So I drew a Creeper a while ago that I now want to bring into the 3rd dimension, see reference pic below:
I’m thinking of making its body in a tree stump/bark like manner (maybe with some moss or something, if it fits), but I’d like some input on how to do this as I’m still very new to Blender (and 3D gfx in general).
I don’t know if I should add the details using bump maps / normal maps / displacement maps (things I’m currently trying to learn more about) or just model it by hand…?
I also want to try to rig it so that I can learn how to animate stuff and using shape keys in the end… so I’m thinking that maybe modelling the details by hand isn’t the best option, because it might make the model pretty heavy… but please enlighten me on this!
I would probably enable smooth shading or another subsurface layer, but it looks very close to the original image. Well done. The finished product will probably be really cool.
Almost done with the sculpting now. I decided I want to try and bake a normal map from the sculpt and apply that to my hand-made model.
Wasn’t sure what I wanted at first, style-wise, but later realized I don’t want it to look too scary, but instead a more Nintendo-ish level of detail, feel and charm. So I’m probably not going to sculpt a lot of veins and stuff on it I think…
The colored version is just a quick paint over I did in photoshop, not an actual texture. Just to give myself some ideas for what kind of texture I want. I’m thinking of adding some moss to it somewhere, maybe some small vines as well, not sure yet. Also thinking about adding some small strands of grass hanging down from underneath the head and body. If I do that I’m thinking that I could add a cloth modifier (or whatever they’re called) to them to make them move around when the creeper is moving.
Also not sure what to do about the small twig on its shoulder yet. I think I’ll make the leaves bigger.
small update before I dive into painting the texture (which I’ve been looking forward to for days now :))
I’ve applied the normal map baked from the scuplted version (900k+ verts and 1.8M+ tris, SubSurf included) to the simpler version (~17k verts and ~33k tris, w/ SubSurf).
Added a tiny bit of vertex dirt
looked up how to do 3-point lighting on youtube and how to use planes as lamps - all very useful stuff!
I think I’ll apply a tiny bit of sub-surface scattering to the body later, since it’s an organic object. I don’t know how to do this atm, but I hope to find a guide on YT or something.
