Sculpt Mode

In preparation for this project, I decided I would try and learn a little bit more about Blender's sculpt mode, since I would be primarily using this in order to sculpt my statue. I wanted to experiment with different methods and brushes, in order to get a better understanding about how to create an organic creature in sculpt mode.

Trials

I started off by looking at some online tutorials and guides on where to start in sculpt mode. One tutorial I looked at suggested to start with an icosphere with high subdivisions, however my more experienced peers steered me away from this, as it is comprised entirely of triangles, which are infamous for being tricky to work with later on. As an alternative, I began working with UV spheres with applied subdivisions. This seemed to work better, however (as you can see from the top left image), my techniques were still a little rusty. This image is, of course, a first trial, although I learned plenty of useful lessons from this. I learned that getting the basic shapes laid out first is essential, and that finer details must come later (part of the reason this model looks so strange is because I tried to start with the nose/eyes/mouth rather than face shape). Of course I also did not realise that you can reflect your brushes, and so it looks very lopsided.

With my second attempt, I think I did a lot better. The fact that I applied the reflect function to all of my brushes definitely helped, however I also think that the fact I made the eyeballs different objects also helped (a strategy recommended by a peer). I did have the issue with this one, however, that while I was able to get incredible detail, that blender was lagging and crashing due to the number of polys. This was the point at which I decided I would look deeper into multires, as it was a good tool to help with getting detail whilst maintaining a realistic amount of polys.

My final trial was of this little cat (or dog?). I didn't want to do another human, since I had already done three or four of them and was starting to get bored, and I think I was able to get fairly realistic proportions and shapes. More importantly, I played around with multires, increasing the subdivisions as the model got more and more complicated. I will go into more detail later on, however this combined with the "smooth shading" option can create organic looking models with a low poly count.

Referenced Sculpt

After experimenting with lots of different brushes, techniques, and features, I decided that I wanted to experiment further with character design and humanoid features in preparation for modelling my statue.

In order to replicate what I will be doing when I eventually create my own asset, I decided to quickly sketch up a reference for a fantasy character. I wanted it to be fairly simple, but with some more cartoonish aspects to see if I could effectively translate this into 3D; I ended up with this elf-like woman, with large eyes, a roman-style nose, and pointed ears. I knew that I wanted this model to be as good as I could make it with my limited skills and experience in order to develop, and so I made sure to allow for a lot of wiggle room in regards to face and feature shape, especially when it came to the mouth, as I personally have difficulty drawing/sculpting lips. After finishing this sketch, I exported it and placed it in blender as a reference image.

Facial Sculpting

After importing my reference into blender, I whipped up a UV sphere, applied my multi resolution modifier, and began to sculpt. I found that while orthographic mode was good for getting the general shape of features and proportions, it could only be used reasonably whilst the mesh was set to wireframe or transparent, which is difficult to see depth and shape very easily, so for the most part I was in perspective mode, and sculpting pretty much freehand, with a little help from the reference to get down the basic shapes.

I started by sculpting the general shape of the head and ears, and giving her eye sockets and a nose. I started defining larger facial structures such as the mouth, in preparation for greater detail. I increased the subdivisions as I went, gaining more detail as needed. I defined the nostrils, the lips, and the more detailed bits of the ears. I was constantly tweaking little bits of the model, layering up and taking away, until the model looked satisfactory.

After I had tweaked and tweaked, and added 5 total layers of multires, I created 2 spheres for the eyes and mirrored them, putting them in the pre-moulded eye sockets. I added some extra layers around the eyes so that they looked more natural, and then the face was done. I didn't just want to leave it there, so I gave myself the extra challenge of trying to model hair.

Hair

The majority of the sources I found on how to create hair in the style that I wanted recommended using bezier curves. I think that attempting to sculpt or model natural hair any other way would just look strange. I watched this video (to the top right) to learn more about this, before practicing on my own model.

The whole concept of nurbs and bezier curves was a little scary to me initially, hence my notes in my research writing off this technique as "too mathematical" for my more naturally artistic brain. After watching the tutorial, however, I realized that this method can be used to easily create organic shapes, and fine-tune even the smallest details, which are integral to creating a dynamic and realistic looking hair.

In order to use curves to create hair, you must create a simple path, and then apply geometry to it, which you can control with an external bezier circle. Using alt-S, you can scale different parts of the individual curves in order to taper the end of the shape, creating a shape that looks like hair. By tweaking and adjusting these paths, you can create different wads of hair, and layer them up to create a large silhouette of what the assets hair will look like. For more simple or stylized assets, this alone might be enough, however the tutorial showed me how to take it a step further.

By manipulating the circle which controls the geometry of the paths, you can add texture to the wads, and give the illusion of individual strands hair. I love how this looks, and am amazed by how simple and easy it is to create realistic hair. I will definitely be using these techniques to model my final asset, and am glad that I dedicated time into researching more into sculpt mode.

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