Another design for Hanna the small witch

evilhippie (60)in #art • 7 years ago (edited)

I am still experimenting with the design for the characters in what will hopefully become a small short story about Henna and Hanna the witch and the faunette.

As I have shown earlier I usually start with sculpting a face.

I see a lot of artists have their special "nobrainer" technique. A thing they can do almost without thinking and their goto technique whenever they have to start something new. It is almost a kind of unconscious doodling. For me it is making faces.

If I have to make a new project, a world a story, anything really. I usually start with a person and almost always the face first.

With this one I also started with the face. I have done an earlier face for this model which you can see here
that one was also rigged and animated to test the facial animation, and also as an exercise for me in making a facial rig. This time around I only did the sculpting, or at least I havent gotten to the animation part yet.

The face evolves as I go along. I find things that I might change slightly and constantly have to choose between different ways to go with it.
In some ways, digital sculpting is frustrating because of this. The reason being that it is possible to save multiple versions of the same figure and it is easy to suddenly have 10 versions that are ever so slightly different.

It is of course also a very nice feature, as it makes it possible to try out different versions and still have the possibility to go back if it turns out you liked the original better.

When the model gets hair and colours it often change personality drastically . Sometimes I like the simple version better, and I often leave my sculpts with just a simple material. but for something like what I had in mind here. I need to go through the whole process.
first sculpting, then retopology (that is redoing the entire surface so that only the topology of the triangles change but the surface stays the same) the adding material and textures (there are more textures than you might think, since I need to exactly control both colours, shininess, microstructure and potentially many more)
then adding eyes and hair(with their own materials and textures)

and finally (which hasnt been done on this one yet) adding a control rig for animation and setting up the different animation targets. Maybe I will write about that in another post. I hope you like the alternative Hanna