Day 5- "leg poop"

So I got around to working on the legs, only to realize I know frigging nothing about leg anatomy! This didn't really stop me from working on it of course since it's not like I know the anatomy of anything else really. Except for the sartorius, artists love sartorius.....es..... sartorii? Anyway, after searching through other sculpts and images that I've collected over the years, it's apparent to me that no one really knows their leg anatomy either. I found tons and tons of different sculpts handling the muscle forms differently. Comic book artists tend to show every single friggin muscle as if batman didn't have flesh (though damn wouldn't that be a geat super hero?). The more traditionalists sculpt it really toned down and boy is it hard to make out forms that way through crappy pictures.

When I sat down and looked at the rest of my model I decided to go for more of a comic style exaggerated muscle structure for two reasons. One, so I can at least learn the muscle forms. I know nothing about the muscles of the leg because I've never practiced them and I really need to master their crazy twisted lines. Two, the rest of my character has pretty defined forms and it would be odd if he had ultra realistic legs. Plus I could always tone down muscles easier than adding to them.

I found some interesting techniques from my favorite sculptor, Ryan Kingslien, about some of the forms of the legs, like how the femur has a bend to it, giving legs an outward arching motion. I had a lot of troubles getting the muscles of the quads the way that I like and I still didn't quite hit it but I think I'm getting closer.

I think that's what I'm really working to do with this sculpt, I know that I'm not going to get a perfect anatomy sculpt this time around, but compare this to my last "best anatomy sculpt yet" image and you can really see a difference.

The lower leg was a little bit easier. I'm still just doing blocking, not really making the actual muscles but more their general form that will help me really get them looking awesome. The lower legs is mostly long verticle lines that hook everything up (to you crazy anatomy freaks out there, I'm generalizing here sheesh). The toes I pretty much handled the same as the fingers though I am proud to say that I didn't have to dynamesh this! though for future reference I should still sepperate the toes at the zsphere level because it did take a bit longer than I would have liked to get those piggies to the correct shape.

As far as form and design goes, I wanted to sort of mimic hobbit feet in how clumpy and gross they look. The armor isn't going to cover his feet so I'll be detailing that much more than say that lower back which still looks wrong.

Next up I'm going to do some fixing up of some troubling spots, come up with an armor design, and get some of it modeled in there, so stay tuned :)

Day 4- "that's one buff old man"

So I have another post of my progress. Reworked some more parts of the chest to make it less wonky (though there's still a few things with the hips that I don't care for but that will get fixed). I moved onto the arms and hands and got those more or less blocked. I'm still fighting with how stylized I want to make this character, but I think that will come out in the texturing process.

I started out like everything else I sculpt, I used the move tool to push and pull the basic forms I wanted. I have very little experience with arms (arm muscles especially) so this part took much longer than it should have and it still isn't totally accurate but it's better than anything else I've tried. I think for future note I should try pulling the arms in at the shoulder more. I've been looking a lot at other sculpts and I've noticed that my sculpt has really broad shoulders and I think that has something to do with the Deltoids protruding from the chest. I sort of did that on purpose just because of baking the mesh but I'm wondering if I did it too much.

Then I had to shape the hand and get the digits in which was a pain in the ass. There wasn't enough geometry in the nubs that were there previously so I had to get dynamesh to work without destroying my model so of course the resolution is rediculous, hopefully the feet wont be as much trouble but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Once I was happy enough with my block-in I went on to doing more anatomy suggestion lines. The upper arm isn't usually too bad, I found some interesting styles for doing the Triceps and I'm pretty happy with the results. Weather or not those are anatomically accurate I'm not 100 on but like I always say, if you don't know if it works, make it look cool. The lower arm was the real difficult part, a lot of the muscles wrap around the arm because their primary use is to move the wrist, so finding reference pics can be difficult because the angle and position of the hands can really change the form of the muscles more than the other body parts. I'm still not totally happy with these muscles so I'll probably search for a critique from someone who knows their anatomy really well and can give me pointers. What I do really like about this is the use of bones. I tend to forget that bones do show through in bodies but some of my friends have been yelling at me to include them so I found that the elbows were a perfect spot and I think they came through really nice, so thanks guys :).

