The Boatswain - Sculpt Pt.1

 25-28/01/22 - Week 3

This week was spent starting my second character, The Boatswain. I didn't manage to get everything done this week as Monday was spent finishing my first character and there was some finicky things to sort out in this project so far, and there will be more to come so I think this character will end up taking me a couple more days than I originally planned.

This was the first draft of the head, the head was something that I took a lot of time on in general as I wanted it to look right with the style of the concept. This was the first variant that I left to come to look back on the next day. I used references from traditional African body and facial scarring for the patterns on the face as I could see depth in the concept which led me to believe this was the inspiration/origins of the character's markings.

I tried to get the pointy & defined nature of the style down and did succeed but I felt the overall shape was off.

The next day, trying to understand where I was going wrong, I decided to do some quick sketches to help me understand the face from a front on and side view perspective. I did this a bit for Nia but I tried to put a bit more detail and thought into it here and this ended up really helping, even though my drawings are still a bit off.

I then progressively changed the shape of the head, I also added in the same eyes and eyebrow expression from the concept to help me gauge some of the features, like the eyes that felt very off to me. I found that the structure needed to be more blocky and the eyes needed to be much smaller, eventually, as you can see on the right I managed to get somewhere that read more like the concept.

After reaching this point, I reworked the cheekbones and smoothed some parts out to finalise the face. This outcome is much better and much more like the concept than the first sculpt. The only problem is that this ended up taking me the most part of 2 days so this also put me behind schedule for this week. 

By the end of Wednesday I managed to finish the rough blockout of the body which I then worked on through some of Thursday to define the shapes I saw in the concept. This was tricky to me at some points as I wanted it to still be anatomically correct, but at some points the concept really went against this, finding the balance between the two was hard but in the end I think I am happy with my outcome. As you can see, to save time I didn't define the lower part of the body as this will be covered by clothing.

Thursday and Friday were spent working further into the sculpt, I added some jewellery, the satin wrap and the trousers in. I made a decision with the trousers to make them a bit less low as this would cause a lot of issues when working with rigging and skinning. I think I managed to come to a reasonable compromise with the height of them. The belt ended up taking quite a while as I wasn't using the right tool at first, I was unaware of one of the curve tools that snapped to the form and was instead using a regular cure tool and shaping it to the body manually. Eventually when I was aware of this it allowed me to speed up a bit, but it still took me some time to fix the errors using the previous method and make sure everything looked smooth.

Originally I was going to use marvellous for the trousers but I ended up skipping this out for this project, this is mainly because I was already a couple days behind and creating stylised clothing like this is not really out of my comfort zone so I ended up just sculpting them without the use of marvellous, though I still do want to try to learn this at some point during my FMP.

On Friday I was also given some feedback on the trousers, the folds weren't in the right place and were unrealistic so I quickly found some better reference and reworked these and think I came up with a much better looking item of clothing.

I also started on the shoes and managed to get the basic shape down by the end of the day to try to get myself in a better position for next week.

Overall, This week I tried to make as much progress as I could but some things just take longer than I expect them to. So I have factored these in for next week and will hopefully be done by Thursday, giving myself a couple extra days than initially planned. Some of the things I will be tackling next week like weapons will most likely take me a couple days since I haven't approached weaponry before.