Polybook – Aaron “The Cabbage Detective” Rudderham

[Aaron Rudderham]

@drgnclw Cheers guv!

[Aaron Rudderham]

Wow, time flies huh? Guess I’ve got some updating to do.

Well first thing I should mention is I modeled a foot:

However that was a while ago. Since then I’ve been practicing facial anatomy, modeling each major part of the face separately:

Now I need to place these in to the actual face, which seems a lot more daunting than it probably is. Be warned, I’m probably going to end up making what closely resembles some cosmic Lovecraftian entity more than a human face, but that’s how we learn! Also as a sidenote you can see more shots of these along with other stuff on my twitter (@CabDetective) or Instagram (cabbagedetective).

One more thing is whilst I was bored I watched the abstract art course that was uploaded recently and decided to put these practice sculpts to use to make… something.

It’s been called creepy, which was the vibe I was going for, but I didn’t really have any other purpose for it. Not that that would stop someone who graduated from the School of Pretentiousness for assigning some deeper meaning to it.

Well, that’s me done for now, have a good day all and Happy Blending!

[Palo Piktor]

@thecabbagedetective  All i can say is… Wow, awesome work, man.

[Jan-Willem van Dronkelaar]

@thecabbagedetective 

You are doing great man! I love the effort I am seeing here. 🙂

Tackling individual features of the face is a great way to focus and really get to know the characteristics and subtilities of those features. Its a great adventure! Once you have practiced them I strongly advice you to sculpt a few skulls before incorporating them into a full face. Trust me, learning the skull shapes will do wonders for how to place those features, it will help you put those features together like nothing else.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, I want to talk about simplifying and working with planar representations. A nose (or any feature) can be distilled down to a few basic shapes. Anatomy is a great help in figuring these basic shapes out but thankfully many artists have come before us so we should also learn from them. 🙂

Its time for you to start thinking about those planar representations, their proportions and angles.. Its time to watch drawing video’s and, not surprisingly, sculpting video’s. Real sculptors are fantastic in breaking shapes down! To stick with the nose I want to share a few resources.

https://www.proko.com/how-to-draw-a-nose-anatomy-and-structure/

Learning sculpting brushes in 3d or pencils in 2d is not important, see through it, learn the nose! 🙂 Most ‘complex’ features are actually pretty simple once you learn to see them like this. And.. another important lesson is that sharp edges or holes are relatively rare on the face (or the human body in general). This is really great! Because, if you nail the planar representation (its actually pretty hard when learning so don’t be discouraged), all you have to do is soften/smooth a little and then ‘re-add’ the few hard creases, wrinkles, ledges or accents. Turning it into a ‘real’ nose is actually the easiest part!

I want to encourage you to experiment with this. Put the basic shapes in there but stretch, or widen, or fatten. It will still be a nose, or an ear, or an eye, or lips if the basics are in there! Find them!

Here is an old planar practice of the nose from me:

But you pick one you like from an artist you really like! Learn from the masters, not from me (this is just to show I practiced this too and it did wonders for me).

Now here is something else, I feel a little conflicted about posting this because I do not really like the end result that much. Haha. Its also, well, old (9 years ago).I really loved sharing what I learned back then (still do tbh but shy…)  It does give you a bit of a look inside my head how I break shapes down and look at anatomy to help me sculpt. If I look at that nose now (endresult) I think I do it slightly different but I still think in the same manner. 🙂 It might help you.

https://vimeo.com/12336409

You are doing great though!

[Aaron Rudderham]

@thepainter Why thank you very much!

[Aaron Rudderham]

@3dioot Daaaaamn this is a lot of advice, time to sift through it!

Yeah, I definitely should’ve made some skulls, that would’ve been a smart decision wouldn’t it? I’m about halfway through my first head so I’ll just get it done, inevitably receive a bunch of criticism and use that properly next time, whilst using that criticism to make a skull or two. Really wish I’d have thought of that earlier, but thank you for bringing the idea to my attention.

Yes! This is excellent. I never looked at 2D breakdowns admittedly but this kind of thing really helped me. I definitely need to incorporate it more. If you look at my nose you can *kinda* see where I did it, though I could’ve made it more pronounced in general, and for the rest of the sculpts overall.

I’ll be sure to check out the resources you’ve provided, and thank you very much for the valuable feedback!

