RoboBro's Misadventures in Sculpting

You're probably wondering where the posts have been. Well, I spent a couple weeks trying to learn to model, because I'm thinking of doing 3D commissions after I release my Marah video. It was a bit of a bumpy road, but I got something decent. I haven't rigged it yet, so excuse the boring pose and deadpan face. Anyway, this is supposed to be Megaton Meg, that original character I made a while back. I wanna use her as a testbed for new 3D expansion techniques that will make animating an inflating character easier and require less fixes to make work.

Sculpting is pretty fun honestly, but when you build a model made for animating or video games (as opposed to a stationary sculpt), you have to do what's called "retopology", which is basically rebuilding the entire model from scratch by snapping new geometry to the original sculpt you built so that you get an organized grid of quads (and a lower-poly mesh) instead of random shapes stitched together in whatever order the automatic detail algorithm gave you. This resulted in me spending several days trying to figure out the best way to do this by hand, then restarting it twice with different methods after almost completing it. I don't know if I really got better results by doing that either, the perfectionist in me is kind of a dick.

Fortunately, there's a nice little program called Instant Meshes ( https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes ) that can automatically do this for you. Obviously the results aren't perfect, but it gives you tools to shape the geometry and adjust the poly count to your needs so the result animates well and doesn't lag Blender too hard. I think I'll be taking advantage of this in the future, but the model I made here was retopo'd by hand. Here's the whole body, since I'm sure you're curious:

The "nude" appearance is basically a placeholder, I just wanted to get her basic body shape modeled so I'd have something to build outfits off of. I plan on finishing this later, but for now I'd like to keep working on Marah. Speaking of which, I've been going over that and fixing problems with the animation. I'll post some quick in-editor renders of that shortly, but no new animation for now. There's not a lot left to do on that front, so as I said before, expect a lot of just revisions and ironing things out to make it look nice. Anyway, I'll keep you posted on my progress, and I hope you enjoyed this little update!