 Okay, now that we have all the major elements of the character essentially blocked out, it's time to go into a more detailed sculpting. So I think the first thing that's kind of nice to do is just to merge and clean up some of these shapes. So I might just, actually, let me go back into the previous setup. I am going to call this Settler Blocking. And I'm just going to duplicate the entire collection, call this Settler Sculpting. This way whenever we want to go back to a previous version, we can just immediately get that mesh from the other collection. I can just disable that collection for now. And we can just continue to sculpt on this one. So yes, one of the things I definitely mentioned is I would love to merge these shapes. I don't necessarily want to go completely into sculpt mode and just remesh everything over here. It's definitely something I'm thinking about, but it would be nice to keep the structure of the model intact. I can definitely already merge it over here. I can isolate it with local view and just kind of just move things around a little bit. And then I would need to get this shape in here. I am going to delete these faces. I'm going to add one over here and here. Move these around a little bit. Remove this, remove this. There we go. And I'm going to remove these faces. And let's just remove these edges as well. And to orthographic view, set the pivot point to medium. I had it at 3D cursor. I mean, there's definitely the issue that the body has way less faces than any of the other areas. So what I might do is I'm just going to, is this enough? Yeah, this might be enough. I'm going to apply one of the resolution levels of the subdivision service modifier. Delete this. How many is this now? 10. How many is this? 12. Easy. Just pick these two, bevel, actually. Just bevel them a little bit and then slide them the rest of the way so that they keep this nice offset towards each other. And then we can join this back. Select these two edges. Control E, bridge edge loops. There we go. Slide this one over here, this one over here. Well, it's kind of working. Yes, I'm going to slide this down. I'm going to smooth this out a little bit, maybe go over it with a clay brush. Just a tiny bit. I'm really thinking of adding the use deform only to something quickly accessible. I guess you can add it to quick favorites if you wanted to. I usually really like to assign shortcuts and just regular menus that I make myself just to have everything I need constantly at hand. Let me just move this down a little bit. There we go. But yes, I wanted to actually activate this. Use deform only because, yes, this can use a little bit more geometry. And now with the topology tool, we can just smooth over this. It's going to slide around. Ooh, OK. This is a random face set. You can just slide this stuff around by smoothing over it. And it's going to keep the shape intact. Same thing over here. And I can recommend to actually use mesh boundary automasking on this brush because then it won't affect the boundaries of these objects. I can already tell since we applied the subdivision surface modifier, this is no longer at the mirror plane. So we can just push it back inside. And actually with this, let me just apply the mirror modifier. Add a new one. Set this one to bisect. So now in edit mode, in scope mode, we still have the other side and we can keep axiometry on. So if we smooth over it, it's going to nicely smooth both sides and the middle axis because that's actually geometry to work with. But once the, but we still, in addition to that, have that mirror modifier that's just going to mirror it automatically. So it's just, I found this to be the nicest way to keep everything symmetrical to even though you have the symmetry enabled in scope mode, in edit mode, you would sometimes not because it's a bit less reliable over there. So having that extra mirror modifier with bisect is really handy. Okay, over here, it's basically the same thing. We can just remove this part of the mesh. Just going to try to remove this. How much is this? 16. This is 12. Okay, that's not going to work. So let's just, let's just hide this. Okay, how many is this? This is exactly 12. Perfect. So we can just select these two, control E, bridge edges. Going to merge this. And what we can already do is we can just select this, hide it, hide this as well. And this is now all selected in scope mode. We can go over here and in face sets in it. That's an interesting naming choice. So essentially set face sets based on edit mode selection, face set from edit mode selection. So now I think we actually need to be using, use fast deform. Also I can recommend to use shade flat. So now we have this as a face set. And for the, yes, for the topology smooth, we can not just say mesh boundary automasking, but also face set automasking. So now if we smooth over, that's not, of course, we need to also add this. One thing that I keep forgetting about face sets is the boundary is always going to be shared