[Aaron Rudderham]

Wow, I uhh… need to get better at updating this, huh?

So, what’s happened…? Oh yes!

First of all is an announcement, and that’s that I backed out of the ArtStation competition as I was never going to finish it in time, and that I was okay with that because it was mostly suppose to be a catalyst for me learning anatomy, and that I’ve been progressing in rather well. Though I believe the competition finished nearly a week ago so this seems a tad redundant now…

Well, back to facial anatomy! And this was my first go at the sculpt, which uhh… could’ve been better…

 

But after that I noticed many of the issues and after seeing to many of those issues I got real busy with the grab brush and after sculpting all the other facial pieces this is what I got:

And here’s a gif version for all you animation-lovers out there:

Certainly not perfect, but for my first full head sculpt I think it’s rather alright for what it is.

So with this done the final body looks like this:

There are parts that could be better, such as the feet, back and thighs for example, but again, for my first attempt I’m certainly pleased with this.

I’ve begun blocking out accessories and I look forward to sharing it all with you. Have a good day and happy Blending!

[malhomsi]

@thecabbagedetective  for a 1st time it is really good , the problem is more about general proportions , u may try to get the primary volume right befor going deeper into shapes and structure. take a look at the head volume , it feel huge in comparesion to the body ,the arms r a little short , and the body feel to large on the side view . i have to say that there is a lot of interesting shapes and u have done great work , just take some step back and try to redo the proportions ( grab brush , lattices ..)  ! keep it up

[Aaron Rudderham]

@malhomsi I KNEW the head was too big, it always bugged me but it was never pointed out so I just assumed I’d have to adjust my eye. Cheers for the insight, adjustments aho!

[malhomsi]

@thecabbagedetective take it easy ! u r doing good ! i m rarely able to eyeball proportions ! each time i have to mesure thing to be sure i didnt mess up things ! u can google general body proportions to get an idea ! 

[silentheart00]

@thecabbagedetective Sorry, I meant to point out the head looks big to me, too, and the other things malhomsi pointed out, but I’ve been so wrapped up in my own work I didn’t get a chance.  Have a quick cheat sheet of proportions in your mind, which will take practice to build up.  Legs are approximately twice as long as the torso, the elbow falls around the waist/hip area, lower arm is approximately the same length as the upper arm, etc.  Wear some tight fitting clothes or stand naked in front of a mirror and observe your proportions.  I usually base measurements off of heads to find the torso landmarks, then work out from there.  Similar idea with facial features starting with eye lengths and then basing the rest of the features off of other features.  Let me know if any of this makes sense or not lol.

But hey, you did some great work in your first attempt.  Yeah, some things could be better with more practice, but you have accomplished more work over your time spent than not doing it.  Good effort, dude!  Now, focus on the areas you can improve.  You got this.

[Aaron Rudderham]

@silentheart00 Nah it’s cool man, no need to apologize about it, you gotta put yourself first. That being said I very much appreciate your insight here, so thank you very much for that, it makes sense to me!

[Aaron Rudderham]

So long story short I’m getting a bit tired of being a slacker, and I’m just gonna go full force into this. Been dealing with some… shall we say, mental anguish (as well as a little bit of physical) as of late but I know I can’t use that as an excuse and I need to work harder.

So after feedback I adjusted some of the proportions some more and have blocked out the majority of the accessories and I’m liking the direction so far:

Haven’t mirrored a few of the clothes as it’s being a bit funky atm, will be much easier to do once I start retopo-ing.

I fully intend to get my ass back into gear and will be attempting daily updates again. I wish you all the best of luck in your Blender journeys and happy Blending.

[Aaron Rudderham]

Hey there! Just pointing out that I’m still retopo-ing, but having to wrestle with Blender a bit so I’ll share some screenshots tomorrow, TTFN!

[Aaron Rudderham]

So the retopology is coming along a lot nicer than I expected, it’s a fair bit wonky in some places but it’s certainly not finished yet (though doing those underarms are a massive pain).

And here are some of the accessories I’ve managed to do so far (yes I accidentally applied some subsurf).

Some are adjustments are to be made but considering I’ve never retopo-ed something this complex ever I don’t think this is too bad. Also, I did this when I was making the face and I found it rather eerie, like a mask:

That’s it from me, hopefully I’ll be able to update you again tomorrow but until then happy Blending!

[Author]

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