I thought I’d give myself the project of creating a horse, and maybe later a knight to go along with him. I’m starting out with sculpting using dynamic topology. Right now I’m having a little bit of trouble getting the legs to look right.
Hello! I d advise you to switch to ortho view (num pad 5).
Very good work, It would be interesting to see workflow steps layed out in one image from low poly to sculpting
I realized I should retopologize the horse before progressing with the sculpting. I plan on rigging him so I can pose him much better. I’m starting to wonder if I should make him animation ready, or simply sculpt him into the pose I want after an initia lrigging and posing. The same goes for the knight that I want to put with him. Ideally it would be nice to have a good looking, animation ready, horse and knight (with removable saddle) but I wonder if that is biting off more than I can chew ATM.
I know the topology isn’t the best.
Thank you RIPP, I actually didn’t start with a lo poly, but rather from a subdivided cube, and went straight into dynamic sculpting. I’'m hoping my retopology isn’t too bad. Here is an ortho view.
Yo man! this is looking very nice. the rear hoofs look a bit flat for my taste, but overall a very good sculpt.
your topology is very good actually, should be good even for animation, though one thing about getting models animation-ready is to try avoid triangles like the plague, unless ab-so-lutely necessary. they tend to deform poorly.
Thank you Guss. Yeah, the hooves were really bad. I fixed them in my retopo. I think I’m going move on to rigging. Then after that I will go back to sculpting.
looks great… hey, I recognize the blueprint you’re using. 
I’ve used it myself.
anyway, keep it up.
cheers
G
Hey, they are good blueprints! haha. So I re sculpted his muscle details. I also laid out UVs, and did some texture painting in Blender. The leg UVs are mirrored, as well as I only did 1 hoof that will be repeated 4 times. The head, neck, and body part are not mirrored. I also started work on fur. The mane and tail obviously need work. I did those fairly fast to get the main idea out there. Where I’m having trouble is the main part of his body. Horses have VERY small hairs on their bodies. So I’m trying to figure out if I should have a very small hair particle system, or if I should do look with textures.
nice modeling! I’m not too familiar with horses, but everything looks just in the right place. Is it going to get some armor?
Thank you Iron Lung. I named this “War Horse” not even considering armor for some reason. I envisioned it being simply a horse with a saddle. Like the rider wasn’t as wealthy enough to buy armor for his horse. But honestly though, I’m getting a bit tired and frustrated with this horse. It’s been almost a month and I hardly made any progress. I’m thinking about calling this project a failure, scraping it, and moving on to something else. I just can’t get this horse looking right. I liked his initial sculpt, but the more I work on him, I feel it keeps looking worse. Also, the hair looks really bad.
I scrapped the short hair idea, and tried out a bump map (short fur texture) along with the a color map.
(the colored Suzannes were for comparison of colors.)
Here is my node setup for the body material. Maybe its too complex, and that’s why it looks bad. “untitled” is the short hair texture for his bump map (I also multiply it onto the color map for some variation) The color map is “bodyUV.png” I have a hoof mask so that the hoofs don’t have the bump map, and aren’t as shiny as the body.
Here I was having an issue with the hair. It seems that the children are starting away from the body.
I don’t know if I should continue on this, or move on to something else.