Howdey!

So I recently came across this awesome concept and I figured I could do with some training in stylised character art. Since “The hell, I’ve got time” seems to be a motto of mine recently, I decided to run this blog and post progress from time to time, not sure how it’s gonna turn out.

Anyway, I e-mailed the author of the concept for a blessing (Check out his website!) and sat down to sculpting. I’ve always considered a difference between modelling a realistic and a stylised character to be fairly analogical to drawing them, stylised being easier, that is. While I’m probably not utterly wrong I have encountered difficulties that took me by surprise. Here’s a Blender Internal shot:

First of all, the posing and perspective in the concept does not help at all, unsurprisingly. But in a realistic or semi realistic characters you can always rely on your anatomy knowledge to straighten everything out. In this case I found it much more difficult, because the anatomy is much more sketchy and slightly deformed.

I also found it much more difficult to read a shape of the character, also because he’s just so fat! That’s probably why my sculpt seems a bit more muscular and fit, it helped me define the body parts, I’ll need to work on the likeness.

I tried to model the face in a much more relaxed pose, so it diverges from the concept a bit, but I really want to do a Disney-style facial animation. In general I aim for a nice PBR rendering, mimicking Disney in a game engine.

So yeah, I’m not sure how the model is gonna turn out (and as I told I feel EXACTLY the same about this whole art blogging thing), but I’ll keep posting progress. Feel free to comment, I’ll always welcome constructive opinions. I might be posting other things here, like game’s graphics reviews (Is that even a thing? It totally should be), It all depends on how following months are going to turn out, and if anyone wants to read it.

Laters!