Head and sword models, digital paintings

I've learned lot about character modelling this week making this head. The hair is not finished at all, this was just to practise sculting and retopologising. I've got some very useful feedback from peers on my course about how I could bring more subtlety to the features. I need to learn a better rendering software to show off my textures, and overlaying a photograph at an early stage of the sculpt will help me understand facial features and proportions better.


This was a one day project. I made the master sword as low polygon as possible with a small texture size. I wanted the normal map to have all of the detail and the diffuse to be very simple, but now I understand this is too simple. You should ne'er have a flat colour anywhere on your diffuse. Last time this willl ever happen!


This is a painting from life, taking around 45 minutes. I found the foreshortening very difficult, and getting the likeness of people in such a short time is tough work! I plan to do more of these next week.


Quick speed paint, about 45 minutes. I'll ttry to do an environment paint a week as it's definitely one of my weak points.

Next week:
Model another game ready head with good textures,
Start working on a female body mesh,
More life painting,
One more environment painting (digital or watercolour)
Mid polygon model of a tree.

Sculpting Heads and Horses

Based on the Fawn in 'Pan's Labyrinth', need to learn hair and fur to add the final touches before texturing.

In reverse chronological order, here's some human heads I've made in Zbrush. Each one was completed in a day, I'm trying to get used to the interface and the tools which are available. I think I'm slowly getting there - just need to keep trying.

Attempt 3, shows I need to learn more about cheekbones and how the jaw line attaches to the neck.

Attempt 2, trying to learn Spotlight functions, it keeps crashing...

I find it interesting that no matter how many tutorials I've watched on sculpting the head, my own methods are completely different! I guess there's no right or wrong way to do it, you just need to keep trying until you find your own preferences. At the moment, it's learning the interface and tools available which is the hardest part of this process.

Working on finishing up this model of a famous horse from Ocarina of Time. I'd like to retopologize this to a game ready specification and texture it. The pose could use a little tweaking and it would look better if it was asymmetrical.



This sketch from life took an hour and a half. I think I made her feet too big, but maybe it's just foreshortening? Crits always welcome, thanks for reading :)


For next week:

Continue modelling heads, at least 3 more by next week.
Continue painting from life, try some environments too.
Finish Ganon's horse to a game ready standard with hair.
Make one low polygon model.

Life Painting

Paintings from life using Adobe Photoshop. These two took an hour each. Look forward to the next upload - hopefully I will have finished all my 3D to a presentable standard by the end of this week, and I've signed up to life drawing classes for three days!

Graveyard Shifts

Night shifts and monotonous work in a factory have been taking over my life recently, so regretably game art has been pushed to the sidelines for a while. Hopefully by next week I'll be back into it, I miss it so much!

As I've been working the graveyard shifts, I've been making disembodied parts of people for practice. I made this eyeball in about 4 hours. I think they can be the most important part of a character model and I'd like to avoid that horrible dead eyes look that most of my characters so far have had. I spent a lot longer than usual trying to understand the anatomy and specularity.

The cornea, iris and pupil have been given seperate materials to correspond to how they react to light. This model comes to 304 triangles, but a lower polygon equivalent shouldn't be too hard to make. The colours of the pupil are easily interchangable, and the texture map for the eye white has tiny veins painted on too.


I'll use similar eyes in my character I'm starting this week.

Now on to my hand project. They're bloody hard to understand! Here's the final result:

And here's some progress shots. I attempted to model the hand in a more relaxed position so it animates easily. The thumb actually takes up about a third of the palm so I tried to take this into account.


2D these two weeks has involved making the most of the new laptop, now I can actually do life drawing wherever I like.


I find it difficult to draw people when they keep moving! I need to keep these up until I understand how to use the swatches and colours well in photoshop. Its good practice and I really enjoy it, should help me understand proportions, colour and light.

Next Week:
Continue with the life drawings, at least two by next Thursday.
Finish rigging and rendering super low poly ostrich.
Start modelling another head in Zbrush, if it looks bad do another from scratch.
Model Ganondorf's horse (Legend of Zelda) using the horse I've already made as a base.