#assignment5

Hands were a tricky sculpt for me, as I struggled to get things looking clear, anatomically correct and readable, so I followed along with a tutorial by Follygon at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eohbDOmRaCs, for guidance on accurate anatomy. I still feel like they are currently the weakest part of my character, and it has highlighted to me that I need to spend more time improving my hand creation skills. I didn’t want to spend an extra day on the hands alone though, so got them to a base standard and moved on.

Once I had blocked out my model, I started remeshing and cleaning it up. This project I wanted to really focus on creating clean stylised shapes, I have never created a character this stylised before, and I felt it helped me to be more deliberate in the shapes I create. My primary and secondary forms still need some work to improve readability and believability on most of the model. I used polypaint within zbrush to help with visuallising the character coming together, and it helped my brain out with realising when some of the forms didn’t match the concept, as well as making the end result more visually rewarding. 

My final sculpt for the dragon and girl as of this week:

Reflections

I am happy with how the head hair came out, and the bold seams on the clothing - but the hands and face need more work - in particular, I don’t believe I captured her cheeky, curious essence as well as I hoped to. Instead she looked quite scary with her wide eyes and pupils for quite a while! I’m glad I created her in her A pose, as it has allowed me to potentially work more on her later, and create into a game ready character if desired. I haven’t used polypaint on my Zbrush sculpts before, but I found it very helpful with this project to help define her shapes, and after adding the colours I realised several times where my proportions were off.

I spent the longest time making minor adjustments to the face, trying to get her to look more natural, but I still didn’t quite get there. I need to spend some time doing speed sculpting for both face and hands, to skill up more in this area. I am disappointed I didn’t get enough time to add her shoes, finish sculpting and add extra mesh strands to the hair, or complete the final aspects of polish to really make her stand out.

To finish her off, I gave her a final pose in Zbrush, merging my subtools together for quick posing ease. The result is nowhere near as clean as I would like it to be, losing definition in the joints, and highlighting her knobbly fingers - but for a week's sculpting practice I am happy with the outcome. She is blocky and there are few holes in between her subtools, so I hope she would 3D print effectively.

Reference List

After much research into 3D printing requirements, as well as tips and tricks for the sculpting process, it was time to get started on the practical. I fell in love with a concept by Peter Straubel, ‘Girl and Dragon’, which can be found on his artstation - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/490kWL. The young girl had a very readable figure with bold simplistic shapes and colours, with a sturdy base, with minor amounts of overhang - something I felt was a great concept for printing. I also thought she and the dragon were really cute - and would make a fun project!

After gathering references to assist me in my sculpt, with both form references and LODs, I started off blocking out my model in Zbrush, trying to get as many base forms together as quickly as possible to help with sizing and proportions.

I blocked in the base arms in their final pose, before scrapping that and deciding to create her in an A pose, and pose later within Zbrush itself, or learn Character Creator. I decided to not block in her feet quite yet, and focus on getting her bust completed first, as I foresaw myself running out of time within the week to get everything up to my desired quality.

I sculpted everything from scratch, apart from the face, which I used a base mesh I had created previously, and then heavily adjusted to form her child-like round features. For the hard surface aspects I created the block outs in Maya, before moving them over to Zbrush. Unfortunately my version of Zbrush crashes frequently on the Zmodeller tool at the moment, so I am doing things in Maya where possible in terms of poly modeling. I am hoping to move back to an older version without the bug for my next project.

Reference List

Straubel, P. (2024) Girl and Dragon [Image]. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/490kWL (Accessed: 3 November 2025).

https://uk.pinterest.com/ (2025) (Accessed: 3 November 2025).

This week we were tasked with modeling something capable of being 3D printed. The 3D printing industry is ever growing, and I was really interested in dipping my toes into this sister career. I really enjoy sculpting characters in Zbrush, so am particularly excited to further develop my skills in this area, while learning about the specifications and requirements of models for 3D printing.

For this project I wanted to create something that was easily readable, and focus on clear, well created forms. I didn’t want to push myself too much by doing a whole character, so I looked for a concept with a bust that could be detailed enough on its own, if I didn’t have time to complete some legs. Finding a character whose detail comes out in forms and/or texture, was also important to me, since I wanted my model to look good without the requirement of colour. Having my artifact have a sturdy base, and not being top heavy is another important consideration that isn’t normally considered re real time work.

Research

I really loved the work of Dinamuuu 3D on Artstation and Paterion, found at: https://www.artstation.com/dinamuuu3d, and I am using her portfolio as my main industry standard inspiration, and style for my finished model. The clean simplistic shapes she effortlessly creates, with dramatic silhouettes is something I'd love to incorporate into my own work.

