This past week, I did a bit of experimenting with a new workflow intended to create organic humanoid models. Didn't really do much in terms of my other models since they've gotten to the parts of the process that I seem to stagnate on (in particular, clothing and texturing). I reckon I got some good results from the experiments though!

It's no secret that I'm not the best at sculpting. It's one of my many white whales when it comes to 3D art. Zbrush is obviously a very powerful tool, but when it comes to learning it (and learning on my own in general), I always get scared of failure and lock up before I get the chance to fail in the first place. The problem, however, is that I want to make things that tend to require a lot of sculpting in the first place. The most obvious of these being organic humanoid character models. I've got a few OCs that I haven't shown at all on here because I don't have anything that is tangible.

However recently, I had a thought to myself: "What if I take the easiest parts of sculpting and one of the most intuitive parts of Maya and combine them into one?" Essentially, I have attempted to take the very rough blocking out phase of sculpting (where one blocks out the main shapes of a character with rudimentary shapes) and combine it with Maya's quad drawing tool. This can allow me to create characters in a way that can be a bit more comfortable for my skill set, if I give myself time to refine the process. The blocking out phase is easy enough since for the time being I can just follow along with references or anatomy until I can feel confident to make something more unique.

For my first two experiments, I wanted to just get my bearings around this new(?) workflow. I got some very rudimentary anatomy references and sculpted some rough shapes of the parts I attempted to make. I feel that this part in particular is very well suited for Zbrush brush. For one, this is the only part of the process that actually involves something that would resemble sculpting. For the time being, I tried using Maya's sculpting tools to get the shapes that I wanted since I just wanted to quickly try this out. While they aren't particularly good, it was decent enough that I could actually get a result. With these early experiments, I just wanted to see if this workflow could actually produce something that at least somewhat resembled the reference material. There isn't any particularly good topology and are very unfinished. They did, however, show me that I could potentially use this in order to get a better result. The arm test in particular seems quite promising. It might have been unintentional, though. Because of how the mesh that I used for the blockout was just segmented spheres combined together it produced a clear distinction between the shoulder, bicep, and forearm.

For my next experiment, I tried to use more complicated reference material. I ended up using half of the model that I ended up using since Maya's mirroring can be a bit bad. Something that is noted in the image above and what I used in all my experiments was the Live Object tool. This allows new vertices, edges, and faces to magnetise to the surface of the live object. This works particularly well in conjunction with Quad Draw, which allows the user to place vertices anywhere. This includes the surface of a live object. I think the results of this particular experiment was a success! There are many problems like the pinching on the model, and I missed some basic topology stuff. But like a said before, this was just to see if the workflow could actually make something. I'm honestly quite surprised with the results of this! I remember trying to make a face in Blender when I was first starting out (it might have even used the same reference) and it never ended up going anyway because of the limitations of purely hard surface modelling.

I reckon that if I refine the base shapes, and remember what good topology looks like, I could really make some cool stuff with this! I'm not sure if I'll make something with it right now because of my other projects, but It'll be good to have in my back pocket.

Thank you and good-bye for today!