In this short and sweet Blender Video tutorial, I go over creating what I call a “Tim Burton Style” skull, using an Icosphere and a standard Procedural Texture to achieve the cartoon, claymation style.
Feel free to post links to your images of stylized skulls in the comments below.
Nice tutorial. Just as an FYI iteration is pronounced like it-eration (sometimes it-uh-ration depending on who’s saying it), not i-teration (mispronunciation found at 3:08). I only say this because once you mispronounced it the level of perceived professionalism I’ve come to expect from watching some of the videos here dropped momentarily; I wanted to go looking for another tutorial. I know that if I got that feeling someone else will as well, so I just wanted to give you a heads up so you don’t loose viewers just because of a simple misunderstanding. This comment is not meant to bash you, you guys do wonderful work, it’s just my attempt to help you out and pay for my lurking
Your nitpicking astounds me. Why is it that every time I finish a tutorial and am feeling quietly blessed by the amazing work I am priviledged to have access to for free, I scroll down to the comments and see some really ungrateful and ill considered comment from someone like you, poking holes in the material. How dare you? By your own admission you are nothing more than a lurker, and you contribute nothing to this community. Yet, you still feel you have the right to criticise the authors of the site. Shame on you. When you produce, narrate and share your own lengthy, detailed and high quality tutorials with consistency over a long period of time, then you will have the right to criticise and not before.
I applaud to you, Bisslad!
) and has a serious funny sense of humor, which makes the tutorials real fun to watch, besides being informitive. If you have criticism, let it be at least on the stuff where the tutorial focuses on, not some word Mr. Ward uses once and maybe mispronounces.
BlenderCookie is one of the finest tutorialsites on the web and David Ward does excellent tutorials. The guy really knows what he’s doing (sometimes a little less, but he is not ashamed to admit that
Well, at least now David knows he mispronounced it.
He’s just pointing out that he mispronounced it and that, to make him safe, tells him the correct pronunciation lest someone else think he is unprofessional or something.
Don’t you guys notice that he’s just trying to give a heads up, not exactly criticizing?
In all fairness, there’s no easy way to correct somebody. Personally I ignore grammar and pronunciations because I know I do them myself. But the more you try to explain how small, tiny a mistake is the bigger a deal it comes across. Scott meant no harm.
Btw Dave love the skull, I can see it now with a bow tie, cane and a top hat dancing across a stage. =D
Um… isn’t that what the comment section is for? Do you really think it was put there for people to say how brilliant the tutorials are? He’s just giving a little help, there’s no need to start bashing him
As a Blender newbie I find BlenderCookie to be an invaluable resource and am grateful to all the people who share their knowledge and spend so much time creating these tutorials without which I would be lost. I find it inappropriate and rather petty to correct someones pronunciation of a word; the only time a correction should be pointed out is if the mistake is in regard to the subject at hand. As for looking for another tutorial just because a word is pronounced wrong, good luck with that. Good Blender tutorials aren’t that easy to come by.
When I watch a tutorial on here, I’m not looking for grasp of spoken language, rather the grasp of Blender. He conveys himself well and I haven’t come across a tutorial he’s done where I’ve found myself pondering his meaning because he’s pronounced a word differently to myself.
A word can change pronunciation even if you just travel to another State or City within the same Country.
He produces high quality interesting tutorials. So who really cares if he pronounces one little word ever so slightly different?
Plus, language is a concept of man. We created it. We assigned sounds to the words we created. So, with language beaing man-made, and therefore not a natural certainty or governing law, like bio-mechanics, there is no true of false pronunciation, only a preferred.
i can see your point (some people say “i-talian food” rather than “it-alian food”), but in my defense, i’ve only seen the word in print, and have never really heard it spoken
“I just wanted to give you a heads up so you don’t loose viewers”
Lose is spelled lose, not loose.
You criticize his pronunciation yet you use the wrong form of lose. Fail.
uh no one really cares how it was pronounced. here in asia everyone pronounces words differently but that doesn’t really matter, its the spelling that counts like “loose”.
Wow, another tutorial today. Keep it up!
When I watch a tutorial on here, I’m not looking for grasp of spoken language, rather the grasp of Blender. He conveys himself well and I haven’t come across a tutorial he’s done where I’ve found myself pondering his meaning because he’s pronounced a word differently to myself.
A word can change pronunciation even if you just travel to another State or City within the same Country.
He produces high quality interesting tutorials. So who really cares if he pronounces one little word ever so slightly different?
Plus, language is a concept of man. We created it. We assigned sounds to the words we created. So, with language beaing man-made, and therefore not a natural certainty or governing law, like bio-mechanics, there is no true of false pronunciation, only a preferred.
Nice tutorial and good to see something else than cube and UV sphere used for change. Small idea to finish the feel of eyes; uncheck traceable on eyeballs so that they don’t cast shadow into eye sockets on rendered image. Least its how I think eyes should be.
this looks like a 3d version of @wegraphics logo on twitter… heh heh… nice one tho’
Yay 2 tutorials more for Halloween, I thought there was only going to be the guts one. xD
I agree with Bisslad! These High Quality Tutorials are a blessing. Make your own if you can Scooter.
If I do mirror my sphere has a gap between it
never mind I got it now
The space between in mirror is due to your clipping… Turn it on and drag a vertices to the middle. It should snap to place in the center.
