The Nameless One

After lots and lots of playing around with dynamic topology, I finally decided to make a character. At the very least to get a feel of going through the process all the way from an idea to finished model. I picked this particular character for the sheer love I have for the game, and because he seems to be a very good exercise at detailing. So, the project started yesterday, and I had this before me:


Basically, I could’ve just pulled all the shapes from the default cube, but a maquette gives a good basis for overall proportions.
In a while, I managed to shape it using dyntopo:


Today, to give myself a rest from anatomy and just to experiment with the workflow, I decided to give him his clothing and placeholder hair:


Surprisingly, while doing this I discovered several problems with the main sculpt, which escaped my gaze before.
So the mesh itself still needs some work, afterwards I’ll retopologize him and start adding detail in multires. That’s it for now. No wires yet since it’s all pretty much dyntopo and dummy objects :slight_smile: Any critique and comments are welcome, especially on the anatomy, since I’m still not very comfortable with it and sometimes struggle with identifying problems.

That’s pretty amazing work. Did you start with the skin modifier?

Thanks :slight_smile: Though it’s far from complete.
Yup, the initial maquette is made with skin modifier. It’s not ideal (has some pinching around shoulders and thumb), but that’s not a problem for dyntopo.

Did some work on his head, because it was awful before.


Before you start asking why he looks like this, if you don’t know who Nameless One is, google for Planescape: Torment :slight_smile:

I decided to lay off retopology a bit, just to see how much I can squeeze from dynamic topology mesh. He’s currently sitting at 404444 triangles, and is quite workable. I’m thinking the more work I do now, the less I’ll need to do at each subdivision level during multires stage.

Today’s update:


Since I’m satisfied with head shape, I went ahead and added a skullcap with some particle hair, just for looks.
I think I’m done with body dyntopo. Having fun with clothes. Probably gonna scrap that boot, since:

  1. I already saw similar boot elsewhere.
  2. It’s a pain.
  3. Gotta stick closer to original at least with one foot. I’m already veering away with that slipper on the right foot, but I can’t imagine placing another boot there, what with that contraption and all.

Probably will do body retopo next, so I’d be able to pose him for further updates.

Well done! :smiley:

Planescape: Torment is one of my favorite games of all times! I got chills reading the thread title :smiley: Very nice sculpting, I had no trouble seeing TNO in him. I think he should have more scars though :slight_smile: The weirdest thing; I was just the other day browsing through the archives and found a project for Annah I started in 2002 (using Lightwave). Never quite got the project rolling though.

@VickyM72: Thanks! :slight_smile:

Thanks, Vendigo. And don’t worry, he will have lots of scars, once I finish multires sculpting :wink:

The weirdest thing; I was just the other day browsing through the archives and found a project for Annah I started in 2002 (using Lightwave). Never quite got the project rolling though.

Hmm, maybe you should finish it? You know, to give TNO here some company :slight_smile:

Anyways, I’ve finished body retopology today:



Critiques on the topology are quite welcome :slight_smile:

Now for the interesting part: he currently has 5960 faces. After I add lips and eyelids I expect it to be around 6100. That kind of density won’t get me anywhere with multires, because 6M is not quite enough for detailing I have in mind, and 24M I can’t handle because I only have 4Gb RAM. So I’m planning to somehow increase his poly count to 9k (so that I can reach 9M with multires). Another option is just cutting him in two across his waist (where the belt will be) and sculpting both parts separately, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to “sow” him back again (not literally, of course) during texturing stage.

Great project man…its looking great. My only thought is in regards to the hands. The fingers seem thin for a man and the first finger looks pretty long. I believe it should be slightly shorter then the second finger. If you bulk up the knuckles I think the rest would follow:) Looking forward to more:P

P.S. one more thing it looks like the knee is a bit low making the thigh very long and the shin very short. I believe they should be nearly equal…maybe check some anatomy references:)

Happy Blending:P

Thank you!

My only thought is in regards to the hands. The fingers seem thin for a man

Yeah, I’m not happy with that too. Though I found it hard to inflate them properly in dyntopo. Probably will do that on 0 multires level after shrinkwrapping.

and the first finger looks pretty long. I believe it should be slightly shorter then the second finger.

