Hello all, welcome to my first blog post! In this I will briefly discuss some of the stages of my character project that I started this summer. This is based off of one of my concepts for an elven saloon owner, that I worked on for a class project. I decided to give myself a challenge and push my skills by taking on a 3D character sculpt of her, as I am very happy with her design and I enjoy sculpting sharp features and stylised shapes.
My concept
I will begin by documenting the difficulties I have encountered whilst working on this project, from mental obstacles to technical issues. Lockdown season had greatly impacted my self motivation, and after submitting my work for university I felt exhausted and anxious to take on a new project, but I pushed myself nonethless. It is better late than never to begin a project, despite my third year of university arriving on the horizon. I was itching to do something creative, and to practise what I had learnt over the year in some shape or form. This project was the perfect opportunity to do so. Regardless of these obstacles, I am pleased to say that I managed to complete the sculpting stage recently, and I am now on to the retopping stage of the project. Ultimately, no matter how slow I was to get going, I managed to create the foundations of something that I could be proud of and in a way it has made me feel accomplished, practised and ready for the start of term.
A technical issue that I encountered entailled backfaces clipping through the mesh. I thought that I could use a fast fix in 3Ds Max for this - adding a normals modifier would inverse the normals and perfect the mesh (or so I thought). It turned out that somehow my entire mesh in Zbrush was comprised of front and backfacing normals on the outer surface, in many different places. A rookie mistake. I consulted my tutor who told me that I could check the directions of faces whilst sculpting in Zbrush, so that I wouldn't have to encounter this issue again. I used the Display Properties tab to show the backfaces of the mesh, and found that indeed the inside of the mesh was clipping through the outside. As silly as I felt for making such a glaringly large mistake, it was satisfying to be able to fix this issue myself. I used polygrouping to unify normals into the same group, and ZRemesher fix these areas and resculpt. Alternatively, I could have selected a small number of polys in an area of backfaced normals and expanded the selection, then deleted it. However, I found that this created huge messy areas to fix and it took a lot longer to fix in the long run.
Clipping!!
Free from clipping and reworked!
Quite honestly I don't know how I made such a huge mistake during this process as I have never encountered this issue before (to this scale at least). However, I am satisfied that I know how I may fix it in the future. I also took this opportunity to refine areas that needed it, such as the placement of the hair curls. These curls constantly clipped through the large hat she was wearing, and I struggled to find the correct position for the hair that was presented in the concept. It turns out that I just needed to reduce the size of them slightly and tilt the hat to a steeper angle. Once this was complete I found that it matched the concept well and looked good.
Skirt and folds
I also adjusted the trouser folds ad tried to refine the stylised sharpness of the edges.
Overall, I am pleased with the initial outcome of my model, despite the trials and tribulations I encountered to get to this stage. I hope that I can write more soon about my process.
