Saturday, 4 February 2012

Getting to grips with 3D

I know I don't start my course until September but there have been a few niggling doubts going through my poor addled brain of late, the biggest being uncertain of how well I'd be able to learn computer programs in a short space of time (I've always relied more on paint and pencils) the other being actually thinking in three dimensions, rather than trying to make something 2D look like it could exist in a 3D world. so on my day off this week I thought, right I'm going to get to grips with this, so I downloaded a free trial of one of the programs that I would be learning, mostly to see how complicated it is...yes it's very complicated but after a few false starts and a couple of very helpful youtube videos I finally got my head around the basics of meshes and the like and even managed to construct my own mesh ready to sculpt onto:


I decided to work on my zombie character as it seemed like a simple albeit stylised design that I'm very familiar with, now I know that the mesh I built has a few errors, I know the arms are too long, I simply wanted to take a figure through the process, to see how it works, so once I was reasonably satisfied with the mesh I began to sculpt:

I tried to keep it in the style of the original drawing and I think it worked to an extent, I enjoyed the sculpting immensely, I must admit feeling advantaged when sculpting the clothes, having spent practically all of last year painting creases into shirts on 2d paintings, I lean't quickly that regarding the sculpt and particularly the face, that less is definitely more. Once I was done with the sculpt I decided to have a go at adding some colour:


I purposely kept this very basic as not to confuse myself, given how complicated every other process was on this program, i was surprised out how straightforward this was. The exercise did exactly what I hoped it would do, it has alleviated some of my worries about the programs and I'm very much looking forward to September. for a first go I don't think it's too bad :)