More Character Modelling

30 days sculpt challenge?

Oh boy. When I made my last post about the self-portrait and how I bragged about how I would sculpt until I got sick of it, I had no idea where I would end up. It certainly wasn’t the end result I had hoped for! Little did I know, that I would be completely swallowed by the Going Live module as well as all the 2D work for my program of study. As I’m sitting here writing this I feel utterly disappointed and let down that after all these weeks I didn’t manage to model more than two characters. I didn’t even have time to model the character items I had hoped to achieve.

I beat myself about this fact for a good while before trying to be more merciful to myself and the fact that I still worked really hard on many other things. It was simply the lack of time that made my plans fell apart, even though the poor scheduling too, was my fault. Even still, the two models I made were arguably the best I’ve ever done, so there’s a small win in that.

Raincoat Girl and her dog by Meg Park, unknown year.

The girl

When I had a talk about possible character designs with Susan back when this semester started, Susan mentioned an artist called Meg Park. I had a quick Google and realised that her designs were absolutely adorable. Susan mentioned, that she often heard studios saying how new modellers never seemed to have any models of children and elders in their portfolio, so I decided to focus on those instead of the endless stream of Disney girls.

For my first model, I picked up this cute design of a raincoat girl and her Scottish terrier. I loved the simplicity of the design yet small details like her curly hair and green boots. The fact that she wore a big raincoat was good too, as it meant that I didn’t need to actually sculpt any arms!

So to ZBrush we went! I started the modelling process with simple blocking shapes before tackling her face. It was so much fun making something round and childlike for a change. I kept looking at the model from the side view often, as I was trying to replicate the same side profile as in the character design sheet. Of course, some differences arose, as with stylized 2D often happens as some things just aren’t physically possible in the 3D, a great example being the eyes. They’re often too visible from the side view, which would make them very wide apart when looking at the front.

For the hair, I used a curly hair brush and then separated each strand individually with the move topology brush to make the hair flow a bit more naturally.

As with the self-portrait, I wanted to use the same pipeline of polypaint to Blender, so I painted all the details in ZBrush. I’m slowly starting to become better at poly painting, adding actual skin details and wrinkles too! I hope that someday I’d be able to make something hyperrealistic. To achieve a somewhat realistic result I opted to use some stitch alphas I had to decorate the raincoat. For some reason I really like sharp and neat details on models, so even if the character itself was very cartoonish there would still be some elements that were realistic and finished as well as possible.

After I was done with the girl I still needed to make her furry companion. I felt like the final piece would’ve been lacking with just the girl, so I opted to sculpt the dog too. Since I was going to use particle hair in Blender for the dog’s coat, I didn’t put too much effort into the sculpture itself. When the dog was finished as well, I used GOZ to import the pair into Blender.

In Blender, I decided to make some changes to the materials like the raincoat and both of the eyes of the characters. I wanted the raincoat to be like shiny plastic so I used the nodes to recreate that look. For the dog I went ahead and created a hairy fur with the hair particles, but only on the side that was visible on the camera. Since the shot I was going for was so heavy with slow rendering stuff I decided not to make a turnaround but a nice still render instead. And adding only half a dog of fur definitely sped things up a lot. I used a realistic nature pack I had purchased from CG Geek a few years back for the ground and for the atmosphere, I created a volumetric mist with a colour ramp to make sure that the fog was only really on the bottom of the shot.

I also wanted to create something to the sky around the characters, so I decided to make volumetric particles with white icospheres and with some detailed camerawork I was able to create a very lovely soft first snowfall around the scene. I kept the lighting very desaturated and moody and voila we had a very lovely render that took around 1,5hrs to complete rendering.

This render became my favourite 3D piece I have ever made to this day. Like someone who commented on my LinkedIn post about it, simplicity at its finest. It’s not busy, it’s peaceful and quiet. The mixture between cartoon and realism is very lovely and I’m super proud of how far I’ve come with not only modelling but scene building too. Before I’d always need to find a reference and a tutorial to be able to create a scene, but now I’m able to actually sketch with 3D and composite a shot I want to make without any help from references. The characters are very simple of course, but at the same time, I really like how they turned out. Overall a very successful piece then.

