#but def makes it more obvious when i forget to unhide his eyeballs

[puttlesculpts]

Step 6: Build the skull mask, ruminate a lot. Blender pt 5

With the hood in a good enough place to move on, I wanted to see what it would look like if I used the premade skull mask I had found. As the existence of this post implies: it didn't looks very good!

Never even took a screenshot cuz I nixed that idea so quickly. Which was great, because it was a sign that I was getting more confident in what I could do and the sudden idea of making a mask from scratch was no longer daunting. So I mads a few references and set out to "trace" the model via a flat image and editing the primitive in the isometric views:

Took a screenshot as face-on as I could but still had to skew + mirror it in PS cus ya boy's face is pretty angled. At least the profile is easy to just rotate.

Anyway, here it is with the images placed for Optimal Isometric Modeling:

What you don't see here is the struggle to figure out the best way to actually trace things. Ya I could have watched a video, but at some point you just gotta play around with it on your own. So I ended up taking the woodcarving technique and moving all the vertices to where they needed to be at the most important angle. In this case, in Front View, where I moved everything to the exact place I needed it to be on the x/y-axis, which left most of the sculpting to happen on the z-axis.

This was ALSO the first time I ever deleted faces, something which I forgot I could do, and was much easier than my original plan of just sinking the unneeded surface into his face lol (should probably go back and do this for some of the boot parts)

The mask itself presented a pretty good set of challenges from the previous endeavors, especially with the more natural and rigid nature of bone. I feel like with the cloth of the pants/hood I was able to get away with a little less precision, as there is an inherent unpredictability to the way cloth falls which would not be too noticeable so long as I implied weight well enough (something I was conscious of and played around with :^) ), but the skull portion has a very distinct look with the shapes and shadows.

The mask also needs to be a balancing contrast to the otherwise soft nature of the surrounding cloth pieces. I am wary of my sculpts looking uncanny due to being too smooth and play doh-y (like how the Sims 3 sims looked lmaooo), which is where the skull would come in. I do plan/hope/am praying that brushes will help toward the end to give things a bit of a lived-in feel, and I know there's a way to add additional 3D textures similar to how you add 2D ones, but that was something I briefly tried to do in the past with no luck. In spite of that, I am confident I will be able to figure it out now that I've learned so much more about what I am actually doing in Blender.

With all that being said, the teeth killed me lmao

When I made the general shape of the mask, I thought about just using the mouth portion from the original model I was gonna use. However, that gave me a whole nest of problems on its own. Mainly these huge fucking clusters of vertices:

They made Blender super slow, hoping between edit/object mode was a nightmare, and applying a modifier was a guarantee like 5 minutes of no response. And I spent a good amount of time and troubleshooting trying to fix this (including decimating the geometry, attempting to remove this entire back side + extruding, mirroring, etc) but at the end of the day I just decided it wasn't worth it.

This was a major factor in my decision to started moving away from remixing existing models. I realized that I actually do care about the amount of control I have over them + with each successful part I made, it would make each borrowed one feel that much more out of place.

So major character development here: I am officially gonna axe any plans I had for borrowing models! Except for the skull pauldron, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there lol

Anyway, here are the steps I took trying to make the teeth work before decided to JUST include the teeth and do the rest of the sculpting post-print in epoxy.

I ended up using someone else's teeth tho cus I tried making my own via extrusion (looked bad, look like those lil square gums) and sculpting.

Turns out idk what teeth look like and I could not be bothered to do the entire reference process, especially when I KNOW someone out there probably made a perfectly good set of individual teeth. And someone did!

Anyway, I refined the mask further to give it more shape and will probably continue to work on the teeth as I progress onto other pieces. Who knows, maybe I will eventually gain the skills and confident to say fuck it and just make the entire mask in 3D too.

Up next: Additional head details, maybe the straps on his chest? Gloves pt 2? The BIG cloth wraps? tbd tbh

Sneak preview of the extra details + o ya I learned how to add simple colors cuz it was getting difficult to see all the different lil light gray pieces on his head, but then I got carried away and did the whole body