Hi everybody! This two images are screen captures of the making of my first try in Blender Cartoon modeling. This character is Sahar, a young girl who lives in a fantasy-Persian world, and as you can see wears a kind of turban-scarf that goes down her left arm. Obviously, this is work in progress and I want to keep working and polishing the modeling until I can start retopology and texturing.
I have a couple of questions because I’ve never done this modeling before. I modeled the entire character (by separate parts) with the Dynamic Topology in the Sculpt mode. Not using Multi-res or else, just starting with a sphere and brushing and smoothing. I’m not sure if this is the best way to create a cartoon character, but it worked for me until now. I know I still have to work more in the sculpting but I have some doubts:
As you can see in the image down this lines, with the method I used, there is a lot of “dirty” geometry (kind of pixelled stuff that when I work on it, it gets more clean but its very labourious). When I smooth this parts of mesh I lose detail and I have the feeling that I’m not doing it well. There is any kind of tool or modifier to smooth it all but not losing the shape? Am I doing it in a wrong way?
As you can see, it has the shape but I want a perfect smooth skin and geometry and I don’t know how can I get it with only Dynamic Topology. I want to clean/polish all the mesh.
Any advices? I hope I made me understand well.
Thank you very much!
looks good. what you need to do next is called ‘retopo’. you use your base mesh like a shoe form, and build a new mesh on top of it. to use it, add a new object like a plane, in front of your sculpted mesh, and then enable vertex snapping. when you move or extrude a selected vertex, it will snap to the mesh beneath it. also enable x-ray in the properties panel so you can see what you are doing. i think there are some detailed tutorials on it ( retopo ), and there are a number of options, including an add-on which makes it faster, though i cannot remember what the add-on is called. there’s also a new add-on that is being discussed in the news section of the forum.
(edit) if you tried to rig and animate a mesh as dense as your current one, it would probably crash, so retopo is definately a sound option here. one other option is to use a decimate modifier, but that’s very sloppy, so you don’t want to do that.
Thank you for your advice. I also realised I now have to start retopo. I’m going to start it soon, but I first want to finish some sculpting. I show you above some improvements in the clothes of the character.
I’ll watch the tools you posted, I’m a bit scared of doing the retopo wrong and start it over again, but it’s ok. One question: the retopo will be the same if the character is for film/animation or for videogame? I’ve read that for videogames the quantity of polys is more important and in the retopo triangles are used but not in animation. If the videogame is in HD, could be the same retopo?
I want to show you also one of the concepts I made for Sahar, as I will be posting the process of its creation
the more polygons you have, the slower your scene will be. but if you are making a game, you can still use your high poly model to do some ‘normals baking’ so that your low poly model inherits the shading and detail from your high poly model without the extra polygons. if you are doing an animation, you still need to keep it reasonable, and normals baking can also be a good option here. if you have a super-computer you don’t need to worry about it too much. but i don’t know of many computers that could easily animate your mesh in it’s current state. also, rigging and weighting it would be quite difficult.
