Me and my bro @telepurte, (a.k.a: Miguel Stephens) has started a work exchange, where I work for him and he works for me. He has created some great character designs for a personal project of mine and in exchange I'm making a custom rig for animation in Blender - with muscles ready for Body Mechanics and simple 2D facial acting. First hours exchanged! It is always a pleasure to work with him. He has a great form and conceptual character design skills, and a fun humour.
Base Mesh
Concept Art
These were drawn with Krita, The 3D model in Softimage and is ready to be sculpted, as I blocked out the main form with polygons. I will then use Bforartists (Blender for Artists, a fork) to do sculpting touchups, and then later do the retopology there also. I will bake in SMAK - now that it works with my card, or BFA. I'll rig in Blender/BFA, and use Animation Nodes to build muscles.
Initial Sculpts
Did an hour of scultping today. I used Blender, well specifically BFA, cause it's cooler. To do sculpts in Blender, I like to use Dynotopo on a lowpoly base mesh (to save time on the general form) then throw in a Detail Flood Fill with constant detail. I noticed with a flood fill, it becomes a sculpting experience similar to Zbrush like sculpting. I usually fill and sculpt at a resolution of 20-60. I also have used these brushes called Orb Brush Set, which you can get for free on Blendswap. They are really great to use.
I am not happy and this as this is far from finished, but I need to return to real work today - hopefully we can review some of the anatomy and sculpt it in better tomorrow or the day afer. I plan to make the rig rather dynamic with tendons/muscles using Animation Nodes and principally shapes for artistic control. Stay tuned!
