Hey, everyone! I’m working on my first ever sculpt and am looking for some feedback as well as any tips or tricks in how I approach modeling.
I’m currently in the process of building the spalax aka “cave mole” from Spelunky 2 and am nearing the end. Right now I’m trying to do two things [1] render the whiskers to fit the contours of the face and [2] smooth out the “popping” details around the creases of the mouth and nose to be a smooth as the rest of the body.
Is there some kind of plugin or way to have the whiskers “snap” to the mold of the cheekbones without me messing around with sculpting tools? I’ve tried several times to sculpt them to the face’s contours and cannot get it to look right.
As for the popping, I have “shade smooth” on and have enabled “relative detail” in dyntopo while super zoomed-in but still have popping when using the pinch tool and when I use the smooth tool it smoothes out the creases too much. Any way to work around this?
Hello, all! I’ve made some progress as I’ve figured out how to achieve my first noted issue by using “snap” mode ( magnet ) and then selecting “face” when making a vertex and creating new ones for the whiskers.
I’m now going to attempt doing some retopology to simplify my topography for eventual UV unwrapping so that I can add subsurface scattering on the teeth, flesh, and claws. I’m using this tutorial and this one, but if there’s anything you think I should know or see, feel free to provide links.
Regarding getting those concavities right; I’ve seen people better at sculpting than me use multiple objects (body, legs, head, etc.) and merge (and remesh) them later. Not sure if you have started blocking with multiple objects or massaged a subdivided cube into submission.
Not sure if I’m understanding you correctly. If you mean sculpting the objects separately and then merging them once you’ve detailed them to a certain point, that’s what I did for the whiskers, nose, legs, and tongue. They were made separately and then merged into the body.
The teeth, gums, and claws are still separate because it looks blobby when they’re merged with a boolean modifier. They are joined to the body with the “join” shortcut so it moves around as one solid object.
Currently, I’m at the retopology phase, and so far that’s going along well! The only minor issue is that in creating more faces for the whiskers via loop cuts, it added a lot of little loop cuts on the rim of the nostril and ( top ) bridge of the nose. I don’t think those small nose faces are necessary.
I’m wondering if there’s a way to merge those mini faces away without compromising the integrity of my quads ( by them becoming poles ). That way I can make for future loop cuts if necessary.
Below is where I’m currently at with my retopology. Almost all of these highlighted vertexes are functional interlocking loop cuts and are color codes just to visually breakdown what I was talking about in my last comment concerning cleaning up retopology as these are areas I feel I’ve made needlessly complex due to my novice approach.
The only area that’s cut off weird is the red dot, which is a pole, but I need that area to create a loop cut for the whiskers to give them volume. I"m sure I can do some kind of rearrangement of vertexes around the larger base of the whisker to create quads, providing volume, and getting rid of the necessary vertexes along the highlighted nose bridge, but I’m not sure how.
Still working on this and learning as I go. Reduced most of the loop cut issues with the nose to make the quads more even and fixed a few pole issues I had along the way. Progress so far.
