In over my head

atomicartist42
Jan 31, 2016
3 min read

Not too much thankfully, but this week certainly was a steep learning curve. I've learnt a new way to make a character, which whilst useful, did set me back a bit. Especially as I was planning for a low poly model to be made first, and am now going to do the reverse.

So the new method was creating my character entirely in Z-brush. I did not realise you could do that. We've only ever gone over making a base mesh in Max.

Getting to grips with the process was tricky at first, but in the end I do prefer it to modelling a mesh in max, as z-brush gives you a lot more freedom to experiment with body shape, proportion and face. Plus it is faster in the long run, as modelling characters, especially faces can be very tricky due to the very specific topology they require.

I didn't focus too much on anatomy for this project because most of my character will be covered by her clothes, so really I needed to focus on face, hands and feet, and just get the proportions down for the body. Though I do want to come back to it another time and create a full mesh for me to have as practise for future characters.

I did struggle a bit with the face, and it taught me that I do not know as much as I thought I did about the face, at least about the details of the face. This project has certainly highlighted to me that whilst I may have a good understanding of the broad strokes as it were, what I need to focus on now is the finer details, the muscles underneath the body, the different subtler planes of the face and so on.

I found watching a tutorial on sculpting faces with clay face really helped me with sculpting the face as it broke it down into the large planes to get down first, before fine tuning them to your requirements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1tH03sOhkU

So here is my overall character sculpt:

I did the hands separately then attached them to the body. They came out a bit claw-like, I haven't got time to fix them now, but I definitely want to get better at making hands. Sculpting a convincing relaxed hand was much tougher than I originally thought it would be.

I spent the most time on the face, since it's an incredibly important part of portraying personality for my character.

Here is an example of how the face progressed:

I had a bit of trouble with nailing the ethnicity, but I think I got close in the end, though it could still be improved:

I did a bit of research into what makes a Japanese face different from other ethnicities, which was very useful when sculpting.

Some more feedback I received on her was to work from an actual anatomical reference next time. I definitely agree with this as it would have made getting the finer details of the body shape right much easier.

I'm getting a little nervous about time now especially as I haven't actually achieved that much of last weeks action plan. It'll just mean making even more detailed to do lists to keep me on track.

Critical studies this week was about thinking about presentation of our characters. This will come in handy for both hand-in and our character pitches later on.

So new action plan to get back on task