I’m very new to blender and don’t know how to achieve this. I know exactly what I want to do, I just don’t know which tool to use / what Blender has to offer. I believe in learning by doing so I don’t really like the “Getting Started”-type of tutorial, I don’t have the patience to read/watch them all when I want to just jump into things. What I need is someone to outline the best way to model this thing and name the tools I will need so I know what to look for, or ideally link some good tutorials on techniques required.
At the moment I’m not concerned with the leather cord, I just want to get the pendant right. The material is suposed to be amber, so the entire thing will be very smooth and curvy. I managed to get the outlines of the animal shapes done with extruded curves:
You can see in the first image that the cat and the fox head are individual objects, and that they intersect with each other. The second image is just the same meshes moved apart, so they can be viewed better. Now I need to somehow combine these two shapes to get one smooth carving (and later they both have to be joined to the underlying pendant), but I don’t know how. I know I can use Ctrl+J to join them, but then I still have intersecting faces.
I also need to get the flat surfaces rounded out a bit, and generally make it look more 3-dimensional and actually carved. I think I can do detail work with the sculpting tools, but before that I’m hoping Blender can do some of the heavy lifting for me.
I hope someone can give me a few pointers, it would be very much appreciated.
There’s two different types of modelling, organic and hard-surface… Because you’ve said it’s “Carved” that’d imply it’s organic which means you need a method that suits this style. Poly and SubD modelling are usually used for hard-surface and sculpting is usually used for organic shapes because of it’s flexibility to carve, shape and pull parts out like a piece of clay.
So in hindsight, you’ll want to sculpt the pendant as it’ll give you more flexibility. I’d suggest blocking out the shape of the pendant, something simple and then import it into an application such as ZBrush, Mudbox or Blender’s internal sculpting system where you can mask the wolf design with an Alpha brush and work on the shape…
As for the string itself use a Bezier Curve and then use an Array modifier to make the mesh follow the path.
Happy Blending!
It’s hard to see from the picture, but the “sides” of the wolf head are now missing. I think I can get those back pretty easily by selecting the upper and lower edges and hitting fill. Then I can subsurf the whole thing and go from there.
Thanks for your help, I’ll post WIP shots as I go along and ask whenever I have a particular problem.
Well, the idea is to create normals from the high-poly mesh once it’s done. Doing it from the sketch like in your image doesn’t look quite right, the entire head is supposed to come outwards a bit. It’s hard to describe, something like this wolf carving:
@RickyBlender: I don’t know if I can use cycles material for Skyrim, I’m planning to convert the necklace to Netimmerse Gamebryo file format so I can import it ingame. So I will most probably only need a texture and a corresponding UV mapping.
Dynatopo looks interesting but I always end up creating weird geometry (especially in “shade smooth” mode it looks strange, there are black patches all over) and I don’t know enough about Blender to clean that up efficiently. I think I’ll try the workflow eppo linked and then use dynatopo for detail work at the end.
