Moving on to personally develop skills for 3D modelling and to learnt techniques for characters I will be making in the first project. I've decided to work on another character piece based from star wars. The character I shall be working on is from the Mandalorian tv show as seen from below and will be completed to fully game ready standard.
I chose this character as it allows me to improve my poly modelling through the armour and to also learn sculpting skills for cloth. There's is very few videos on the subject of sculpting cloth soo most of skills and knowledge will come from references of cloths I'm wearing and pictures of real world examples.
Above you can see the initial mood board for the character using a mixture of references, this includes screenshots captured from his appearances in the show, promo images and then even into an action figure based in the character that gives more in-depth turn arounds and a wearable helmet that shows in-depth detail of the characters head. Moving on to areas that are harder to see in possible references such as the jumpsuit underneath his armour I've used real world references to do my best to capture this detail.
Blender Tools Used
Starting this character I shall focus on area that I've already got knowledge on from before. As seen above is a render from a project I worked on during the break between 1st and 2nd year. This shows another character from star wars in which I modelled the armour through poly modelling in blender. This whole process used variety of modelling techniques such as extruding polys to build basic shape of the helmet. Then continuing on to use grid fill to add quick messy topology to fill in major areas and then cleaning up while referring to reference from the film. To put in the place the smaller curves in the helmet that cant be extruding in I use the bevel tool which curves selected edges in the mesh. The last two tools that I learnt are crucial to this method are intrude, which create a smaller shape in the selected polys of the mesh this was useful for such areas on the character above like the eyes. The final tool I used was extrude which allows you to pull shapes out of the mesh and creates a external part of the mesh, this was used to create things such as the details on the chin area of the characters helmet.
Above you can see the finished untextured model for the characters helmet in blender, using the methods as described above. This part I found relatively easy so my main focus was time and considering for the previous character shown on this blog post, which the helmet took me at least 3 full days of work to complete and this helmet being finished on the base side of modelling within a day and a half. I am extremely happy with this progress.
The final stage was to mark seams on edges of the model so I could unwrap it allowing me to texture it in the secondary program I will be using in this project, Adobe Substance Painter. To import this model into substance I need to have a clean UV layout so I can paint on this model in substance. The picture above shows Red lines marked on the model showing the seams, this is done easily by right clicking poly edges and selecting Mark Seam. To perform the final Unwrap all I had to do was select all edges in Edit mode and perform Unwrap function.
I will continue with this model in my next weekly update....