It’s not. I mean, it is actually shorter :slight_smile:

P.S. one more thing it looks like the knee is a bit low making the thigh very long and the shin very short. I believe they should be nearly equal…maybe check some anatomy references:)

Thanks, will certainly check on that!

No images yet, just a little rant. Before doing anything rash like cutting new loops in my retopologized model, I went to check whether I’d actually need more than 6M multires. After all, it’s not the quantity of polygons that matters, but how they are distributed. Quantity may matter more for straight multires sculpting on basic mesh, not when it has been retopologized. Since it takes 5 multires levels to get from 6k to 6M, as well as from 9k to 9M, I’d just end up with the same detail level on those areas I leave untouched in the base mesh. So, anyway, turns out I’m quite happy with level 5 (6M). If I ever need more for, e.g. the head, I think I’ll just try cutting it off (cruel, cruel things 3D art teaches you) and sculpting it separately.

So, what I did was take my retopology, add multires modifier, and slowly go up in levels, adding and applying shrinkwrap (having original dyntopo as target) in project mode at each level. At level 4 I got most of my detail back, which is nice (I thought I’d need highest level for that). And then I decided to scale those fingers as per Derek’s suggestion. So I went to 0 level (to speed things up a little), entered edit mode, selected the fingers and Alt+S’d them a bit (this scales along normals, effectively inflating shapes). Returning from edit mode to sculpt mode, I quickly saw that not only the fingers became quite more inline with the character, all the existing detail has been nicely kept. Yay!

The only quirk is that I still need more than 4Gb RAM :slight_smile: Currently I’ll have to severely decrease undo size, otherwise Blender will chew on my memory pretty quickly. All described operations plus some brush-testing to see the detail upped memory consumption to 4.5 Gb, and while everything responds quite smoothly otherwise, once OS starts swapping it’s… gruesome.

Anyway, more sculpting ahead!

Okay, here’s a small update for you (solid view and GLSL lighting, clickable and zoomable):




Body is more or less complete. Several problems still to fix (feet and fingers being most prominent), but overall I’m happy with it. That is not to say that if you see anything funky you shouldn’t yell at me with mean, mean words :slight_smile: Blender won’t allow me to use max multires level for preview in object mode, so I had to settle for less.

One cool thing I discovered for myself while working was that not only can I sculpt shape keys themselves (kinda proportional edit mode via sculpting without multires), I can also sculpt on multires with shape keys active. This allowed me to open his eyes and mouth to get inside and sculpt a bit :slight_smile: I probably wouldn’t have bothered, since I can just hide parts of the mesh, but in case of eyelids mesh actually overlaps slightly, so I had to find some way of doing that.

Not quite ready yet to do any proper renders, first I need to model clothing (yep, it’s still all placeholders). Posed him just because I don’t feel like posting same bland resting pose every time. Rigify worked quite well, though there are some weight problems, but nothing frightening at this stage: the rig allows me to play with poses, see if any problems manifest in deformations. Sadly, I’ll have to rerig him since I’ll be doing fixes on the mesh.

nice model. i know nothing about sculpting and my attempts have been total fails, so if you dont mind me throwing a few questions at you? :smiley:
why did you sculpt with dynatopo in the begining, re topo then multires sculpt? why not completely sculpt in one method til it was finished? where did you learn the tequniques to get a realistic figure form a nearly nothing object? i assume you make your own custom brushes, how?? stupid questions but i want to make use of the sculpt tools but havnt been very successful at finding useful tutorials yet :slight_smile:

Thank you kindly :slight_smile:

i know nothing about sculpting and my attempts have been total fails, so if you dont mind me throwing a few questions at you? :smiley:

Not at all.

why did you sculpt with dynatopo in the begining, re topo then multires sculpt? why not completely sculpt in one method til it was finished?

First and foremost, because I wanted to get animated model out of this whole endeavour, or at the very least a model that can be animated. You can’t animate dyntopo model for obvious reasons :slight_smile:
Secondly, there’s a performance consideration: the higher you’ll go in detail with dyntopo, the slower it’ll get. And to get very fine details such as cracks and wrinkles, you’d need to pretty much have very high triangle density all over those detailed areas, because alphas just wouldn’t work otherwise. Possibly even higher than with multires.
Lastly, because multires platform provides better baking results than baking from separate objects.

