Character model

After showing the model templates to Mr Morris, he suggested I do additional versions, one without clothes, and another of just the head

From there, I could start modelling the character in Blender. After showing Mr Morris all the tutorials I’ve found, he told me I should look for new ones because most of them showcased bad topography that would make for a bad model for our purposes.

I ended up finding this tutorial by Dikko on YouTube, which is a two-part series of videos, one focusing on the head, and the other on the body. His models are made for animation, and so he does use subdivision, but I looked at the final result and figured even without subdivision it will look alright. Also, because the model is created to move, the loops should work for animation. He specifically noted his models don’t use sculpting, but he did use sculpting tools for smoothing. That didn’t affect the poly count, so it wasn’t an issue.

It took me a while to get through the video, mainly because I had to keep pausing to understand the shortcuts he was doing to get the result he got. I didn’t have much experience with Blender prior to this, so I was learning the program as I progressed through the video.

My final result was this, I ended up doing some adjustments to proportions while doing the body (mainly the distance between the eyes)

After I finished this, I moved on to the body, following this video, also by Dikko. I got through it faster, because now I knew how to use the shortcuts.

One thing that was really difficult was attaching the neck to the rest of the body, because the head had way more loops compared to the body. I didn’t want to add more loops to the body, since it would raise the poly count by a lot, so I had to figure out how to turn 6 loops to 1. Eventually I managed to do that without having n-gons or triangles. The back of the head had a similar issue, but because it will be covered by her clothes, I figured having 2 triangles there wouldn’t be a problem.

After that, all I had left was the hair, which Dikko has a tutorial on too, but I didn’t follow it too closely as the hairstyle of my character is much simpler. As seen in the model template, her hair will be mostly covered by the shawl, except for the front.

Initially, I tried using bezier curves, but the controls were finicky and frustrating to me as someone that never used them. I couldn’t get them to twist the way I wanted. I tried different types of curves, and landed on the “Line” type in Blender, which works similarly to the bezier, but the handles on the ends allow for easier maneuvering, at least in my case.

This is how the hair looked halfway through

And this is the final version (I dissolved a lot of edges after finishing)

I didn’t bother making the bun at the back too detailed, but the strands are converging in a way that makes sense.

The next part will be modelling the clothes, which I will do in Marvelous Designer as Mr Morris suggested. I didn’t get feedback on the character model yet, but I’m moving on because I rather not leave everything for the end.