Tag Archives: blender

Modeling with Sculptris

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A week ago we finished the 4th round of our Original Character Project over at Drawing Meats. Since the original artwork was in 3D I was tempted to use 3D to re-create the character. Long story short: I totally failed and ended up drawing it. I’ll post that drawing up here soon enough, but you can see it on Drawing Meats right now.

Creating that illustration got me back into Blender. My 3D modeling skills have deteriorated since I stopped using Blender back in 2010, but I quickly relearned most of those skills again between a cheat sheet I kept of Blender tips and Googling for info.

Even more recently, I began to play with Sculptris. When I stopped modeling in 3D I stopped looking into the new software being created to facilitate building 3D models. Sculptris is a revelation. It literally changes everything for me in terms of 3D modeling. I did this in two hours:

guystatue2 579x1058 Modeling with Sculptris statue sculptris rendering blender 3D Modeling

I started out by making a head. It was too ugly to be a female head so I turned it into a guy. I wanted to make it look like a fancy stone statue so I created a base for it. If I did this in Blender. For one thing, it wouldn’t look like this. A second, it would have taken a month or two and that kind of turnaround time is unacceptable.

This took two hours.

The bust of the dude is my second try. Here’s my first:

sculptris test1 579x325 Modeling with Sculptris statue sculptris rendering blender 3D Modeling

I rendered this one out in Blender before I realized Sculptris had a renderer of its own. I did this in about an hour after tinkering with Sculptris and making and botching eight different other attempts at modeling a head. In one hour I was back to where I was 3D modeling-wise back in, like, 2004, and this looks better than that.

Best part of all this, Sculptris is free. Once I master it, I might consider buying Pixologic’s flagship product: Z-Brush, which is this but fully featured. On a technical note, there’s one big difference: Z-Brush doesn’t have Sculptris’ dynamic on-the-fly tessellation. You can learn about that on the Pixologic site. You can also sculpt in Blender 2.62 using a multiresolution modifier and their sculpt tools. There are some issues, mainly polygons can get messed up if you push and pull them too much. They’re working on something akin to Sculptris, but I’m not sure when it’ll be ready. I think their branch build server may have a version with it, but I’m fairly happy with this right now.

Some 3D sculpting tips I learned while doing these:

  • Less is more. I did a lot less “drawing” with clay and a lot more pushing and pulling clay around and applying broad brush strokes where they needed to be. When I needed detail then I might draw some strokes in.
  • I also learned to use the crease tool which is great for the lip of the “stone” block and the lips.
  • Inverting the inflate tool is great for nostrils.
  • You can switch into smooth mode by holding down shift while in just about any tool.
  • You can turn off symmetry, but I think it’s a one way street at that point.
  • Sculptris has a pretty decent renderer so I don’t have to export to Blender, but it’s limited to your max resolution screen size. My desktop is 1920×1200 and the render was about that size.
  • the masking tool is what I used to make the hair. I outlined the area below where the hair should be (I just eyeballed it) and then used the grab tool and pulled out a mass for the hair.
  • Go to Youtube and watch speed sculpting videos. You’ll learn a lot.
  • I think I have a stronger reason to study anatomy and muscle groups. With drawing I could kind of fudge it, but honestly I should educate myself better in muscle groups. It’ll help both my illustration and 3D sculpting.

It’s damn liberating to be able to do this in just a few hours and not a few weeks.

 

Hair!!

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The new Jakha particles are a lot better. This is just playing with the particles for maybe 2-3 hours:

head3 hair tn Hair!! blender 3D Modeling

Here’s how it works: You create an initial batch of particles (maybe 25 to 100 hair particles). You then “bake” the particles out — that is they become editable. From there you’re able to enter a particle mode and comb the strands of hair, grow them out, add new ones, remove hairs, cut hairs, etc and stylize them until you’re happy with the output. Towards the end of your hairstyling escapades you can turn on children hair particles that use the 25-100 hair particles you have as a template for how they should grow and conform to the head. That’s 2-3 hours of work. I would say the new Blender hair styling system is really damn good. I look forward to outfitting Albino with stylized fur. icon smile Hair!! blender 3D Modeling

About Hair in Blender…

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I take it back… (maybe)

But, if you want to play with hair in blender, get this build:

http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=560 

That is the beautiful thing about open source. GraphicAll.org is a site that builds many different versions of Blender — usually the builders also test them and viola, before there is a new official Blender release, you can be playing with the new tools and technology that the Blender Foundation has to offer. I found a new one with Jahka particles — the programmer is named Jahka I think. He’s redone the entire particle system and give us Blenderites an incredible hair particle system.

