The Boatswain - Sculpt Pt.2

 31-03/02/22 - Week 4

This week was made up of finalising my second sculpt. I created weaponry for the first time and improved my belt making skills so I started off slow but managed to end when I wanted to for this week.

The begging of the week was spent firstly finishing off the shoes and jewellery so that the sculpt was ready for the guns and belts/straps. There wasn't much to this though it was good to finally have the main sculpt finished.

The guns proved a lot harder than I originally thought. I wasn't sure what was best to create my base in, Max or Zbrush. I am not the best with ZModeller so I thought that Max would be my best option. I am unsure whether this was the right option to take but I ended up slowly figuring out what was the best way to approach guns in Max. With some help from my classmates I decided on using a loft to create the base shape and then using turbosmooth to help with the rest. This took me a while to get the hang of and get the right topology/shapes in there. I also had to gather lots of reference of the types of guns portrayed and some of them were a lot more fantasy than I thought and some parts were very unrealistic. I went with trying to replicate the guns I could see in the concept since this was one of the main things I want to get right, correctly replicating concepts. So logically, my guns don't really make sense and trying to capture the shape intended was a bit difficult and confusing especially with the largest gun. I also decided to create 3 guns instead of 4 as the smallest one does have some differences but they are super minimal and to save time I will just make one of the other ones smaller to fit the concept.

I then followed this up with creating details in Zbrush which wasn't too difficult though sometimes hard to get the program to understand the topology I was trying to go for which made subdiv a bit pixelated occasionally. By the time I had finished the guns I had taken up most of 3 days which was over my max limit that I wanted to go for, ideally I could have finished these quicker if I'd understood it from the get go.

I used up the last part of Wednesday and then the majority of Thursday to create and finish the belts and holsters. This was just time consuming as I am still not the best at more hard surface properties in Zbrush so getting the topology and shape right was again a problem. It was mainly a case of using the curve tool and adding in new tools to add on each part. I then used the rest of Thursday to polish the character off and make sure everything looked to a standard that I was mostly happy with for times sake.

Now I have finished this sculpt, I do have a bit less time for my third and final character which I am not too confident about since this is probably the most time consuming one since it is so intricate. Hopefully with my skill building in zbrush I will have sped up enough to get this finished on time, I am willing to give up at most 2 days the week after but I will need the majority of that time for retop and unwrapping.

Here is my plan: