Month: December 2017

Intended Outcome:

• Create a final mesh before meeting with my tutor by creating the legs to my creature.

Problems I encouraged and how I overcame them:

• Because I had time before I was meeting with my tutor, I decided to complete the final model of my creature in preparation for the sculpting of its torso. To do this, I needed to create the legs and feet.
• For the feet, I decided to start with a cone, removing the sharp and tapered edge with a boolean. It became apparent once creating the feet that this could have been created with a cylinder, but the effect seemed to work so i decided to stick with the method I had gone through with.
• I wanted the bottom of the foot of my creature to remain flat, however keeping it completely flat made it look too flawless, so I still ran over the base of each foot with the sculpting tool, using as small as a detail size as I felt appropriate.
• When sculpting the feet, I initially made them too short and stumpy. Instead of altering the initial shape and therefore starting again, I decided to use different sculpting brushes to extrude and lengthen the top of the model.
• When creating the second foot, I chose to just duplicate the first and change its shape slightly with the sculpting tool. I did this as I felt I wanted the feet to look vaguely identical, but still have noticeable different shapes. Finding this balance was prominent throughout modelling this creature, and I felt  I did this effectively.
• To make the upper part of the creatures leg I used the same techniques as I described in the creation of the upper part of the arm. I didn’t bother to alter the second leg as I felt once smoothed over, they didn’t look obviously identical as their shape is rather simple, with not noticeable individuality such as dints or detail sizes. The rotation of the leg also makes them look different from the front.

 

• The knees were created as the elbows were. I used booleans to remove large portions of a squished cylinder, and used the sculpting tool to make both the left and right knee look different.

Where to go from here:

• Fix the error in your sculpting tool settings.
• Complete the whole creature.

 

Intended Outcome:

• Create a mesh that is a close to my 2D drawing as possible.
• Create a mesh that is ready for sculpting

Problems I encountered and how I overcame them:

• Although my creature is not completely symmetrical, I decided it would be easier to start with a shape as equal as possible and alter it with the sculpting tool. To do this, instead of making estimates when moving edges, I typed distances whilst moving them along an axis to create equal distances between each side.
• When using the loop cut tool in the previous session, I split the whole object, making unnecessary cuts. To prevent this, I hid parts of the mesh I didn’t want to split, so the loop cuts didn’t effect the whole of the object, just the face I wanted to alter. Below is a step-by-step example of what I did in the time-lapse. I also used this technique so that when I moved parts of the mesh with proportional editing, it didn’t alter the rest of the model, example being when creating the bump on the top of the creatures torso, as well as in the shoulders.

• To create the spikes on top of the mesh, I subdivided parts of the top of the torso, hiding the rest of the mesh again to prevent effecting parts I didn’t want to edit. When I tried to do this separately, I found it hard to make each spike equal in height, so chose to alter them at the same time.
• When I began to prepare the model I was happy with for sculpting, I noticed that the mesh was all over the place. There were many diagonal edges and it all look rather messy. I was about to begin fixing this by using the knife tool to make each face contain just 4 edges, something I learnt was possible in the Anvil tutorials, but the mesh was so large I knew it would be very time consuming, so looked for an alternative method. When experimenting with the knife tool, it became apparent this issue was caused by me creating a boolean with the a sphere, something I did co make the head and the torso of my creature separate. On finding this out I undid alterations Made until the mesh was fixed and worked with the sculpting tool from there.
• When I began to use the sculpting tool, the brush seemed to be rather long instead of the rounded shape I expected. I spent a rather long time trying to figure out where the error was, but decided to leave this until another time. I would also attempt to discuss this error with a tutor during my next meeting, which was very soon. To finish off the session, I made the whole of my model proportional and similar to the initial image I had been working off of.

Where to go from here:

• Create legs for my creature to have a completed model.
• Discuss the error with my sculpting tool with a tutor.

Intended Outcome:

• Create a mesh that is a close to my 2D drawing as possible.
• Create a mesh that is ready for sculpting
• Put tips I learnt in the Anvil tutorial to use.

Problems I encountered and how I overcame them:

• Something I thought would be simple to create was the offset towards to lower part of the torso, however I originally struggled to make it efficiently. I tried to use the inset tool, however I only wanted to set the two sides of the body, and the inset tool insets all four. I did try and work with this, as I knew my creature didn’t have to be perfectly equal, but it just meant I would be creating unnecessary vertices and a more complex mesh, so I experimented with ways to avoid this.