by two face sets. So that's definitely something to think about. So now we can just, with any brush, basically smooth brush could go over this. That's only going to smooth the white face set. Of course, it's also going to remove some volume, which is not nice. I think I am going to actually use the topology brush for this. This way I can just slide this into the body further over here. That's definitely interesting. Yeah, sometimes it's a bit confused which face set to choose. Whether it should choose the, because it's going just by vertex, by vertex to vertex. Interesting. Well, I can just smooth all of this. Oh yeah. Again, might have left the, oh, we didn't even have clipping enabled, oops. Okay, smooth it a little bit more. And then with a grab brush over here, we can again say face set auto masking. So it's only going to take, actually, let me hide all of this. And now make another face set from this selection. So we can just go W, face set from visible, bring back the rest. Okay, interesting. Okay, in sculpt mode with a face set draw, I can also just paint in the rest over here. Since it's so low poly, this might actually be the nicest solution. Oops, but it's still sometimes a bit confused which face set to sample. Interesting. Well, I can at least, okay, it's set to face set auto masking. But it's, of course, not going to do it like I think it would. Yeah, face sets are definitely a very interesting new feature because they behave very differently from anything else you would normally find in Blender. Usually when you work with vertex groups, for example, like the name implies, it's vertex based. So it's definitely a different system to have something that works based on faces as a mask because there's always going to be the boundary that will be essentially be a mask that is applied to both sides. You can have multiple face sets that share the same, some of the same vertices, basically unintentionally. Anyway, I might just copy and apply this mirror modifier. So now we have everything mirrored again. I'm actually going to remove the creasing from this edge. It was still a bit purple. I didn't quite go away. Minus one. Yes, now it's gone. It's, of course, still on the other side, but whatever. You can add a couple more edges over here and the same over here should be good. Same thing could be done over here just so we have a bit more even resolution. This is nice right now for sculpting, but later on if we want to salvage this mesh a little bit for the final retopology, that would also be nice because if it's more evenly subdivided, it's definitely going to be nicer for deformations because this is going to be a very elastic character. Let's just smooth this all down a little bit. Oh, of course, if I use deform only, then the face sets are going to be visible and I still use them over here. Oh, the smooth brush is also still using it. I almost feel like this should be a global setting across all brushes. I keep toggling it and sometimes, yeah, I guess usually it should be applied to all brushes. Again, here, face at automasking is still on. There was at least a concept introduced with some of these settings, which is this one, use unified. So maybe some of these settings deserve a toggle like that. Anyway, I'm just going to copy and apply that guy again. I'm also going to clip this region for a moment. I really do love the topology brush. Such a nice tool allows you to really work non-destructively. Anyway, you can bring back the rest. So one thing we kind of left out over here is the turtleneck. So far, they were modeled by kind of like extruding them out of the arms, for example. But I'm actually thinking this might be a bit of a wrong approach. So I'm just going to remove it and I'm going to instead I can just delete this. I'm going to instead add a torus object that just makes the overall shape a lot cleaner. Or at least it should just do 25, eight of these. Yeah, it should be fine. Yeah, scale it down, rotate it to align it properly. Actually, the reference, yeah, the reference images were hidden. You can just scale it up again and then in edit mode with alt S scale it along with the normals to make it a bit fatter and add a subdivision surface modifier. Yeah, align it a little bit better with the arms. I'm actually going to just link over the modifiers from another object and then again use the center empty to mirror over this guy to the other side. And of course, fill in these regions, bridge edge loops, shift E, minus one to get rid of the creases. Almost looks like a bit of a broken arm tweaking the shape a little bit. And there's also the thumb. I might actually just since we're going to do it later anyway, just align the thumb already in a T pose way. We'll just make it overall a bit easier. So just like this, rotate them. Let's just add another loop over here. This right now is very monotonous. There are definitely little tasks where kind of need to switch your brain off for a little bit. How does this look unsubdivided? I