Multi-session series on the creation of a high-detail sculpted model. We’re modeling in the style of a “House Elf” from the Harry Potter movies, and will be modeling, sculpting, and texture painting, this time using Gimp instead of Photoshop.
In this first section, I create a base, low-polygon model to act as a foundation for a detailed sculpted model.
The final effect will be similar to this time-lapse video I did of the same subject:
it will be great to see the creation of another character, dave! so far, so good.
very cool dave, hoping ill understand skin shaders a lil bit more after this series
one of these days i need to finally sit down a watch one of the harry potters never seen one yet
haha, yeah, i was very skeptical about the harry potters series years ago when it came out. i thought it was a little kid thing. but the girl i was dating at the time was a huge fan, so of course, i had to watch it, and i saw that it was a very intriguing world they’d build. i’ve been following the series ever since (movie AND book).
Just my two cents… AWESOME!
why thankyew
Great tutorial. I get such a kick out of listening to your commentary!
I’m wondering something, though, since I’m fairly new to modelling and want to do things the right way.
I’ve seen Johnathan Williamson’s typology tutorials a few times – the head one is relevant here – and notice that the typology on your guy is alomst exactly nothing like the typology on the head in Johnathan’s tutorial. There is *a lot* of five point poles in the mesh you’re making, and the the edge flow is quite different. Some of it I can see is because you are box modelling, and Johnathan had not been been box modelling.
I’d really appreciate if you could say a few words about this; why it is so different, and what consequence it will have later on (on further modelling, rendering and so on).
There isn’t any one “right” way to set up your topology. Whereas I believe Johnathan’s model was intended for animating, this one most likely isn’t. It’s being set up for optimized sculpting. If you wanted to animate it, it would need a quick retopo and detail bake to be ready.
Thanks Matt, for your reply. I thought it might be something like that. Maybe ‘right way’ was not the right thing to say
since, as you point out, there are more than one way to do things. The ‘best’ or ‘most efficient’ may have been better to say, I guess.
I do, however, get the impression when I read about these things or watch tutorials, that edge flow and topology (poles and such) is important in any case – that one should always pay attention to the topology and flow of the mesh.
This is most confusing to someone new to modelling.
(I realize this is probably not the place for a discussion of these things, so sorry for going on about it. I’m done now
)
with the poles, there’s really no way around them, especially when you extrude. no matter how good your topology is, any time you extrude, there’s typically going to be a five-sided pole on most (sometimes all) of the corners. and obviously, since my technique here was to extrude to get the “muzzle” and “eye socket” areas, there were immediately some poles there on the cheekbone and forehead. so the trick is just putting them in an area that’s not going to be moving a lot during animation.
yet I have to agree with RK: Some of this topology, while initially not avoidable, could have been reworked. I guess, it would have even helped you with certain shapes…
Actually it seemed to me like you started out with a fairly dense cube already…
Shouldn’t, with a proper topology, sculpting work more decent too, giving more quads quicker to those parts that’ll need more details?
Of course, if your computer is able to handle a decent amount of subdivisions, this wont matter much, and with the subD tools, it’s significantly easier to modify high density meshes (as that’s what they where made for), but to get the base shape ready, a decent topology with sparse poly-count would be helpful, wouldn’t it?
Besides that, this tutorial looks very promising
– I’m already curious to see the next part.
There where a few places, where it appeared to me, that the use of edge slide could have been helpful- For instance, when you made the eye region larger to squeeze in another edgeloop…
Wow!!!!!!!!!!, very cool Dave!!!, I new series!!, very cool.
Amazing!.
i’m very interested in this video tutorial series.
this is perfect.
Spain
1stly, Sylvester….get and watch all the movies at once!
2ndly, I was very excited to see this series and cannot wait to see how it progresses. It’s a very exciting time for Blender and these sort of tutorials are a godsend!
Well done, can’t wait for the next instalment.
I’m hoping it will include SSS skin, hair, facial rigging….maybe even how to make him disappear like in the film!
well, i WILL get into SSS skin (no hair, unfortunately), but this is basically just a “bust” statue type of deal, so i won’t be doing any rigging or animation on him
Sad… after seeing this first part I was praying for an animation tutorial. I have been trying to find a good animation tutorial for rigging and animating a sculpture. If anyone knows of one, please reply with a link.
Great! Thanks David for those tips and clever use of blender tools.
=====> heyyyyyy reaad meeee look down
you’re keep doing lots of series tuts. thats nice , but I hope -wish- to see a tut about RIGGING a CAR as I saw you’re littel animation of a comic car which speak’s (blabla) -don’t understand me wrong I like it- … I hope my way of writing attract you… looking forward to hear from you OR see the tut
that was all done with animating shapekeys; i’ll kick around the idea and see if i can’t come up with something
@ RK
Edge flow and “topology” are something that is not set in stone while David’s Edge flow isn’t Ideal, it is sufficient for his needs and as I don’t Imagine much animation will be involved with the model There will be no problems but even If he did decide to animate it it would still work well.