If Noth Karelia was a person

Okay, so how do we top that previous piece? The answer is no we really can’t, but we can make something pretty cool with just character modelling and nothing extra around it. Since the other point Susan was mentioning was missing elders from portfolios, that’s exactly what I decided to do. Again I browsed through Meg Park’s designs and I found an amazing design of a literal crazy cat lady.

Cat Lady by Meg Park, unknown year

I simply love this design. The lady in the picture reminds me so much of my grandma from my mother’s side, who lived to the very end on her tiny farm in the middle of nowhere in North Karelia. She was the epitome of Finnish sisu and I always admired her for it. I understand that this picture isn’t exactly the most flattering to compare your grandma with but I’m more than sure that she would’ve absolutely agreed and laughed!

Again I started with simple block shapes in ZBrush and my god did I laugh at the small and round lady that emerged. I just felt like she was so cute. I had soo much fun with the face, adding all the wrinkles and small details. Her cheeks and chin were an absolute joy to sculpt too. She just had so much anger and emotion on her face and I’m super glad I was able to replicate it so well.

I went a little heavy-handed with the poly paint, which I’m not mad about as it worked well in this situation. I added loads of wrinkles and moles as well as other small details that would make her skin look more realistic. For the hair I was able to use the same curl brush as with the little girl, only this time going nuts with the move brush and really making the hair strands stand up straight at times.

Her body was a lot simpler to make compared to the face, as she was mostly covered by the apron and the dress. Her legs were so barely visible that I didn’t need to add much detail to them at all. I first made her hands in an A pose for better symmetry and then posed them so that she would be able to hold one of her cats and in her other arm I really just had to add a rolling pin because there is no Karelia grandma without one.

Since I had already made the dog for the girl I felt like Grandma needed her cat too. The cats in the character design sheet were very simple, so I was able to quickly sculpt a long black cat in her arms. I’d again use the hair particles in Blender for some added fur.

Back in Blender, I decided to skip any complicated backgrounds and simply create a yellow backdrop as the original painting had. The colour contrast between the pink and the yellow worked so well that I had to replicate it. I used three-point lighting to frame the characters and then added some hair particles first to the cat and then to the scarf Grandma was wearing. I had done the tassels in ZBrush but didn’t like how clunky they looked so decided to opt for hair instead. In hindsight, I’m not entirely sure if this was the best possible solution, but it worked well enough. I also added some hair particles to her eyebrows to make them more like the character design had.

I had actually planned on using image fabric texture for her clothes but soon realised that of course, it wasn’t possible as there weren’t any unwrapped UVs on the model as I just booted it out of ZBrush. So instead I used nodes to create a very simple fabric texture which kind of blew up the first time I tried it. For a minute there Grandma had the sickest furry dance outfit before I made some changes to the values I had with displacement.

And there they were. This render wasn’t anything exceptionally amazing or unique, but it was a good character render nevertheless. Cat Lady Grandma has so much soul in her, that she completely steals the show. I’m very proud of the face, as I’ve never once before tried to sculpt an elderly character before. The deep lines and small details like moles and bumpy skin on her arms look very nice and even the quick sculpt of the cat looks pretty decent by her side.

I still am a little disappointed that I didn’t do more during this semester, but I’m trying to remind myself that I, in fact, modelled six characters in total if you count in the animals too. That’s more than what I did during the first semester so I guess come semester three and I’ll have even more! I’m also glad about the quality as all of my sculpts from this semester is a huge improvement in technical skills as well as artistic. I’m also starting to get the hang of the likeness which is something I’ve always struggled with (and keep mentioning). I had one more sculpt I started to make, a lion but lost interest in it very quickly and ended up never finishing it. Maybe I’ll manage to do that later on.

For sure, next semester I’ll try harder to create more, even though I know I’ll be so busy with the Degree Show!