I even tried a few… not-characters. I got the idea that lightning is THE MOST important thing in environment render but haven’t got a clue where to start with that. Just a lot of moving light-bulbs around
Oh well, back to real-time characters
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Your faces are full of emotions, awesome work!(still except monsters, but human faces are just awesome;) )
amazing stuff. Is this all sculpted in blender?
Thank you!
Thanks! And yes, Blender all the way.
All the tweaking seems so insignificant, until the iterations are lined up side by side. It’s frustrating. Probably means that I don’t have a clear idea of what’s right and wrong.
It’s an interesting experience to change a completed female base-mesh into male and vice versa. Makes typical differences more obvious.
Fanart to get it out of my system:
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A thing for May the 4th. Could’ve spent more time on this and model it properly, but… got really sick on the last day. The Force has abandoned me! Finished it out of pure stubbornness and went to sleep =D Maybe next year.
So thrilling to get “that character you imagined for years” in 3d. It might not look like anything special to others, but makes me go “weee, it’s alive!”
It was quite a roller-coaster: at first I was too afraid to mess it all up with textures and then got greedy and considered going full stylized PBR. Settled for original plan though this time around. Hopefully next iteration will be full-body and pose-able.
To put things into perspective: same guy, a year ago.
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Now I’m just accumulating WIPs T__T Send help.
Wanted to do a quick hand-painting, but can’t even retopo the thing. It should be straight-forward by now! But nooo…
Multires eraser is great though.
So, procrastinating by doing some other stuff. Generated hair texture with lots of noise and gradients. If only I could figure out how to optimize the shader to easily tweak frequency, lengths and colours… Still easier than trying to use particle hair for texture generation D=
3 Likes
Is it still a sketch if there’s not much in common with the final image?)
I was going to treat it like rough drawing: let’s throw sparkles here, some random ornament there, use bright red fabric, go wild… yeah, no. Don’t have relaxed enough attitude for that apparently 
At least didn’t have to do retopo or complicated unwrap.
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Well, that was a whole different kind of fun.
Things haven’t been great lately, so I’ve decided to take a little break from the whole “art” thing to prevent burnout. Took the opportunity to finally upgrade my little haircard addon. Super crude execution: I just kept googling until it stopped throwing errors at me. Then I started thinking why the heck am I so worked up about these things? So it’s sloppy and probably commits a crime or two against common sense. So what? It’s my personal stick to pound models into shape, it doesn’t have to be pretty 
I spent much, much more time overthinking this nonsense then coding.
…Still needs a proper field-test and maybe some UI polish, but so far seems to be working all right.
Only I have this nagging worry that it does something weird where I can’t see 
My PC unexpectedly and for no apparent reason died a slow death X_X Which made me consider fragility of hardware. Luckily my drives lived long enough for me to save all the data.
Figured it would be a shame to lose some stuff. So for now here’s some blend scripts/files backups: old hair-curves (cards) addon, new curve (for hair/seams/ornaments) management addon, small miscellaneous functions, and stylized hair texture generator (wip) —> tool shelf
One of my oldest characters/avatars named Misery now in 3D (low-poly is hard):
There’s something so very retro in that flat eyes look =D
5 Likes
That knitted fabric is lovely. Is the face vertex painted, or image textures?
Thanks for sharing your utilities, I was dreading the hair texturing I’m soon to do, now I can dread learning your utility instead 
Great sketchbook. I look forward to seeing more.
1 Like
Hi and thanks!
The face is sculpted and vertex painted. Makes me think that Image Textures are the way to go though 
About utilities: be warned, since these were made for personal use, they are very rough and might not make much sense - I’m learning after all 
Plus I haven’t had time to properly test and polish them.
The hair texture is Work in Progress (got to find a way to make the node tree more readable) and under the circumstances there was no “field-test” yet.
That is to say, I’m not sure if the result is going to look any good on a model at all =D
1 Like
Quick (-ish) test to see how this new hair texture works.
I was so concerned with transparency of the ends, tbh, roots didn’t get any attention. Ditched roughness map and lowered Normal influence almost to non-existence. Things looked weird. Maybe it’s better to do more contrasting colors instead. If only darker values didn’t get lost somewhere along the way 
3 Likes
Quick upd: leaning a bit more into npr. Wish I retopoed and unwrapped it so I could get more out of texture, but oh well, yesterday-Me wanted to just sculpt 
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Handpainting is fun! …when you finally can get to it after sculpting/modelling, retopo and UVs. It took foreverrrrr.
Also it pays to be prepared and consciously design forms… unlike me, who had no actual idea what to do with hair =D Spent too much time re-modelling and had to re-paint 3 times, because drawing random squiggly lines does not work in 3d!
Now to make my way back through WIPs I gathered over the year =D
7 Likes
So far the SculptJanuary experience this year was… weird. Surprisingly I’ve made some renders that I actually like (especially considering 1.5 hour time limit for most) and at the same time I just want to STOP 
Been thinking a lot about the nature of the challenge and whether it would be ok to quit. Am I giving in to weakness and bad discipline? Or am I being reasonable about needs and goals? Should I really care about these things at all? 
Here’s random Heretic fanart:
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So SculptJanuary is over. Despite my complaining about everything and missing 9 prompts I was on a roll!
Here’s inevitable DooM fanart (I finally got to play 2016 last autumn and I’m the happiest little doomguy in the world 
):
Fanart of Angua von Uberwald (the only werewolf I could think of):
And some random characters:
Got surprisingly comfortable with the amount of faces, hands and cloth sculpted from scratch. Experience points acquired!
Also I think my lights got better.
9 Likes
Things have been weird and stressful for months, and I’m at a strange place right now where my hands know what and how to do better than my mind. Every artwork is like a leap of faith: I can get these little models done, but at the same time I don’t feel like I had the energy and knowledge for it.
Fanart WIP (I’m stuck):
And fanart for May the 4th, based on Jedi: Fallen Order game (which is truly strong in the Light Side, imo, and therefore should be treasured)
I spent a lot of time trying to get both likeness (at least a little bit) and appeal, but this is hard, especially with male faces for some reason. And if the sculpt looks kinda human it breaks when I try to add textures and I have to move things around a lot.
A mandatory step in each of my handpainted textures: go in recklessly, start panicking after a while, delete the image, get the HARD brush, stupid, start over with more reasonable and careful approach.
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Good work!
I feel like it’s the symmetry. Both female and male characters benefit from some asymmetry, but looking at the reference for Cal, he has quite pronounced asymmetry and without that it just feels bit uncanny.
1 Like