Professor-magician, medium rare

No, don't run away, I haven't taken to cannibalism, the "medium rare" in the title just implies that the character is not done yet. Well, or otherwise.

I have to say, though, that I managed to finish a lot more than I anticipated. So let's talk first about what I haven't done, shall we? None of what you see is retopologized, the coat is not fully sculpted, the tie is a make-believe, the hands are just painted, and don't get me started on the pants and shoes. Now, with that out of the way, I can talk about what I *have* done.

First of all, the head. Sculpted and presented in the class as a bust. Or, well, a head, because it didn't have shoulders attached. If you are curious, here is a Sketchfab model.

Professor-magician bust by Katerina Novakova on Sketchfab

But I didn't stop there, oh no. I wanted to be able to render the poor guy, but I didn't have time to retopologize his head (so that I could paint a texture on it). Therefore, I used the only other means available to me. One that I have never used before. Vertex colours. 

A short definition could be "a cross between weight-painting and texture-painting". You paint directly on the polygon-heavy sculpture, which is fun because you have to make every stroke bazillion times before the sculpture is fully covered with paint. Don't ask me why. But I think there are brands of paint that refuse to stick to any surface until you apply five hundred litres of them. Maybe the inventors freelance as Blender devs in their spare time.

Oh, and one special nuisance of vertex colour painting is that once you do it, you can't activate DynTopo without erasing all of it. So, when I received feedback from the class, and wanted to make the changes, I found out I could not. But that didn't stop me. With a cunning use of Lattice modifier, I gave professor a much-needed facelift. Or, forehead-and-nose lift. Looks just like those before/after pictures:

But enough of heads, what else did I do? Oh, yes, the shirt. What shirt, you ask? Oh, the nearly-invisible shirt from which you can only see the collar. Yes, that one. I think I'm starting to see a pattern here. Henceforward I shall be known as the greatest invisible artist of all times. Muhahaha. (Not that I would be invisible, that would be silly, just the work that— you know what I mean.) But I'm proud of myself for not doing the full shirt. At least I was proud of myself before I realized that I made the shoulder piece too short and I'm now running into the risk of exposing Mr. Magician's non-existent belly. No sexy neck revelations for him, I'm afraid. And let's hope the tie stays firmly in place.

I'm not going to talk too much about the lab coat, because it's a) not fully finished and b) not interesting enough to merit a lengthy description. Just a coat with a few wrinkles on, three pockets and A COLLAR FROM HELL! Phew. Why do I always do this to myself? I put together a decent mesh, relatively quickly, and then I spent an hour trying to figure out how to bend the goddamn mesh so that it doesn't freak out when I give it a bit of solidifying. In the end I had to give up the MultiRes modifier (because the quality of the base mesh would make for a crappy normal map, eventually) and I turned to DynTopo instead. Which means... oh yes, full retopology. Shouldn't be that bad, though. I think.

And that's all for today, folks. I'm currently ahead of the class schedule, but that's going to change very quickly with more work coming in the following weeks. I'll have to see whether I go for a full magician coat, or just a cape (leaning heavily towards the latter at the moment). See you next week!