief, I mainly wanted to get familiar with character sculpting, and wanted to get as far down the body as I could, and I managed to get to the knees of my character, so I am very content. My MVP too, was also completed in time, and I was proud of what I had made for that. Overall, even though there was some stressful moments, I managed to finish with something I am happy with.

Conclusion:

Even though I feel like this project has gone very well for me, there are a fair amount of things I would do differently and improve on if I was to do this again. For example, creating my character in an A pose, or in an already thought of pose, and waiting to join the objects together to avoid any weird merging (like what happened with my arm and torso). Looking into more facial expressions too would’ve helped me to make my character convey more emotion. 

I have learned a lot overall, like remeshing, voxel sizing, body proportion, stylising a character in 3D and how to sculpt details. All of this will help me in the future.

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Final Outcome Turntable

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Final Outcome Turntable Process

For presenting my final outcome, I wanted to create a 3D turn table for my character. With not much knowledge on how to do this, I went to YouTube and found a video to help me out. 

The first thing I did was add an empty object that would be the centre point for the animation and camera for my turn table. This would be a plane axis. I placed it at teh centre of my characters body.

The next thing I did was set my frames to 300, and insert a key frame for the rotation of the empty object pressing i and selecting rotation. 

Next, I would rotate the empty object by 180 degrees at frame 150, since this is half way through the 300 frames and the 180 degrees would be half the full circle of 360 degrees. I repeated this step again at 300 frames.

Next, for a smooth continuous motion, I would press v to add a vector handle type to the graph editor. 

Finally, I would set up a camera and parent the camera to the object with the transformation. This would make it so that when the animation plays, the camera spins along with the empty object to create the turn table animation. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Final Outcome

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Progress Overtime

As I reach the end of the project, I take a look at all of my work I had done to actually get to this point. With the way I work, I usually make something, duplicate it out, then continue to work on the duplicated version to further progress the model without losing much work. This is how it looked in the end:

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Outfit - Black vs White

After I had finished making the clothing, I started to play around with colours. One of my classmates suggested that I should try out black clothing, so I did, and then compared both the white and black outfits. 

In the end, a lot of people, including myself, preferred the black outfit, they said that it is a nice contrast to the white hair, and that if everything was white (clothing and hair), it would blend in too much and nothing would stand out. 

So, I decided to stick with the black outfit, and changed the roughness and made the material of the clothing slightly more shiny, to give off a latex feel. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

HANDS!!

Making the hands, admittedly, was one of the harder processes of making this character. Actually getting the proportions right alone was enough to drive me insane, and it took a fair amount of tutorials and watching speed sculpts for me to find something that worked. 

I ended up making a relaxed hand pose, using scaled circles to turn them into fingers and a palm. I’d use the grab sculpt brush to move the hand around to get a general hand shape. As its nearing the end of the project, I would make a basic relaxed hand and scale it in proportion to the body to finish up the model. If I have time, I will definitely take to modelling and sculpting more details for the hand. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

handless - but almost done

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

How I Made The Clothes

The clothes overall were fairly easy to make. It was just a matter of making sure the mask used to map out the clothes wasn’t ragged and would end up making the clothes look bad. 

The tutorial I followed for the clothes is below, and it was very easy to follow and udnerstand:

Making the clothes was just a process of essentially drawing on the clothes with a mask tool, and then making the clothes an actual object and solidifying it, smoothing out the edges to get a finished result. it ended up working out very well. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

New Approach - Arms And Torso

After adding in a new torso and redoing the entire upper body, along with arms, my character sculpt ended up looking 10x better than it did before.

Below is the before image, and as you can tell, the breasts look very unnatural, and overall didn’t fit in with the lower body. The shoulders were also a bit too defined, and didn’t look right with the arms. 

After redoing the upper body, it looked a lot better. The model to the left is the new and improved one, and the breasts look a lot more natural and realistic compared to what they did before. The arms and shoulder too, were also improved and defined and overall her upper body had been felshed out a lot to look better. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Attempting To Fix Body

As I had to completely remove the torso of my character, I would need to start over by adding a circle and using the grab brush in sculpt to get the general shape of the upper body in place. 

From this point onwards, I would need to remesh and slowly add in the details, such as the collar bone, breasts, shoulders. All it would take was a bit of patience, the clay strip tool, smoothing and defining the creases in the body with a draw sharp brush. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

More Issues With Body Modelling - But I Know Why

There is quite a big issue I am facing at the moment. Luckily, I think I can fix it, as I have done my work in a process of steps instead of combining everything into one. 

The issue is that, the head of my character is fully sculpted, and I joined her head to the torso of the body when I first started sculpting it. The reason I am having issues with this currently is that I cannot properly sculpt out the rest of her torso, lower half of her body and even arms because I would need to constantly remesh the body parts.

Remeshing would allow me to work slowly up to doing more detail on my model, instead of jumping straight into final details from the start. This allows for easier sculpting as I can start by blocking the basic ideas first, and work off of them. 

However, to properly sculpt out the arms, I would need them to be joined to the torso of the body. However, the torso of the body and the head of my character are one model, so if I was to remesh the arms if they were joined to the torso, it would lower the polygons in the face, essentially destroying all the detail I have worked on. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Hard vs Organic Modelling

Organic modelling is usually creating 3D models of living creatures such as people or animals. Organic modeling includes all those real world things and stuffs that are curvy and dynamic in nature. Like Human beings, Terrains, Plants and trees etc.

Hard surface modelling is usually focused on inorganic objects such as buildings or furniture. Hard modeling includes all those things that are sharp and have some hard surface in nature. Like Tables, Chairs, Crates etc.

A lot of the time in my past projects, I would do stylised dioramas which I would need to use hard modelling a lot for things such as the buildings. A lot of the time I actually used hard modelling for plants and trees, as I felt it had a more stylised look than doing organic modelling; organic modelling would usually end up making the plants look a lot more realistic. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Making Simple Arms

Making the arms was fairly simple, all I had to do was make the basic shape out of some circles, and add them to the torso of the body. After I had done this, i would be able to slowly build up detail and remesh the model so that I can add things like the muscles, and make it overall look like a good arm. 

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Leg And Torso Details

After a load of remeshing and sculpting later, I ended up with a model that was coming along more and more, and giving me a result I am more happy with. 

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Adding Thighs To My Model

As it was my aim to fully make more of a thigh up model, so I could try sculpting some important features you would find in a succubus (like the curvy hips), and in general give her more of a seductive look, I decided to add on some basic ovals to mark out her thighs. 

From this point onwards, I can remesh and start to sculpt out her hips, thigh area.

[saskiaraynefmpyear2]

Lower Torso New Technique

After my last failed test, I moved on to trying out using two ovals for the body. This seemed to work out better, and in general gave my character better proportions to work with. 

I continued to work with this new model, and remeshed the ovals to give them more faces for a smoother look that began to match the rest of the body. From this point onwards, I would start to carve out and add the details that will really make her body look more, well, body like.