Sculpting Digital Characters - Week 04: Retopology

Week Four: Refining your sculpture... retopology
Hands and feet explored, why we should sculpt these first
Wrinkles, subcutaneous... what's that and why should we pay attention to it
Compression and how it affects what we do
Gravity why it's important
Stencils... Converting an alpha into a stencil
Retopology. How do we create a base mesh that will work for animation and production?
What is good topology?
Projecting details
Assignment: Refine character Sculpt base you've created and retopologize

Sculpting Digital Characters - Week 04: T-Pose

I have had to repose the model so that I have plenty space to work around the model during the retop.

The repose was done using the Transpose method; masking the areas you do not wish to move then using an action line to scale, rotate or move the desired section. This required another passover to adjust the muscles in their new state, which also causes a knock on effect with all the other muscles attached to the affected area.

Sculpting Digital Characters - Week 03: Hands and Hooves

Another passover to get the form right. I reduced the mass of the body and bulked up the legs to give correct the anatomy, The last post shows how the upper form was growing too big as I worked on it.

Next I need to 'retopologize' the model. I'll talk about this in the next post.

Sculpting Digital Characters - Week 03 Foundation Turnaround

Second sculpting pass over figure...

Sculpting Digital Characters - Week 03: Foundation

Week Three: The sculpt, knowledge is power.

Resources, seeing is believing. So why don't we have more of it?
Foundation is king!
Sculpting form vs. details
Dynamic Levels of Resolution
Layers and morphs, why are they your best friends
Polygroups, Uv regions - how can these help me?
Broken models, why they happen and how to fix them
Masks how they work and why you'll use them often
Using the canvas as a sculpting medium.
Assignment: Sculpt character form based on design you've created.

Here is the first pass over of sculpting the form of my character. Doing this I learned that I should have modelled the forearms with the palms forward. The way I modelled it here was difficult as the rotation of the wrists causes the muscle flow harder to follow. The fingers and legs are still to be finished.

Sculpting Digital Characters - Week 02: basemesh

Week Two Objectives:
Creating a base mesh for our character using Zspheres
ZSpheres as a mesh generator not as a sculpting tool
ZSpheres for topology: head, hands
Attractor ZSpheres & Unified Skin
Modeling with Image Planes
Assignment: Design and create base mesh for your character using Zspheres.

...And Here is the mesh, generated by making an Adaptive Skin from the ZSphere armature.
ZSpheres are essentially Mesh Generators which are used to create the base shape for whatever you wish to build. The below mesh was generated the pulled around using the move tool to fit closer to the shape of the orthographic drawings (front and side views attached to the X plane or image planes)

Sculpting Digital Characters - Week 02: ZSpheres

Here is the ZSphere armature which I built within the Image Planes, set up from last weeks orthographic drawings .

Sculpting Digital Characters - Week 01: Preperation

I have begun the eight week long course on Sculpting Digital Characters. The course is run through the CGSociety and the teacher is Cesar Dacol Junior, a professional in the field of digital sculpting, recently working on the visceral carnage of 300.

"Perfection is a by product of observation!"

http://workshops.cgsociety.org/courses/000055/

Week one was getting the foundations in place - First I had to consider and write up where I was in life and what I wanted from the course.

Secondly I had to draw front and side orthographics and flesh out the backgroung/history of my character. I have chosen to do a Minotaur type character again, starting from scratch and taking more considerations into the character, and fleshing out some background information to back up the design process (see below what I wrote). Also I made a dozen Alpha Brushes, textures for the final model such as skin texture; pores, wrinkles, warts and scars etc.



Bael, an Elder Bull Ogre, (Minotroll.) Eldest and second last of bloodline.

2024, spring, first quarter full moon, early morning...

Bael sighed and removed his glasses the fire light danced in his watery eyes, heavily burdened by what they have seen. He closed his tattered diary within his giant mecha hand and wearily stood up, straightening slowly exhuming another sigh which exploded into a cough, dry empty and ancient, like gravel pouring through parchment.
‘sh-shit’ He spat, steadying himself.
His chest heaved and his rheumatic hand shook never worse than when the sharp cold of spring morning slowed his bones. The arthritis was a result of six years of heavy labour in the scorching desert planes, as part of the Yeung Railtech mobile site. The Slaves of Hydra. ‘Driving progress across continents.’ But his sorrow today was not memories of past terror, but a bittersweet tension; expected at mid day his granddaughter Leeota, the only of his kin shall arrive. Seven years since he seen her last the summer before the accident. Before she leaves Bael must tell her his secrets. A burden perhaps better to take to the grave, but the Truth must heard.
Bael shuffled across his dusty apartment, a basic dwelling which belongs to a cluster hamlet, in the Black Feather Rock. Too many years he wished to live in the northern Isles, in the fresh green forest of Nuropia or the sub tropics of Yalliv, where it is said the Silvertail River empties crystal clear water, so pure it is said, that drinkers are cured of any illness, bathers re-grow limbs and the indigenous folk of its shores live forever.What good of that he thought, its waters would surely dissolve this ill fated, fragile husk and the blood on these hands would taint the seas for seventy moons....


[Bael as a youth, grew in the foothills of Akkari The Strongest of seven Sons of the Bakshi Clan, travelling with the Talon Academy, trained in combat and dropped into Twelve years of slaughter; a battle for the planet itself.Education.Not as youth, but self learned in later years
Significant events: Warrior in War against the Red Talon Federation. 12 years.Near fatal wounding – lost right arm and eye.Hard Labour camp. after 7 years granted Freedom
Now lives in reclusive mountain hamlet hut, bad plumbing and satellite radio, bana reed and cured timber furniture no paint on walls, unlike most hamlets this one is not painted externally but has chosen to shrink away from view.
He no longer travels far but gazes the sky with his LGX telescope. Looking out into the near cosmos and charting planets and comets, trajectories and timelines. Scribbled runes and diagrams poured into his oversize hard bound Journal, stained and bleached from years of use in the arid hills.
Dislikes: dust, sand, snakes and the twin Suns, VTOL aircraft and The Empire
Likes: telescopes, the black narcissus flower and it's psychoactive petals. Alchemy and Poetry, dreams of utopia and death]


The winter was harsh this year and many fevers were fought, deaths hand refused again and again... determination to complete his tale carried him through it all. Now the pages were final, on the eve of his telling his body feeling like it has already begun to shut down. He will never see the summer, and the storm he was about to unleash. The hand, designed for demolition and destruction... and Death. A construction limb, grafted on after Bael suffered an almost fatel mortar attack which resulted in the loss of his right arm and the sight in his right eye. Bael suffers Rheumatic arthritis and the weight of his mecha arm has become a burden...


So here are my Orthographic drawings for the creature (Minotroll) that I will be building over the next few weeks... the mecha arm will be added in later with clothing and accessories. The drawing represents the naked version of the creature, so symmetrical anatomy can be worked unhindered by garments and such.