 So last time I kind of left off with experimenting with the hair, just kind of sculpting at it, trying to figure out a nice flow and so on. But time is actually kind of running short, so I got some extra draw-overs from our concept artist Vivian. I can just put it on screen right now. So based on some of like a video that I made and some screenshots, she drew over it with some design adjustments. And some of them are really helpful, like I think in terms of shape, like one of them is making the arms a bit thicker, making the sort of like straps on the arms and legs that are like the edges of the gloves and boots, making them a bit less like doughnut shaped and more seem like kind of blending into the outfit. Like something that I originally had, making the bolt a bit irregular, shifting some stuff around a little bit, all kinds of stuff like that. There's also extra elements that could be added. There are currently some extra concepts being made for design adjustments on the backpack. So we want to add like a little element, like a big screw over here on the back, which is like kind of acting as a button to close, like on like a practical level to close the backpack. But it's also adding a bit more interesting elements to the design. Right now, it's a bit blank. It's a bit boring, which should be fine, because in the animation, the hair is actually going to cover the backpack most of the time. But yes, that brings me to another thing. Since I need to prepare this model very soon now to be sent off to our rigour so that Matt, Demeter, our rigour, can actually already start making a sort of like a like a dummy rig, like I can send him. He can have access to the model that I have by the end of the day, and he can already make a rig according to those proportions and the pose. So I will need to actually already change the pose of this character to be more of a resting pose, a t-pose, and make the hair more even more straight so that all of this can be rigged as soon as possible. And then after that, I will spend a bit more time experimenting with the hair. There's already some discussions going on so back and forth between basically me, the 3D artist, concept artist Vivian, animator Pablo Fournier and so on to figure out a hairstyle that can be fast and easy to make, but also still relatively polished and appealing, something that doesn't look too cheap. So we're currently gathering some references on how to approach that. I think my workflow of like just fully sculpting it is not the best way since this will involve a lot of retopology afterwards, where there's not really a good remashing, automatically automatic remashing method in Blender right now. So maybe it's the best if I can sketch it in sculpt mode, but afterwards I would still need to spend time to just model it manually and with with curves potentially instead of just sculpting everything in sculpt mode. But yes, that is essentially everything for now. And I will just get back to that. So I'm just going to put my reference back to the side so I can always look at it if I need to, grabbing my pen. So there's a bunch of little notes, definitely that need to be addressed. I think one of the most important ones right now is the T-pose that is super important. I can already, at least for now, I can slap a decimate modifier on the hair just so even if I run out of time, I at least have somewhat a mesh that could be used for rigging. It just needs to be a bit lower in resolution, I mean, a lot lower. This should be fine. Yes. So it still has generally the same shape and this can be kind of like slapped on for for rigging for now. I can just disable that for now. I can go into sculpt mode. So one of the notes in the drawovers was that I can pull it over again, that the hair should be shorter and also at the front, I'm going to try to remove some of the volume of the hair. But I kind of intentionally gave the hair a bit more volume in the front because in orthographic, it's going to be easy from the front and side and so on in three quarters to see a lot of hair. But the moment you go into perspective that all just kind of fades away. It shrinks into the distance because once you add perspective, that's going to be the problem that you have to deal with. I already right now for the viewport, I set it to 80 millimetres in focal length. But by for the default 50, you can already see like if you zoom in, the hair is almost completely gone. So this is something that we will need to be fighting with in the in the animation and the scenes later on. So it would be ideal if we see him a bit from from further away. But yes, I will have to adjust the pose and some proportions, make it more straight to the design adjustments. And then as a last bit before, definitely before it goes into rigging, I need to set a real world scale for this character because right now, if I just go into the sidebar and does it actually adjust to everything I've selected or just the active one? I wonder. No, I think it's just the active one. But if I would just let's just save this. If I would just join all of these shapes real quick. I mean, OK, this was a mistake