mean, this is pretty much what we want. This round thumb kind of tube with a rounded end. That is all the effort I should really put into this for now. The belt is pretty much what we want. There's going to be added extra detail, of course, but we'll get to that in a moment. Over here, same story. Let's just get rid of this. And duplicate this one. And I set the 3D cursor over here with a selection. And now I can just say selection to cursor. I'm going to snap in place. I can align it with the leg. Scale it up a little bit. Scale it down along the normals. Yes. And now filling this in again. Bridge edge loops. Shift E minus 1. I'm actually going to just add two new loops here. I'm also going to add another loop over here. Just squeeze these in to create a little bit of a crease. And then over here, these guys with Alt S scale them in. There we go. Yeah, I shouldn't spend too much time on the topology. This does not deserve this much attention right now. That's all for the production asset later on. Hmm. Now over here, what I would like to do is... Actually, let's continue. Let's finish the leg up first, so there's still the foot. But I think this one might actually be pretty good already. This shouldn't be this much subdivided. It shouldn't be that sharp. And from the back, I think... Yeah, I think this can be all moved down a little bit. These loops over here. This way we get a bit more of this foot shape. And then when it gets subdivided with modifier, it will be smoothed out a little bit more. Same thing over here. And actually, I should have done it with project mode. Damn it. Actually, let's just undo it. Because now if you go to wireframe, you can see both sides. And with the alternative grab brush, where I'm going to turn down the strength a lot more, we can just push both sides down at the same time. Because we're not going to get any edge. Same time. Because we're not going to get any automatic symmetry on the foot. Since the symmetry axis is way somewhere else. Way better. I think I might just add in an inset over here anyway. Just to get a bit of a flatter shape. No one will ever see this foot. This up close, but still. It's nice to work out these details. Yes, I wanted to get to the belt, to the turtleneck. Let's just go for the turtleneck. So here it's essentially going to be the same story. I'm going to, let's just copy and apply the mirror modifier again. I'm going to set the 3D cursor over here. I'm going to again, let's just add a new torus. Yes. This one can be scaled down along the normals. So we have this sort of thin strip. You can rotate it along the x-axis. Now we have this little guy over here. Let's just apply the scale. So now what I want to do is first off again, mirror modifier. Center, bisect, clipping. And now with, I will need to put the pen down, since proportional editing is way easier right now in blender with a mouse, since you have access to a scroll wheel, which is kind of sad. I wish there would be a better way to do it with a pen, but there isn't sadly. So right now what I might do is I'm going to rotate this a bit more. There's always the issue over here. So I think the excuse that I'm just going to go for is that he has a beard to fill in this little bald spot over here and still hide any part of the head. You can just imply a sort of beard over here, sort of jaw beard. Again over here we might just slide these edges a bit further to the front just so we get a bit more of the turtleneck. I really want this turtleneck to be visible across these different objects. Copy a plane mirror modifier. I want to see it on the other side as well. And let's just pull this down over here as well. Just so, yeah, let's just pull it down just so we see the turtleneck all the way around touching the backpack even. And then we can just pull the hair down also a little bit more. He really resembles a bit of a troll. So much hair. I might actually pull this a bit in. I think the body can also be pulled in a bit further. It doesn't need to be this thick towards the sides. Or at least I don't think so. There we go. Let's just hide the backpack also for a moment. There are still some sections where you can see into the object. That's not nice. That's exactly what we have the turtleneck for to fill in these blank spots. Might actually just scale it up along the normals just a little bit. Yes. There we go. There's always going to be a bit of trade-offs compared to the concepts because if we look at the concept again we can see that the turtleneck is actually visible from the three quarters. But I don't exactly know how this can work because the mask is just so wide. We could of course try and really make the body super wide. But I'm not sure that's going to be very appealing because it is already very wide and shouldn't be as wide as the mask over here. There's a reason why there's a bit of thickness. Actually like that we can see that thickness of the mask from different perspectives. Just random little tweaks here and there.