Bottom line: dyntopo gives you freedom to quickly create sketches, or even (in case of this project) base models, but I wouldn’t use it for detailing.

where did you learn the tequniques to get a realistic figure form a nearly nothing object?

Well, I observed other people’s work and watched several sculpting videos, I used photo and didactical references… pretty much as any other learning process would go, I think :slight_smile:

i assume you make your own custom brushes, how??

For initial stages you won’t really need custom brushes, maybe just some tweaks to existing ones (like curve shape or stroke type). Custom brushes (which are nothing more than built-in brushes with textures applied) come in much later, when you refine the shapes and add fine detail.
My base dyntopo model was made using mainly Snake Hook, Inflate, Clay and Smooth brushes, with some Crease brush at later stages.

stupid questions but i want to make use of the sculpt tools but havnt been very successful at finding useful tutorials yet :slight_smile:

Nothing stupid about’em :wink:

I don’t think you’ll find meaningful tutorials on sculpting itself, since it’s a more of artistic process. But you can see techniques and methods employed in videos or on forums. See dyntopo tests thread in Blender Tests forum here on BA, look for ZBrush videos on youtube (Liam Shaw uploads sculpting-with-commetary videos), look on sick’s youtube channel and his blog. Also don’t forget to visit Ben Simond’s site. Of course, if you’ll look at ZBrush workflows, not everything can be translated to Blender. But overall techniques are the same: you have a big lump of “clay”, and you shape it with your brushes :slight_smile:

Not a bad go, Pancake. There’s something going on in the neck with that pose. The silhouette just doesn’t feel right to me. Like, the trapezius muscle shouldn’t look forced outward with the shoulder dropping like that. The sternocleidomastoid muscles look very exaggerated as well. You’re missing abs. You should have two smaller rectus abdominis muscles just beneath the pecs. As it is, yours are very symmetrical and long. His face seems a tad sunken in as if he lacks fat and skin on his face. It appears as though his facial skin is quite thin, accentuating the underlying muscles.

I’m sure you’re going for stylized here anyway, and I don’t want to go on an anatomy trip and sound like I know more than I do. Just giving some basic feedback since you asked for it. Other than that, you’re doing good and should be happy with your direction. This is for your future reference.

Thanks, Kris, and thank you very much for pointing out problems! I’ll be looking to fix all of them, except facial skin, because, well, he should be like this :slight_smile:

Stan, when I look at this, I see just how far I have to go to becoming good at this :smiley: Great job!

Small Troll, Keep an eye out for Blender Cookie doing another Mastering Modeling workshop. Jonathan’s run 2 in the last few months, and one week of the workshop is dedicated to sculpting. Very worth it if you’re eager to learn! (Don’t know if or when they’re doing another, but one to keep an eye out for!)

Thanks for the info Stan, i just sat through a few of liam shaws videos, pretty good stuff there, i’ll take a look at those other sites too.

@gradyp thanks i have heard good reports from the Master modeling workshop, and while i would love to support the cookie crew i simply dont earn enough to join. for now i will continue to get my education from youtube!

Now you’re being too kind to me and hard on yourself without reason :slight_smile: The first thing to know when you start something new is that you probably won’t make anything good. As I mentioned at the very beginning, this is my first character project (first “big” project in Blender, for that matter). I have no illusions about this one: it’s mediocre at best even if I do say so myself, has lots of problems, and currently he’s not very interesting being still in his clay form without any environment to put him into or even just a render. But I am ok with that, and I intend to see this project to completion. After all, the whole point of this project is to learn, not to master. I’m saying all this just because I actually often feel very much like you: there’s tons of stuff out there such when you look at it you feel like you’ll never be able to do something similar. But truth is, without practice, without making yourself doing something, and without feedback, you just wouldn’t be able to do anything at all. And I’m saying this without any big scary art portfolio to back it up with, but it’s just the nature of learning which can be applied anywhere really. So drop that attitude already and start modeling, sculpting, rendering, whatever’s your fancy! :slight_smile:

You are welcome :slight_smile:

Be sure to check out sick’s blog also, especially this section. He has a great collection of info, technique demonstrations and sculpting timelapses, invaluable for learning.