Dev Log 06 - Wume Comes To Life

Wume Progress

With the block out for Misho's sidekick completed last week, It was time to go through the same process of sculpting out further detail and get the overall shape of the character while using real world reference to help the design be grounded and realistic.

It was also important to heavily document this not just for documentation in this blog but to also be used in my 3D character art lecture, so more detailed insight in this process can be seen within blog posts relating to them lectures. Sculpting Wume was a nice change with the subject being something I haven't worked on in the past with this creature being built up mostly of shell covered limbs. Overall this was easier compared to more muscle based characters with there only being several large defined shell areas to sculpt out. Obviously this still needs a massive amount of reference, so I made sure to have my pure ref document filled with fire flies and other insect reference. I also watched several HD close up videos on insects moving to understand how their joints interlock and move in relation to each other, An example of one of these videos can be seen below.

I sculpted all limbs separate of each other working from the base pre-sets I had made and shown in the previous Wume related blog post. This method of how I sculpt worked even better on Wume as the overall shape is clearly blocked out into areas so it took while till I started merging the shapes together. Now this characters design was original and purely created by me so the overall shape of him isn't based of any certain insect so instead when going through and sculpting him I used several different insects as reference for different body parts such as the abdomen being based off of a honey bee yet over shell pieces such as the plate that covers the back of his neck being based off of the original fire fly reference.

Not many brushes where used in this early process with it mostly consisting of 3 brushes. This being the clay add on brush to build up shell pieces then moving on to use the crease brush to define the harsh edges of where the shell pieces. To give of the impression of these shell pieces being hard and jagged I used the scrape brush to flatten small areas next to each other.

This was the final look of Wume after a couple days of sculpting there's is only a few areas that need to be touched up but overall he's at a standard that is ready to be retopologies and thrown into substance and textured up.