Of course they would need it because of the Foundation’s current animated movie project Peach.

It looks a lot easier to stylize hair, so I’m eager to try it out. Maybe I can get something even better than a washed out punk rocker this time. If things work out, I’ll post a new image…

Albino Grimby

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My latest work-in-progress. A “bunny rabbit” character that I created with my brother named Albino Grimby — hence my Interwebs nickname. His Interwebs nickname is Grimby Slayer. Here’s what Albino actually is:

albino front tn Albino Grimby blender albino grimby 3D Modeling

A small stuffed animal. He might look cute, but we all know the truth. He’s evil to the core although all he ever wants (porportly) is to bite your face off with his non-existent mouth or get some candy and let it absorb into his body as if he were the blob. My brother and I knew of his fowlness and thusly, his full name is “Albino the Brain Sucking Grimby.” He doesn’t actually do that or anything else. Now here he is in 3D with fur and without fur:

albino composite tn Albino Grimby blender albino grimby 3D Modeling

The fur one, when you look at it closely, isn’t there yet, but I didn’t spend much time on getting the fur to move correctly. The model itself is a work-in-progress. I still need to add details to his paws (hands) and figure out how I want to texture map him or just use base colors and furry-ize him to death. The fur version of Albino has 100,000 fur particle covering his body. I would need to use forcefields and whatnot to get them to stand in the correct way. Might be do-able. I spent all day yesterday familiarizing myself with Blender’s particle system — mainly for doing hair, but that’s really tough. I tried to add hair to my head model (see previous post for bad renders the head model). I managed to get the hair from looking really, really bad to looking like barbie doll hair or a washed-up punk rocker chick after a night of binge drinking and cocaine. I need to improve my technique or there are tools that Blender needs in the barber shop area. I saw that they’re working on some, and I look forward with great anticipation at what the next release of Blender will harbor for hairstyling.

My goal for Albino Grimby is to make him a fully articulate 3D character. So he’ll be modeled, textured, and rigged. Then I can do some animations with him. Like this one:

http://www.paradiseworld.net/animation/albinofly.avi

Notice, though, that the Albino in the animation has a big ole mouth. That would actually be Albino’s japanese brother, “Mangabino.” From there, I’d even like to experiment with him in Blender’s game engine or in DirectX. That might be fun to have a fully articulate character. It would also be great to test him with my OBJ code to ensure that it still works and raytrace him via my homebrewed raytracer.

Where is all of this 3D going? I’m definitely not interested in getting a job as a 3D modeler. I’m quite happy as a software engineering. I’m content with this being a hobby. I’m also happy to support Blender and freeware. If freeware is this damn good, then I say, let’s keep going in that direction.

I’d like to see my characters live in 3D most of all. Especially this one, which is the ultimate goal. (BTW, potentially NSFW.)

3D Head Model

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Some more Blender practice. This time an entire head. “Where are the ears?” I hear you saying. Next time. Next time there will be ears. I’m not 100% happy with the render. I’m playing around with Blender’s subsurface scattering parameters, but I said to myself, “this is the last render of the night and I’m going to post it no matter what.” I modeled the head from a cube and used subdivision surfaces again. For the most part I modeled the head by just splitting and merging polygons until I got something that looked like a very tesselated head. At first the head was very blocky looking and had way too many polygons. Most of the work I put into this was spent finding ways to cut down the number of polygons and to form the various polygon loops that make up the head. If you thing about it, there are circles that radiate outwards from the eyesockets and from around the nose and mouth and even the entire skull. These loops meld into each other and when they do and they’re sculpted smoothly it gives you a pretty pleasing looking 3D mesh.

head3 hdrender crop tn 3D Head Model blender 3D Modeling

Oh, here’s another render of the same mesh I but with different lighting and rendering settings:

head3 cropped tn 3D Head Model blender 3D Modeling

And just for kicks, here’s an alien face I did yesterday. The goal for this mesh was just to see how fast I could model a face from scratch. I wasn’t trying to make it look beautiful. I wanted it as ugly as I could get it and see what kind of monster would appear.

alienhead tn 3D Head Model blender 3D Modeling

That’s all I got for you right now. More to come.

Oh, did I hear you say something about DS Homebrew? How’s that going, you ask. Not going right now. Going slowly maybe. I’m torn between letting my Blender kick play itself out, but there are some hefty things I want to model and it seems that now is the time to be learning and moving towards that goal — besides I seem to be moving pretty damn fast at the pace I’m picking up and learning things in Blender. I’m also trying to relegate Blender to the weekends and spend the scant hours I have during the weekdays to write code and study DS stuff.