3D Character Modelling

3D character modelling is something I want to specialise in and get better every day. It has been my interest for a few years now and I would very much like to make it into a career later on. There’s something extremely therapeutic to listen to some calming music whilst sculpting away in ZBrush. I never actually got interested in actual sculpting with clay. I have tried it multiple times but just felt like the process was very dirty and the results weren’t something I was happy with.

Then came ZBrush. We had our first lesson on it during our third year in our bachelor’s as we were sculpting our bobbleheads for the character modelling brief. I was so excited about it that I went and bought the software for myself, keen to learn more and deciding on the spot that this is what I want to do. From there on I thoroughly enjoyed modelling characters for our final year film and during my free time.

I admit I should’ve been more diligent with my practice though, as I realised by the end of the fourth year that I had not had much time to do that after all. I modelled Disney’s Ariel for one of the personal briefs and quickly realised I was lacking in technique – and a lot. I was very happy at the time with how the model turned out but looking back at it now, just a few months later, I can see I still have miles to go!

For my other additional modelling brief, I modelled my dog but this model didn’t turn out great at all. Quite frankly, its eyes still give me nightmares. I was happy with the pose and the body but the artistic choice to go for cartoony facial features was clearly the wrong one. I admit it was fun playing around with the hair fibermesh for the fur, even though I wasn’t 100% sure what I was doing half the time.

To move forward from here and to get better at modelling during my Masters, my plan is to sculpt more. Much more.

My main objective is to familiarise myself with the character sculpting pipeline to a point where I can confidently create a character from start to finish without checking the progress constantly and searching online for ways to perform certain manoeuvres inside the software. The process should come from muscle memory.

To achieve that I’m looking at different characters online from known films and books, like so far The Groke and Snorkmaiden from the Moomins and Wei Wuxian from the Netflix series The Untamed and trying to recreate them in 3D, from the simplest of shapes to more detailed work such as clothes and hair using simulations.

I will also be studying anatomy more in-depth by sculpting human body parts in ZBrush as well as getting back to basics and drawing the human form in 2D. Below are some examples of that from last year, including online life drawing and studies from Aaron Blaise’s Human Anatomy course.

So far I have done some simple modelling practice in ZBrush by modelling anatomy in quick max 5min studies of ears, eyes and so on and a few characters from the Finnish Moomins. I chose Moomins because the shapes of the characters are very simple and round, making the modelling process so much quicker. I struggle with likeness a lot, so it would be good to start off with something very simple. I think my biggest issue when starting was to begin modelling difficult things first, which lead to frustration when the end result wasn’t as I had hoped it to be. I have a very toxic trait of expecting way too much from myself and then getting angry when the end result isn’t at the level I want it to be. I also compare my work to professionals, which is not healthy as this leads to more frustration after realising how much I still have to learn. In a sense, it’s a brilliant learning opportunity, to give me more time to learn and to try to make my overactive brain understand that building skills take time and that everyone’s journey is different.

A few anatomical studies were done in ZBrush. I allowed a maximum of fifteen minutes per piece, resulting in quick observations which ended up being quite successful. I followed Follygon’s youtube tutorials of simple modelling and learned how to quickly achieve a professional-looking result.

Above are the two Moomin characters I made in ZBrush. Even though they are very simple, I’m very happy with them. This is due to the likeness I managed to achieve, so my hypothesis about starting simply to achieve likeness was correct. I stayed in ZBrush the whole time, so the topology was cleaned with Zremesher and texture was achieved by using polypaint. Going forward I’m going to try to send one or both to 3D printing and see how the models turn out.