No, not the Mistah Braun! from Steins;Gate, this is a different guy. I mentioned that the pumpkin Jack O' Ripper was my second sculpting that I finished first because I wanted to post it for Halloween, which makes Mr. Braun here have to wait.
I'm very happy with the final render. Making this was both frustrating and joyful process as a beginner. For Mr. Braun here I experimented with bumpy clay texture, if you notice the bumpy surface all over the model. What I want to make is a character portrait with no actual colours of the model's attributes, rather I want to experiment with shades of brown for everything, if I word it correctly. His name, Braun, is derived from "brown".
Mr. Braun
Without further yapping, let's jump into the process. But, sorry if this isn't detailed enough because I forgot to record it when I make this.
Plain Ol' Cube
Basically everything in Blender starts with a cube. Whether you want to make a character, animal, tank, weapon, food, interior, all of them start with this boi right here. I mean, I could have just render this cube and call it Mr. Braun, but, you know. But! you can, of course, change the base shape to something else, but for this one I turn this cube into...
...A sphere, with subsurf modifier. Can you see the final shape of Mr. Braun like the above images already? No? Me neither.
I've seen some CG masters on YouTube start sculpting with the sphere above, but I prefer to further tweak the base mesh for easier sculpting by pulling it up and down until I get this nice head and neck shape.
Sculpting
Aaaand this is why I should have recorded this instead of backtracking like this. I shaped the head further in sculpt mode and sculpted the face. The chin, ears, jawline, lips, nose, nostrils, and eye sockets. Those are the most difficult parts to sculpt ranked from the easiest to the hardest.
Did I say eye sockets is the most difficult? I take that back. I found myself stuck even longer with the hair (including the mustache and the eyebrows). Making clean edges for cartoony hair is far more difficult than I thought it would be. Using the crease, invert crease, pinch, and smooth brushes, plus an infinite amount of patience is the key to achieve that. Still, I can't make it perfect.
After hours of refining the face over and over, I create the clothing by retopology the lower part of the body, copied the base mesh for the clothes from the bust itself so I get clothes that perfectly fit the body shape. It's almost like being a tailor. Added a little more touch in sculpt mode and I have this.
Texture and Material
After I'm satisfied with the sculpting, I applied the "shade of browns" to everything except the monocle. Then proceeded to create the bumpy clay texture in the node editor, although it doesn't look much like clay. The only thing I've done with texture paint is the eyeball. It's awesome that I could combine both bumpy and glassy texture to it.
Mr. Braun Process GIF
Aside of making him look more like a gentleman, the top hat was to cover up the top of his head because I couldn't sculpt a decent looking hair. But I thought if I don't learn now, will I keep making excuses like this from now on? No, I don't want that. So I decided to sculpt the hair and surprised myself. But since the one with the top hat looks good too, why not both, yes?
Initally, the lighting was normal white light just to give a nice lighting for the character. Then I played around with the lighting and created this trippy lighting. And I said "lighting" for like 50 times now.
What do you think, Steemian? And for 3D artists, if there's any that happen to see this post, what do you think of this for a first time sculpting? Am I going places? Opinions and criticisms are welcome. Thanks for stopping by!
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©2018 Adam Rainite Lawsone