Thanks David. As always, another exceptional tutorial. Your dedication and time to producing such material is very much appreciated by the Blender community.
I am from Germany, and I find, David´s tutorials are the best. As English is not my mother language it is sometimes difficult to understand what is meant, but not in David´s tutorials. Everything is for me clear as glass.
Rudl
David and Jonathan… the unstoppables guys!!
Thanks for all this great tutorials.
Dave – you always rawk*! Thanks again for the wonderful, selfless contribution to the B community. I always look forWARD to your tutes.
Sweaty
* it’s spelled r.a.w.k., but it’s really pronounced “roke” for Scott.
Thanks so much for the great tutorials. You can pronounce whatever, however you like. I’m sure most of the NORMAL people understood every word.
Man, some people are unbelievable. Give this kid a blanky.
Grow up and be respective of people trying to help. If you don’t need the help, go else where and whine.
Thank you again for a great tutorial.
My opinion is that Scott is trying to help David, not going around and slamming people that are trying to help. He’s giving a heads up, not criticizing.
Really nice tutorial as usual, but if I may suggest a little someting, I think you should turn off the grid floor, it’s quite distracting.
great tutorial[2]
David,
Thanks for the tutorial and great that you are trying new ways.
You mentioned the uv sphere causes problems because of the triangles. Not sure if this helps, but in Face Mode if you select every other pair of triangles (select two, skip two) and convert them to quads, then select the remaining pairs of triangles and convert them to quads they will all be quads. You can then almost illiminate the distortion by subdivision modifier, set smooth, and then selecting every other vertex of the first ring, and adjusting them.
My first try: http://alexkilledthebeast.deviantart.com/#/d31x31g
I wasn’t happy with it so:http://alexkilledthebeast.deviantart.com/#/d31yjhv
Very nice results Alexandre. Try changing the background to fully black so for the mood.
I guess you were right.
nice! i love seeing “student work”
Hey! I loved this tutorial!
I did it over a couple days, this is how he turned out!
http://d.imagehost.org/0840/Cartoon_Skull.png
Thanks again, this is a great tutorial!
looking good
you might throw another layer of subsurf on there, you can see some polygon edges around the eyesocket
Reminds me of “A nightmare before christmas – Tim Burton”.
Your skills are impressive!
Is there a way to use box modeling to make a stylized human head that can be animated?
sure, check out the “house elf” series, it uses the box modeling technique
http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/09/28/house_elf/
Here’s what I’ve created with the help of this tutorial
http://dysonshell.deviantart.com/#/d325849
Awesome tutorial, just as we are used to
nice, very close to my final version
Hmm…
I don’t see why you did change the ramp shader in the first place… Doesn’t make much sense, as the effect of setting diffuse colour to black or intensity to zero would have the same effect.
It’s probably hardly noticable but I guess, a deep black procedural ramp texture needs more calculation time than no texture and just black diffuse.
Also, icospheres are based on icosahedrons which are made from triangles. So nope, there is no way to build quad-based versions of them.
And while you don’t have the relatively noticable pole that you’d have on a UV sphere, you have a LOT of other poles distributed over the mesh and not a single non-pole… – with the procedural texture that affects the normals, that doesn’t maater too much, though.
Nice tutorial
i like to leave my “material” color to be standard white/grey, and set the color in the texture area, so i can easily render a “clay render” if i like by just turning off the textures. it’s not required, i know, but it’s something i like to do.
thanks for the info; i played with it a bit more after the tutorial, and while you can edit the sphere to have quads by joining adjacent triangles, they’re not very pretty. best to just go with a UV sphere if you want good topology to play with.
Very nice tutorial! But can you explain how you inserted aditional loops at 03:11? I can’t find this function…
Regards,
Demno
He used CTRL+R to insert a loop cut
Thank you very much!
Now I can proceed… xD
Hah, thanks, I was about to ask the same question!
Thank you guys so much for asking that question and Scott thank you for answering! I have been stuck on that spot for a while trying to figure it out!
Thank you David for this a little different tutorial. To me it was rather hard to adapt to the icosphere as a base mesh due to all those trishes. It really seems like it could be useful sometimes, though.
Btw: I modelled two versions, one the left from an icosphere, on the right from a box (I’m sure you will notice the difference
http://www.raubkopictures.de/files/icospherevscube.png
Btw2: I’m not Scott from the first post, but I also don’t consider his post as harsh criticism but rather a head’s up…
David,
When I add the icosphere and then the smooth shading and subdivision surfaces as you did in the tutorial, I don’t have as many faces as you do. what am I doing wrong here? Using 2.55.0 Beta
Great tutorial David!
I’m learning so much from this site, it amazes me.
Here’s a Flickr link to the one I modeled. I also used the LuxRender tut on here too and incorporated that.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/56384490@N05/5213681036/
Thanks for another great tut David. I actually decided to take a different approach on this. Instead of using an Icosphere or UVSphere, I decided to use Johnathan Williamson’s more recent tut on cutting holes in a curve. As found here:
http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/12/28/tip-hole-curved-surface-revisit/
I was kind of rushed, but the following image shows a pretty nice topology after applying my subsurf modifier:
http://i.imgur.com/M4Mmj.png
Thanks again!
If you listen very carefully you can hear jonothan willianson screaming about the topology, But jokes aside this is a great tutorial
great tutorial.
My cartoon skull: http://blenderw.blogspot.com/2011/12/una-de-miedo.html