Sketchbook: Sundae Bell
Hello! I'm Sundae. I want to become a 3D character artist.
I have some self-taught 2D drawing experience but I'm fresh to 3D and excited to learn.
I will post my 3D art, concepts, & references here to catalog my lessons learned.
All critique is welcome! I'm new to everything :p
Replies
[Graxus the Monk]
My first project is attempting to make a "game-ready" character.
The character is a male, half-orc monk. He's one of my friend's D&D characters. I think he's pretty neat.
This is a pretty big project for my first go, but I'm hoping I mess up a ton of stuff and learn how to fix some things in the process. I'm giving myself 5 weeks to complete it. Each day working 3ish hours (I don't wanna burn out my eyes) Complete meaning I have a rigged and textured character. I mean I gotta finish it some time and I guess that's a goal. I'm using 2 online courses to learn the pipeline and workflow of 3D character creation:
Course 1: Crimson Ronin - PBR Character Creation by P2Design
-is pretty fast-paced but shows in depth the process of how to make a low poly 3D game character (I'm learning a lot from it)
Course 2: Complete Guide to Realistic Character Creation in Blender by Corazon Bryant
-is pretty slow but Mrs. Corazon skips no details in her workflow. Her course is more focused on 3D character creation for films (but it's very useful!)
The main program I'm using for modeling is Blender (because I'm cheap) but it seems nice (and complicated..). There's a lot I don't get about Blender but I'm figuring it out slowly. An artist I admire provided me with a copy of 'Anatomy for Sculptors' and I bought 'Anatomy for 3D Artists,' both of these books have been phenomenal in helping me self-study anatomy for my model.
Progress so far [ 1 week has now passed since I started this guy ] :
This was a day 1 learning how to make a base from 5 spheres. no hands or feet yet T.T.
This was days 2-3 where I refined the model (simple hands and feet added! Sexy arms with extra muscle included XD)
This is days 4-5 where I added some meat to the model trying to get the correct anatomy (it's not great.. but it's something!) He's a big dude.
I put off detailing the hands and feet (they were intimidating ( ^ = ^ )
On day 6 I fleshed out the face and added some cool teeth (it took me a lot of the day to figure out making the mouth bag thing).
On day 7 (today) I figured out how to add color to the viewport and I also added some placeholders for his hair and his muttonchops. I'm gonna work on his hands and feet finally too. I've learned in the 2 courses that there are different ways to do the hair, course 2 focuses on particle hair for film use. I'll have to learn how to do hair cards (i think) to get the effect I want of nice textured hair that's feasible for real-time rendering.
==Problems I currently don't know how to fix==
I've been running into an issue, my incompetence, lol well that's probably the reason but I'm not sure when I'm supposed to apply things like scale/transformation/ rotation in Blender. I think this is causing an issue where when I load the program the next day some meshes aren't the original scale I made them in (like they'll be super tiny). It's not a huge issue yet as I just rescale it til it looks right... but I'm not really sure what I'm doing that's causing that effect.
More updates next week!
[Progress Update: Graxus the Monk -Base Retopology done]
So far its been 2 weeks and 5 days since I began this character (who's counting..) -well me I guess lol
So my latest progress on Graxus the monk has been learning how to do re-topology! It was a lot more difficult than I thought and took some time to figure it out. It was kind of intimidating, so I ended up procrastinating for a few days on it watching how-to videos.
The method I used for retopology was I think what is considered the normal 'vanilla method' with a blender. I just started with a single smallish plane and sized it down to about the width of one nostril. I turned on back-face culling then applied a mirror/ shrink-wrap modifier to the plane and began creating essential loops on the face. My workflow for retopology as taught to me in the tutorials I watched was:
*Create essential loops first
~face
~upper body/ lower body
~hands/ feet
*fill in planes in the same order around essential loops (avoiding triangles and Ngons)
-Body, front-
-Body, back-
-Body, side-
-Face, front-
-Face, side-
===Summary===
TBH retopology is hell.. it kicked my ass and was all around not fun lol. but I did my best at it and I think it came out okay. No Ngons, I think there are like 2 triangles on the toes. I don't think it will be an issue... hopefully. In total, the base ended up at about 12k Polys plus another 10k for the eyes, which seems very low. Hopefully, there might be a way to increase (like double?) that a little for more definition, like maybe subdivision or something without creating a huge headache. I'll look into it.
*Lessons Learned- Make sure to exaggerate the A pose more (lift the arms) when modeling, otherwise retopping the armpit seam is not a good time.
===What's next===
Next, on the docket, I will sketch out the armor and start modeling that out. I'm kind of hoping if I box model it off the retopologized skin it won't be another huge retopology adventure down the road.. but well see I guess lol. I am very excited to kit Graxus out in some cool monk gear. He does carry a crystal sword around too, so, I'll give a go at trying to model that too.
===Problems I figured out or still have===
In the last post, I was having an issue with scale, so the biggest problem I was running into was Blender has the space bar hotkey connected to the animator by default. And I'm not sure how, but when I started modeling Graxus I was somehow creating key animation frames and when I accidentally hit CTRL + Mouse wheel it would scroll through the different frames just screwing my model's scale up. I fixed it by reverting to an autosave that had the correct scale and deleting all the animation frames, and then I switched my space hotkey to the search function. It has made my life more convenient. Also too now whenever I use the scale function in object mode I always make sure to apply it.