because I shouldn't have joined it with the mask because this one has the most amount of modifiers. Oops. But yes, then I could check in on the dimensions. Yes, OK, it's done. So right now he's three meters tall. That's it's pretty big. The scale that we kind of agreed one is one meter. So maybe I can just do that right now. So I can just bring back all the collections just to make sure everything is there. I want to scale down everything we have. And I'm just going to. I'm just going to with control P, parent everything to that center empty that I left there since the beginning and just scale it down by point like just one third. This way, I'm just going to like another way to check the the size we can add a cube. Then move it up one blender unit that way because a cube and when you add it by default, it's it has the scale of one. So it's so it's going to be two meters wide, two meters high and two meters deep, which means we can just move it up one meter and then set the origin to the 3D cursor or the center of the world. And then we're going to have it over here at the bottom of the cube, scale it down by 50 percent. And now this cube is from the ground to the top one meter tall. So I can also in the I have my own little menu over here to change the display type to, for example, bounds or wire. You can find these settings over here in the object properties and display as and then by default, it's on textured. So it displays the solid object and any textures that you might want to display on top. But sometimes it can be very handy to set it to something lower like bounds. And now we can see this is the scale of the character. So I might just able. Yeah, I might actually still scale them down a little bit more because the hair is going to contribute also a bit to the size. And I just want to we want to perceive him as one meter. It's not going to be his actual height as in the top of his head. But instead, just everything that is related to the character. So now I can just like clear the parenting again. I can actually leave this cube in here. I'm just going to call it ref scale. Why not? We might use it at some point again. So I'm just going to put it in helpers as well. I'm going to disable these collections again. So we just have the sculpt and there we go. Safe. So next up is the T-pose. That's definitely very important. So I think I'm actually going to merge some of these objects, like these guys over here. But I am actually very curious about something. I think in Scott mode, I still have like if I remove if I use the form only and I'm actually going to select everything and set it to flat shading because in scope mode, I still am using face sets over here, which is very interesting. So I might be able to just select this part of the mesh going to scope mode face sets and face set from edit mode selection. Eventually, I have to copy and apply the mirror modifier again. I'm going to do the same thing over here. I'm going to add another edge in the middle, hide this, select all connected over here and go to scope mode and face set from edit mode selection. And what I want to try right now because it's a it's a very new feature actually. Yeah, I think it's actually not even committed yet to blender. So if I move this now, it's not going to work. There's a relatively new feature right now to move separate objects as well with the post with the post brush. But that's not in there right now. No, sadly, no. But I can set this based on face sets, which is like a really nice new feature. So this is already a nice help. I can like copy and apply the mirror modifier. Now we have the same face sets over here. Let's just try it with symmetry and OK, either that's the cat or my roommate throwing some stuff over. But yes, now it's immediately going to set a pivot point based on the face sets so I can just rotate this and it's going to mess things up a little bit. This might actually not be the best way to do it. Just actually go back into the face sets. This is overall, I would say, like the way I'm making this character is not the most efficient way. But I am actually using this a bit of as an exercise to try out some of the new tools and see how they work because they have been a lot of small improvements and added features in Blender recently. And I would love to experiment with them a bit more. Interesting. It seems to have some sort of smooth fall off. What if I do this? Ah, what if I know this is this is not working exactly how I expected it to work? So let's just do it the old fashioned way, I guess. I can also just select all of this. I could rotate it around the 3D cursor over there, but I'm just going to do it like quick and dirty, maybe with a few less loops. So we just have these guys over here and then the rest can just be smooth to it. But we want to have this as a straight T-pose. I think I'm actually going to, yeah, I'm just going to do it like this. This is already a bit curved, so I would have to adjust that. How's the topology brush going to react to this? Yeah, it's going to try to keep the shape intact, even though the shape is all messed up. But it might give a nice starting