After doing some research on how to sculpt with 3D printing in mind, I learnt about a few key considerations I had to adhere to (Oasim Karmieh, 2024). It is important to create a ‘water tight mesh’, with no holes anywhere, which wasn’t something necessarily required for game models. Being careful of overhanging sections with large gaps between parts will also come up as issues in the final print. Creating parts with thick solid attributes, and avoiding fragile sections will result in a more successful first time print.

I then did some 3D printing research on creating poses for my character. Previously I have always created my characters in a neutral pose, and rigged them afterwards - but there are a number of ways in which I can create a posed figure in Zbrush for printing: sculpting it directly in the required pose, posing it later within zbrush, or externally rigging the model, posing it, and importing it back to Zbrush for final touchups.

I wanted to explore these options further, so I watched a video on 3D printing and character posing, (Reallusion, 2023) specifically using Character Creator 4. Here the process involves sculpting a character in a T or A Pose in Zbrush, then rigging and posing it externally in Character Creator, then back to Zbrush afterwards for final 3D printing touch ups. This is a great non-destructive process for creating numerous poses for the same 3D printed character, with a massive library of pre-created poses to choose from. The plugins mean the programs work directly with each other, allowing seamless back and forth, with each zbrush project being able to hold multiple pose data for your model. However, it does require a lot of time to set up a character, and may thus be more suited to a larger project, then a simplistic one posed character sculpt.

I may have jumped the gun a little bit by doing research on keying parts together post print, and how to create keys in Zbrush, but the idea was exciting to me! I learnt that keys aren’t always necessary - but good if you want to print the model in different colours, make painting easier, or to avoid using as many supports which can damage the model, or cause extra sanding time. Not creating too much overhang in the pose of the character can also achieve this reduction in supports, by creating something stable from the get go. I will be taking these aspects into consideration when choosing the concept for my artifact, as well as final posing decisions.

Reference List

Reallusion (2023) 3D Printing and Character Posing with ZBrush & Character Creator | One Sculpt, Infinite Poses. 31 July. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg-7mYHSosg (Accessed: 2 November 2025).

Oasim Karmieh (2024) How to Prepare Digital Sculpts for Successful 3D Printing. 24 November. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6m7GPZVfuc&t=1631s (Accessed: 2 November 2025).

Because I didn't have enough time, I took a break from the Blender exercise to focus on the goal of this assignment.

It's that magic flying machine I drew before. I've been itching to build it in 3D to see what it looks like in Blender!

The heart of this magical flying machine is the perfect blend of technology and magic. It's divided into several parts: the moon seat in the center core, the jewels and name tags on the top of the flyer, and the magic ribbon on the tail! (My favorite part, but also the hardest part of the painting process)

In the modeling process, the most challenging part is the details of the fuselage and the overall modeling mastery and restoration. In the 2D drawing process, I can cover up some of the design's less desirable or unique parts more opportunistically, but in 3D, there is no dead space at all. So, in the actual modeling, I had to adjust the proportions of the overall shape for a while.

The second issue is the texture. It's hard to draw textures by hand and even harder to create textures in Blender that match your style. It's tough to make a texture in Blender that matches your own style of hand drawing.

At a very late stage, I realized that creating a unique texture is very difficult, and it's not something that can be done quickly. However, I looked at the online teaching resources and tried to make something close to my ideal. The glass moon and the magic ribbon were the most difficult parts.

This assignment was all about using 3D software, and honestly, it made me a bit nervous. I don't have much experience with 3D software, but I'm also excited because mastering 3D skills is a massive part of being a concept artist. I'm a beginner in 3D but eager to find as many resources as possible to practice and learn more.

First, I'm looking for Chinese resources to learn. I found a YouTuber who teaches how to use Blender, starting with building an essential toolbox to learn how to operate it. Since I'm pretty new to Blender, this tutorial is still challenging. I managed to build a toolbox using the tutorial, but there are still many things I don't understand or did wrong during the process.

So, I decided to look for a new Blender tutorial. This one is perfect for me, haha! I followed this YouTuber and built a simple pearl girl. While doing that, I practiced the basic Blender operations, like interface, basic object deformation, and setting up the material creation.

After practicing the Pearl Girl, we will start practicing more complicated models.

For example, the fox, leaves, trees, and so on. While building this basic model, I became more familiar with the operation of Blender and learned the most important function of the Blender modifier.

Honestly, this function is really quite complicated! But after actually using it, I will be shocked by Blender software!

Lastly, practice the important connection node in the blender texture function.

Attached are my notes haha