• Another way I tried to create the offset lower part was by creating loop cuts to split the mesh. This also made it easier to move the appropriate edges to create a taper to the bottom of the torso. I was also then able to merge faces to reduce the mesh to being as simple as possible.

 

• Using loop cuts and the proportional editing tool, I then set to creating the curved top of my creatures torso. The more vertices, the smoother the curve, but the more complex the mesh, and because I had split the object earlier, I had to loop cut each section separately.  I attempter to combat the large amount of edges I had created by joining them together, however this effected some modelling I began to do later in this session. When moving certain edges and faces, the cuts I had made earlier split the mesh, and in order to fix this, I would need to individually merger every edge and face on the mesh. Instead of doing this, I chose to begin again and find an alternative. In my second attempt I chose to rely more on the extrude tool, extruding on a certain axis. I also used the G shortcut to move and the scale tool to enlarge parts of the mesh on specific axes.

 

• It was quite hard to get an ideal initial shape during this session. I found it difficult to smooth round the shoulders, and the peaks on the shoulders were difficult to make completely even as a basis to my sculpting. I chose to try and use subdivisions to create peaks on the top of my creatures torso. This seemed to work, but I felt there was an easier way to gain this effect. Because of these findings, I chose to begin a new modelling session in the near future to give myself a chance to reflect on things that worked and things that did not. This turned the above findings into experiments rather than my final output, but these findings should help my future attempts.

Where to go from here:

• Create a new model.

Intended Outcome:

• Complete the Arms of my creature.

Problems I encountered and how I overcame them:

• The only things left to create were the fingers, and to do so I began by finding the most appropriate starting shape. I initially tried to use a cylinder mesh, however found that the shapes on my 2D image resembled more of a cuboid, so instantly chose to use this shape. Bevelling the edges made the basic shape look almost identical to what I have used in my initial sketch, and made the modelling much easier.
• It was hard to create fingers that were unique without drastically changing the shape. I wanted each finger to resemble the shape of a cuboid, but with details that made them look like sedimentary rock. Because there are 8 in total, including the thumbs, I needed each of the fingers to be uniquely sculpted as having identical fingers would be obvious and noticeable to viewers. Originally, I hoped to sculpt each finger from scratch to ensure I wasn’t tempted to keep the fingers looking too similar, and also to prevent the repetition of notable details from on to another, for example, had I created a dint on one finger, there would be no trace of it on the next finger. Before beginning to do this, however, it was clear it would be unnecessarily time consuming, so I chose to create the same finger of each hand (thumb, thumb, finger 1, finger1, etc.) so any accidental similarities weren’t as noticeable. I eventually chose to duplicate one finger and sculpt all 6 fingers next to each other so I could see hoe similar/different they looked before arranging them around the hand. Was I to model something like this again, I would begin with 8 cuboids and model them next to each other from the beginning.
• During modelling, I also changed the width of the pelvis to better fit the initial sketch, and in comparison to the arms final form. This could still be changed according to the final Torso shape, but for now it made my proportions look closer to my intended outcome. Throughout most modelling sessions, I am constantly referencing my initial image for the truest shapes and sizes of my creature. After doing this, I also straightened the arms pose to help with the future posing of my creature.

 

Where to go from here:

• Complete the Torso of my creature to get the proportions correctly.

 

Intended Outcome:

• Complete the Arms.

Problems I encountered and how I overcame them:

• This session was rather short, and I only managed to complete the arms and the hands. One difficulty I found when sculpting was getting the size of the hands to look right. As I had the image next to my modelling window, I could estimate the size from the front, but making the thickness look proportional was difficult. I Experimented with different thicknesses before deciding on the outcome below, and I could still alter it if I decide it looks too thin or too thick when placed next to the completed Torso.

 

• As I have mentioned in previous posts, I wanted to get used to the basics of Blender again. To do so, I watched Blender Guru’s Anvil tutorial, which taught me a lot. I had previously learnt that sculpting is much easier if you start with a mesh that is as close to the shape of your intended outcome as possible, so learning how to do so made me more comfortable in modelling. I also became more comfortable with he controls and shortcuts in Blender, which helped with the speed of this session

The main tools and tips I learnt in this tutorial was using the G shortcut to move vertices, and using O to enable and disable proportional editing when appropriate.

I unfortunately lost the footage to this modelling session, however I have included as many screenshots as I felt necessary to show you my progress.

Where to go from here:

• Create the fingers making sure they are all unique.
• Use the view shortcuts more to make things more proportional.

Sources:

Guru, B. (2017). Available at: https://youtu.be/yi87Dap_WOc [Accessed 01 Dec. 2017].