point since if I would use the smooth brush just on this, it would completely destroy the shape and smooth down the volumes a lot. I might be able, though, to just like just do it with a little bit of strength and then adjust it afterwards. Yeah, I don't want to use topological automasking right now. Although maybe I keep it active for the normal grab brush, but I still have my 2D one and this one has it disabled so I can just like grab this with infinite depth to the brush and I can just straighten out this arm as much as possible. You can also straighten out this torus a little bit and of course straighten out the hand. But for this I might actually remove the origins based on face sets and actually use the default behavior so that I can, oh, interesting, so that I can just like straighten it out with a post brush. Just a couple of blender versions ago, I would have used the snake hook brush since that one also has a way of having the geometry follow the rotation. But with a post brush, it's suddenly you can get that done with way less distortion. So it's really interesting how these tools, how these new tools actually improve the usability and scope mode in various ways. Like there's many ways you could use these on a daily basis. Some of them are a bit more specific. I would say like the cloth brush is really a corner case tool. It's great if you want to have like want to make some quick first base meshes for anything clothing related or anything that's cloth. Of course, the tool also has its limitations, but it can be quite helpful. Of course, you can achieve all of this with the default tools. All of this was still possible before. It would have just had, it would have just taken longer. OK, another little note I had in the in the draw overs from Vivian and from Publiko, Pablo Fournier, the animator is that the the thumb can also already have this sort of, I would say like droplet shape. Nothing is really stopping it from already having a nice and appealing shape like this. Since it can be further tweaked in the rig later on, and this would be probably a better default shape to work with for this particular character. And again, I'm often toggling the wireframe overlay with a shortcut, which is super helpful, even if you have it on flat shaded, what you're sculpting or working on, being able to just enable wireframes on top can be very helpful to get a clear view of your mesh, of your topology. Also from the top view, if you're looking at it like that, it's very clear that, OK, first of all, I didn't enable X symmetry, I guess, but that's fine. We can just mirror it over again with the modifier. But the arm is also a bit bent and off in rotation. We want to have this as angular as possible. So I'm just going to clip the viewport with alt B. No, there's a little bit of a freeze, so we don't have the neck blocking our view. But be careful that if you do this, the brush is also not going to affect any geometry that is being clipped off. So that's good to keep in mind. And I might actually use the post brush again just to straighten it out a little bit in rotation. And then the same thing, essentially, for the torso over here. Yes, sometimes in these cases, it can also be very helpful to just remodel the the arm from scratch because it is such a simple shape. Actually, that might actually be a good idea. But at this point, I already got it kind of where I want it. So that might be just a bit too much hassle. And I have like almost like half a day left. So the deadline is approaching. I need to get this done in some form that can be further worked on. Actually, let me just pick the, yes, the topology tool. So great. Just smoothing over this to redistribute some of the geometry a little bit. Of course, this can still cause a little bit of loss of shape since some of the geometry can spread a bit thin. But that can still be dealt with very easily. Something tells me that this is not going to be the cleanest model. It could be. But that's also because of time constraints. So I'm just going to make the best of it that I can. Yes. And I also noticed like this stuff, that's not good. Like we want to have these loops as straight as possible with the direction that they are deforming towards. So I'm just going to actually let me hide the Taurus. Yes, I'm just going to add more loops over here. Actually, let me remove these. I can with the loop cut tool, cut a loop in here. And with pressing E, I can set it to be even. So now it's always going to align with the one on the right, even if it goes all the way over to the left. By default, it would just kind of blend in between them. So now it aligns with the left one. Now it aligns with the right one. Press E and it's going to align with one of them. The one that it's going to align with has the little red dot. And if you press F, it's going to flip it. This is all visible in either in the header. You can see these little shortcuts with explanations. So I can really recommend you to experiment with this. Or you're going to see it at the status bar on the bottom. Right now, this is still a sort of feature that needs to be made a bit more