Art Styles, what do they mean?
Before getting into the process of trying to create base models of my character, I need to consider what an art style actually means and refers to, as to just creating something similar, in order for me to be fully immersed in my project in order to produce the best final model possible. In my case, I really have to consider the 3D style of a Skylander: how is it rendered? does it have highlights? is it lowpoly? what is its color scheme? does it make use of normal textures? what should the quality of my textures be?
Many different factors need to be considered so that I can understand exactly how I want to do things with this project and plan accordingly to different problems I may encounter.
In this example, I can see that it makes use of shadows & highlights, looks somewhat low-poly (excluding head and hands). It doesn’t appear to make use of normal textures or mapping, all of it looks modelled and sculpted, but still follows the cartoonish approach, I note this style due to the large hands, small general body, as well as squished face proportions, whilst also being wide and covers enough of the face to give space for more detail. However, there being no outlines can make it hard to skew my point, but at the same time, it is no where near realism
Maya v. Blender
When it comes to deciding what im going to model my base in, I have to look at the 2 main contenders for modelling, and factor in benefits and cons. For example, I have much more experience in blender than I do Maya, but Maya has better UV mapping for example, however, I personally dislike its keybinds and shortcuts as they aren’t as user friendly, when compared to blender’s shortcuts. On top of this, I find the UI of Maya to be hard to read and figure out, resulting in the general experience of me using it for this project to be quite unsatisfactory. In this case, I am going to use blender purely for the workflow speed, I need to dabble in Maya in my spare time.
Colours & Silhouettes!
Before modelling, I needed to come up with my colour palette for Grub and also define its silhouette to see if the design is recognisable just from its silhouette, this in turn makes a good unique character as it can be defined based on its unique features.
Modelling time!
Now its time to model Grub, woohoo! First things was the basic head shape, I started by creating a cube, and adding a subdivision surface modifier on it, and upscaling viewport to 4. Why this over a regular UV Sphere? Mainly due to topology reasons, when it comes to sculpting later on, it is much easier with a subdivided cube, as all of the topology is square, where the top of a UV sphere has triangles, causing complications in sculpting.
When creating the body, I also made use of a cube to start it off, I also worked with the mirror modifier on, so that my character would be exactly the same on both sides, something which my drawing unfortunately didn’t do, and did cause some delay in my workflow, but not massively. A main struggle im looking at is how im going to get clothing working, possibly soft-bodies to vertex groups. For now, here is my progress on Grub (as of 26.2.23).
Texture Practice
In a short lecture from this week, there was a crash course on texture making, specifically in photoshop as supposed to substance painter, which was quite refreshing, as i used to texture make mainly in college before coming to UAL. Here are the results from that workshop! (note textures are in 128×128)
For now, that concludes week 2! Next week I’ll focus on making sure my base model is fully established, and that I can go into sculpting and starting to texture some parts of the model!