Anttilat

The beginning of the next chapter of the Essential Blender, chapter 5, was a lot of fun! It teaches about sculpting and multiresolution modeling. The task was to model a head of a monster. This was a fun way to model and felt a lot less technical. There also was a lot less key combinations to remember.

The problem with multiresolution modeling was that my computer started to slow down at some point. More than anything else it was annoying. But in some odd way it was a good thing too - I started the tutorial last night and ended up playing with my model until almost midnight. Once the computer started to protest I finally looked at the time and realized that I should probably go get some sleep :) These pictures show you how far I got last night. Once again you can see bigger versions by clicking the small pictures.

I spent a lot of time with the monster's mouth and eyes and never got them to look good. Fortunately it's not anything real so no one can tell me that it can't look like that ;) I do like the nose, though, and the shape of the head. They somehow seem monster-like to me. Even though I spent quite a lot of time playing with different brushes I didn't quite learn which is which and how do they work. That's probably something that I just need to learn by trial and error. In fact, at the end of this "hands on"-part the writer suggests that the learner should try the tutorial again. On the second time the results are probably much better.

I continued to improve the model today. After the model itself was done I got to experiment with using textures as brushes. At this point I added some wrinkles to my monster's head. Textures are explained more closely in chapter 9, so there was very little about different options in this chapter. I did like the result, though. Little wrinkles make the skin look a little less plastic and unnatural. I know very well that I tend to overdo this kind of things - adding too much detail in a way that doesn't look good at all. And so it happened also on my first try with this monster head's wrinkles. You can see the results of my second try in pictures.

For the final touch my husband helped me to put some color to the model and set the materials so that it doesn't shine quite that much and looks a little less like plastic. So here's my gruesome, horrible monster and my first practice with sculpting.