Creating a Cartoon Skull

by David Ward
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Modeling, Tutorials

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.

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Discussion

57 Responses to “Creating a Cartoon Skull”
  2. Posts: 230
    verticies says:

    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.

    • Posts: 80
      Serpent36 says:

      Very nice results Alexandre. Try changing the background to fully black so for the mood.

      • Posts: 11
        Alexandre Gonçalves says:

        I guess you were right.

    • Posts: 261
      David Ward says:

      looking good :D you might throw another layer of subsurf on there, you can see some polygon edges around the eyesocket

  5. Posts: 4
    Philip Kavanagh says:

    Reminds me of “A nightmare before christmas – Tim Burton”.

    Your skills are impressive!

  6. Posts: 11
    Alexandre Gonçalves says:

    Is there a way to use box modeling to make a stylized human head that can be animated?

  8. Posts: 71
    kram1032 says:

    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 :)

    • Posts: 261
      David Ward says:

      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.

  9. Posts: 2
    Demnogonis says:

    Very nice tutorial! But can you explain how you inserted aditional loops at 03:11? I can’t find this function…

    Regards,
    Demno

    • Posts: 7
      Scott says:

      He used CTRL+R to insert a loop cut :)

      • Posts: 2
        Demnogonis says:

        Thank you very much!

        Now I can proceed… xD

    • Posts: 1
      Aericks says:

      Hah, thanks, I was about to ask the same question!

      • Posts: 3
        Kristin says:

        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!

  10. Posts: 7
    Scott says:

    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…

  11. Posts: 77
    darth_gimp says:

    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

  13. Posts: 11
    Neil Brewer says:

    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!

  14. Posts: 1
    robert slater says:

    If you listen very carefully you can hear jonothan willianson screaming about the topology, But jokes aside this is a great tutorial

  16. Posts: 8
    nathaniel byrd says:

    A few questions if you do not mind.

    1. When we were placing the camera you did something to make it easier to move. But when I wanted to model again it did not allow me to rotate around the model. How do I reverse it??

    2. Mine looked more like a walrus that a skull because of the separation in the center of the model. How could I have prevented that??

    3. And what is the clipping modifier for?? What is its purpose??

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