Going backwards, to move forwards.
This week, I have seen more mundane tasks being appropriate for the progression of Grub, as it turns out that my topology throughout the project has been quite poor, and is causing problems when it comes to me creating more detail in my model, whether it be through modifiers or through sculpting. Essentially, this week just consisted of me quickly doing some UV, finishing off the rest of the clothing and making sure that all the parts of my model are up to the highest quality possible for the project.
At the start of the week, this is what I was working with:
Whilst this wasn’t inherently bad, I definitely wanted to change it, and fix it, as there were a few glaring problems, such as the pose it is in, weighting it is going to be difficult like that. Secondly, it is missing clothing and features from the design, and last of all, there are quite the noticeable number of topology issues, especially with the hands and the crown.
Handy Work
First matter I decided to attend to, was fixing and remaking the hands, as they were incredibly messed up, and didn’t resemble a hand in the slightest, so I decided to remake them. With the previous version of grub, they were originally part of the arms, and I had realised that doing that is terrible practice, as you cannot get an accurate shape to work with easily, so I made a new object.
But before I show you it, I want to display the old hands as a reference point:
As you can see, these are not the best hands to make for the character, with the remake, I made sure to give enough space for each finger, as well as enough depth to make it seem accurate.
Clothing! (for real this time)
Finally, I was able to finish the clothing aspect of Grub this week, but the hair is still to be added, tldr modelling is almost fully done.
To make the crown, a lot of work had to be done to it, including a lot of re-topology and adjustment in detail. During this time I also found out that using Simple on the Subdivision modifier was really useful in conveying the style of Grub, as my personal style has a lot of sharper and direct lines instead of curls and details, but I need to make sure it compares to the Skylanders look, as that ultimately is the main style for this project.
UV’s
With my UV Mapping process, I have been a bit lazy in how I have done it for this project. Ideally I shouldn’t have as many islands as I have for my model, but I am going to use Substance Painter for texturing throughout this project, so I decided to get the only bare UV’s from blender’s Smart UV project and use those for substance painter.
As you can see, with these texture maps, the islands haven’t been arranged properly, and its all over the place, this is due to me planning on taking my character into substance painter, and working from there on the texturing process, and considering Substance Painter only needs a base UV map, I didn’t focus on it too heavily, I will in the future though as it is good practice.
For me to even achieve these UV Maps as well, I had to backtrack a lot, I was told that it was easier to UV with the Mirror modifier, so I had to cut all my models in half, and re-uv them as it would generate half the amount of islands this way and still apply to the entire model, which has happened in this instance. It also gave me the chance to touch up on my topology and apply and fixes.
Current State of Grub!
Currently I feel like im in a good spot with my model, now I mainly get to focus on texturing, rigging and animating Grub, which I am excited to do overall. Here is the current state of him!