Thanks for replying. I see what you are saying. Being new to modelling, I find it a bit confusing. It would be good to get some pointers, in a tutorial like this, on the different directions one could take in a project like this. I do, however, understand that that is almost impossible given that there are so many issues and directions possible at any given point in the process. I’ll watch and learn and find my own way, I think…
i believe the edge loop difference is in the fact that the house elf nose has a lot more detail/size than a human does, neading more topology on it… im new so i could be wrong but it seems that way to me?
the main detail in that part will actually be comming in later during the highpoly sculpting.
Houseelfs are very wrinkly, of course, but older humans tend to be too. The detail of a houseelf is similar to very old persons plus heaps of exaggeration plus huge eyes to still make it somewhat appealing. So basically, the main topology can be just the one of any human(oid).
Why the topology looks like that, is simply explained by the fact, that this mesh wont be rigged nor animated.
However, in theory it would still be good to stick to at least a somewhat nice topology in order to do certain wrinkles.
Facial wrinkles tend to follow the muscular flow, so doing proper topology will make it easier to do them.
What the better topology probably wont help for, is stuff like scars, that could have an aribitary flow, crossing any muscle at weird angles…
Already a new tutorial… awesome!
Can’t wait to see the rest; this series would be extremely helpful.
I’m quite pleased with the inmforatoin in this one. TY!
Hey David, if you like using smooth, as you mentioned it wasn’t working quite as fast as you wanted.. just use shift+R to reapply the smooth. It repeats the last option you used.
there’s also a section on the left toolshelf that appears when you apply the first smooth, and you can increase the influence, very similar to increasing the subdivisions when you subdivide.
hey i was wondering if you could do a tutorial on fluid particles. i’ve seen some videos on youtube and it looks really cool but there arn’t any tutorials on how to do it anywhere.
if you know how to can you think of making one?
thanks
I made a tutorial months back, but obviously terrible quality. Maybe it would help, though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWau4yzQRag
Jonathan Williamson has already made such a tutorial here on blendercookie!
You should get a MEDAL coz of GIMP!
5 starrs and bookmarked, just because of GIMP.
Thanks for the great tutes David. You are a very good teacher. You explain things well
Hi David, the tutorial so far has been wonderful, i’d like to ask one question about proportional edit mode, what’s the shortcut for controlling the falloff scope, so you can change the falloff ‘brush’ size on the way like the video shows.
you just scroll your mousewheel up or down. if you don’t have a mousewheel, you can use “page up” or “page down”
Why does the banner say “year one”?
it’s an homage to the harry potter films/books. rather than say “part one”, they say “year one”, as each part is the duration of a school year at hogwarts.
O.o
I hope, this series wont take you seven years though…
haha, nope, only 3
Thanks for the great box modeling tutorial. I always have a problem with topology direction in box modeling.
Practice, practice, practice I keep telling myself. Then I see there is another new tutorial on CG Cookie, and I go to the fridge for a rootbeer.
Awesome. Thanks.
Hi ward, you are awesome and i love your tutorials! you have a nice tutorial voice. And i think you sound like peter parker from spiderman x) Anyways I have a problem, when I use mirror modefier on my model it dosent connect to the other half of the model properly it kind of leaves a gap between my model two parts… I hope you got any tips to me so i can fix this problem and try to do your tutorial properly.
Thanks man!
hey great tut.But about a year or so i asked you a qestion on your johnny blender series on youtube it was like something that had to do with an eye and you did’nt rwally answer my qestion but i did not give up and found you on blender cookie and it has really changed my life…
after 2 minutes when you get to the eyes if I grab it hole my sphere gets wide. What do I wrong?
how did you get your interface to look like that, and i am stuck at step one, i click subdivide, or subdivide multi but i dont get a smooth option
You said you’ll go into SSS skin. Will you use maps for it? I mean those epidermal, subdermal, specular, diffuse, etc. maps.
Since this is a few months old, I’m not sure if I’ll get a reply… I’m sort of stuck at 42:05 on the vid where you’re supposed to extrude the neck and flatten the bottom… at this point, lol I think you’re pretty into your work and almost forgetting that you’re recording as you sort of mumble a lot of things almost as if talking to yourself rather than to the watcher… you say… “Scale it some… along z axis….” then you say “0%, flatten it out there”… I couldn’t figure out exactly what you meant. I tried Scale 0%… scale z 0%… but clearly that wasn’t what you meant. lol some pretty undesirable effects took place. So anyway if you or anyone else who knows what command you’re supposed to use to do the 0% flattening for, that’d be great
Thanks!
Edit for above. Time is actually 41:50ish (42:05 is actually just after the “0%, flatten it out there” is said.
For anyone who runs into the same problem I did with this tutorial. I found a work-around. Go into sculpt mode. There’s a brush called F Flatten/Contrast. Flatten out that bottom as much as you can. If you’re like me, it still won’t be quite flat enough but it’ll be close. Then go into edit mode in front view and using vertex select, carefully align the vertices into neat rows. After using the flatten brush, I found this extremely easy. The connecting lines of the mesh work as little levelers so you can tell when they’re straight. Worked out very nicely for me and FINALLY I’m able to continue on with the tutorial
Good luck!
Also, the only two views I needed to use to level these out correctly were front view and right view.
Hi there, I do believe your website may be having browser compatibility issues. Whenever I take a look at your web site in Safari, it looks fine but when opening in I.E., it’s got some overlapping issues. I just wanted to provide you with a quick heads up! Other than that, wonderful website!