Mostly-sculpted man

Phew. Creating characters is hard. I mean, I knew that, but it is... hard-hard. I worked on the little pilot for a full week and I'm not even finished with sculpting. I've managed to do his face, hands, sweater, pants and boots, but I still have the jacket, hat, earmuffs, goggles and gloves to do. I'll be lucky to finish the sculpting phase before the March class begins (forget the retopology, textures, rigging and posing). 

And, on top of that, he turned out kinda creepy. I swear he doesn't look this terrifying in the viewport! It's the combination of lighting (with the hat blocking some of the light) and the super basic textures that make him look like a psycho on the run.

So let's not dwell on that, OK? Instead, let's talk about the sculpting process. Ehh. Yeah. You know, you take all these different brushes and then you wave them around until the result looks nice. Best description ever. But seriously. I've deviated a bit from Jonathan's interpretation in that I made the wrinkles in his clothes more subtle. He mentions that both the jumper and pants materials are heavy fabrics, so I tried to stick to that. 

At this point I'd also like to mention that wrinkles are one of those things that we know exist, but we rarely notice them consciously. As a result, it's really quite hard to make them look natural. It is also difficult to know in advance how much you need to exaggerate some of the features in order to be able to bake nice texture maps later. I'm beginning to suspect that I'll need to revisit some of the sculpted pieces (let's just hope that I'll realize it before I retopologize the whole thing).

One thing I found funny when sculpting was how different my perception of difficult parts differed from Jonathan's. He warned us that hands and ears are the toughest body parts to make properly, but I found them to be on the easier side of the spectrum. The eyebrows, on the other hand... Brrr! How do you make them NOT look like two dead caterpillars, I'd really like to know. (Not that lips are any better. Just two facial features that heavily contribute to the overall look of the character. No biggie.)

Anyway, I'll stop it right here before it snowballs into a rant. At least I can end up on a positive note by saying that for once I have the next week's work cut out for me. MORE sculpting. Yay.

(Oh, and have a look at the close-ups, why don't you.)