Next came the hand details, something which I also struggle with because it's less about muscles and more about bones and fat pads. I always tend to over-suggest forms so they just end up looking like crap. I'm also not sure if the characters hands should be more bulky or more skinny, I think I went with more skinny and I think because he is going to hold a sword or axe I should go more blocky. Most of the tools I used for this was the clay brush, the dam. standard in zsub and zadd, and the move tool and I really like the results. I'm not doing all the really fine detail yet because I still have those feet and I'll probably have to dynamesh them because I want the feet to be really exaggerated and cool looking because it's a goblin and I feel like I'll lose those really nice hand details anyway.

Next I'm going to fix those terrible pelvic muscles and then move on to the legs, so stay tuned :)

Goblin character days 1-3

So for my first post on this blog, I figure I should show my latest project because let's face it, everything I've done before now is total crap. For this model I decided to create a goblin with crazy fantasy armor. My main inspiration comes from this piece

by the wonderful Wes Talbot

I don't necessarily want to copy his style but more his form and combine it with my own style. To start, I went to my go-to program, Zbrush. Using just a dynameshed sphere I roughed out the shapes of the head.

I like starting with just the head because a face will really define my character. I have a big image containing various references and inspirations but for the most part I don't really have a concept image painted out, so getting to know my character is really important because it well effect how I approach the rest of the designs. Once I had the head sculpted out, I went ahead and did some detailing. This part is sort of a double edged sword, because I really like having the ultra detail to get a really good feel for what the model will look like so I can prepare the rest for the same level of detail, but it's detached from the body which will create some nastiness when I go to bake the details for the game rez model. 

If I left the detail out I could move on to the body and dynamesh it together without having to worry about the loss of detail, but that makes me a little blind to how I should handle the body and I won't know if I have the head the way I want until way far into the development process. I think the best course of action is to combine the body and create a really nice re-topologized mesh and basically blend shape it to this high poly model. That way I can have a really nice low poly model with super clean topology for another project in the future. I've never actually done this before but I know a few that have so I'm pretty confident in that technique.

So here is the same head with all the wrinkles and stuff. I still have a few more things to add such as pores and warts and things like that, but that will wait til the very end when I know what part of the mody is going to show after I add the armor.

Next step was to get the body sorted out. I decided this character should have some sort of hunch or lump or giant back. His face came out looking really old and warped and I wanted to continue that through the rest of the design.

Zbrush has an amazing tool called Zspheres which lets me block out basic forms and armatures in a matter of minutes. The only real problem is that Zspheres are always sphere shaped so it's hard to get a good volume. Usually I have to stretch things like the hips and shoulders out a bit which makes it look odd. 

Once that is done, I convert the spheres into a mesh and start shaping out the form. I decide to go crazy with his back and make it less of a hump and more of an overdeveloped Trapezius (back/shoulder area) muscle similar to the hunchback from 300.

(oh ephialtes, how I love your creepy-ass form)

I then started sculpting in the muscles and more detailed forms. It might seem strange to work on details that won't show since they will be covered by armor but I like having the muscles for 2 reasons. For one thing, clothing doesn't just fuse to our flesh, it is defined by our bodies. It's almost impossible for me to design armor to fit this character if I have no idea what his body underneath it looks like. Second reason is because I may use this model again in the future. I big thing for 3d artists to do is to kit-bash projects together. So many characters and models are just reused assets for other work. It saves time and money for studios and is really unnoticeable if the artist is good.

This brings me to my current progress. Right now I'm working on the chest area and making sure it looks exactly what I want it to look like. I really want to not make him too muscular because that's overly done and doesn't actually show artistic skill for a character artist (imo). However I do want to show that he's pretty bad ass and will friggin kill you if you cross his path.

His muscles are still a little bit too defined and brawny, I wanna give him a little bit more fat and tone down his pecs and delts and just overall soften the lines of his muscles. you can't really see his posture but he is leaning over a bit so I want to make sure his abs are always folded over each other. Once I have this all set I'll probably move onto the arms next, so stay tuned :)