Workflow question / Character sculpting

[Nathi Tappan]

Hi there!

I’m ready to start a new personal project to put in other skills I’ve been learning here to use. I decided to bring one of my old sketches to life through character sculpting, so I can hopefully rig it and animate it (once I finally finish Wayne’s courses… it has been a slow process).

I have 3 questions about that:

– My sketch has a posed character, and while the pose is not very dramatic it is definitely not a T or rest pose. What is the normal workflow for this? Would you go back to the concept artist and ask for a neutral drawing, would you sculpt it posed and then somehow bring it back to neutral?

– I plan on rewatching Kent’s Fundamental Sculpting course but there’s a rumor of a new version coming up 🙌. I didn’t see it listed on the “what’s coming” page, so I don’t know if you guys have a rough idea of when that would come out? I might end up doing both… I guess why not?

– Are there any courses here that you can recommend that touch that topic? Anything that would teach me best practices on this workflow maybe? 

Thanks, as always, for your insight!

[Omar Domenech]

I’ve heard Kent say that you work with what you get. So a lot of times you will get a concept art that is not on a T pose and you have to work with it, and from there you can sculpt and translate the art from 2D to 3D and it’s recognizable. I think ideally you can produce various sculpts, some in whatever poses that capture the character essence, since it’s a challenge to have a 2D art and look at it in 3D and feel it’s the same. You can always sculpt it in a pose and then with the pose brush get it into a neutral pose, but that can fail and can be finicky and you’ll get undesirable results, so it’s better to make the sculpt with the end goal in mind. So if you’re free flowing, just sculpting away to try and nail the character for approval, so you sculpt for that. But then when you’re generating the sculpt that is going for retopo and rigging, it’s better to sculpt it in a T pose. Of course if you can ask the concept artist to give you a T pose, then it’s even better, because for rigging it will have to be on T pose.

Yes, a new sculpting fundamentals is in the works, but as you say, you can watch both, it’s more knowledge for you.I think it may come out in less than 2 months maybe?

The courses that are going to give you all the super powers of the workflow, even though they are oldies, are these two:

https://cgcookie.com/courses/short-film-character-production

https://cgcookie.com/courses/modeling-realistic-characters-with-blender

[Nathi Tappan]

Nice! Thanks for the speedy response Omar!

These courses look exactly what I need to get a proper plan! Added to the queue.

Between watching these, finishing Wayne’s courses, and rewatching the original Fundamentals I’ll probably have the chance to follow the updated course before really getting into my own character.

Thanks again!

[Martin Bergwerf]

Hey Nathalia, here’s fun watch, Kent live sculpting a posed character… maybe start at about 50 minutes in:

https://cgcookie.com/live-streams/bc2-1803-week-2-character-development-sculpture

[Nathi Tappan]

Awesome! Thanks Martin! Will watch that one too!

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