consistent. Right now, these sorts of things are a bit all over the place. But yes, I can just add another loop over here. Add a couple more cuts. Yeah, I'm just going to add four over here. Add some more over here, actually like that. And then the same thing basically over here, although I might be more careful with not losing the shape of the arm. I might just smooth over it a little bit. Even everything out a bit. There's still some bumps over here, very visible. And then we can just like nudge them around a little bit. But overall, this should be good. Yes, we can unhide the torus again. So that's now in there. And I didn't notice that these would be scaled. So would be skewed so much over here. So I'm going to still select them again. Yes, they are very skewed. I'm going to select all of these individual loops. And then what I will do is I'm going to set the... What is this? It's the pivot point to individual origin. So it's going to use individual edges over here. And I'm going to scale them to zero on the x-axis. And just a little bit more over here, like that. That looks good. Good enough. And then I wonder if I should make the legs more straight. This might actually make sense. Just for the sake of rigging, making that an easier process. And also having the bones better aligned. This would be quite nice. So I'm actually going to hide all of this. I'm going to set the pivot point, the cursor over here and set the pivot point to three. The cursor over here and set the pivot point to be the 3D cursor. And then I'm going to rotate all of this along the 3D cursor. And move it just a little bit. So now it is actually straight. Of course, that didn't apply really to the feet. That one was already aligned with the ground. So I'm going to select that one too. Again. Maybe that's a good pivot point to rotate it from. And then rotate this one as well in the opposite direction. Maybe this one too. Yes. That should be good. Yeah, over here this is really kind of extreme of a sharp edge. I might just smooth this out a little bit. Just on the heel over here. And then I'm just going to add a couple more edges. If it has a bit more geometry then it's going to be easier to get some more deformations. Make it a bit more elastic. I'm not super happy with this. Like with those two poles right over here. But I'm just going to keep it like that for now. Yeah, this is also not great. Okay, let's just do the same thing over here. Select individual edges. And just with individual origins scale them along the z-axis to zero. I can just like remove these, dissolve the edges with CTRL-X. And add just a couple more edge loops as a transition. But I really want most of them to be aligned well. Kind of straight. Just makes it overall a bit more clean. I might just smooth this out a little bit. But let's just keep the strength of the tool down. Kind of like that crease to be there. But it shouldn't be always there. It should be good. Okay, let's unclip the viewport. This is good. Copy and apply the mirror modifier. And let's just bring back the other elements. There we go. Again, material view. Yes. Another note from the draw over was that the turtleneck could be made a bit more visible over here on the neck. Which I kind of agree with. It could be a nice little touch. But it would also push the mask a bit forward. So I would have to drag this bit towards the front. I'm actually going to copy and apply the mirror modifier on the mask as well. Just so, yes, now it's nice and symmetrical in scope mode as well. Because right here we're using the option deform only. I'm going to push this up a little bit over here. Not too much. I don't want to destroy the curvature too much. Just as a little bit of tweaking. And, yeah, I think I actually... I'm really not sure about the hair over here. I would like it to still be like a sort of believable hairline. But then we run at the risk of seeing the head. So what I might do is just hide the head over here. I want to see the body and how that relates to everything. I'm also going to hide the face. It's just always distracting seeing that in front. And I'm going to scale this up along the x-axis. So that we kind of get this seamless blend. So even though there's a turtleneck over there, we could still have the suit continue. So let's just, again, grab the 2D grab brush. And just pull this further to the front. So that the body is the thing that caps off the rest of the face. Like this. Also, I got a note from Vivian of like other proportional adjustments. Just to... I'm actually going to re-enable the modifiers. And I am... What is the best way of hiding? I don't think there's a good way of hiding the legs without using deform only because the, yes, the modifiers will always prevent this stuff from being hidden. It's just like how you can't see a mask right now with certain modifiers. Just trying to get the shape right. And then, of course, over here would be nice if this line is also a bit more of a seamless blend. There we go. Am I using the right met cap? Nice. So the suit is really wrapping around the rest of the body, the face over here. Yeah, I'm really wondering about this. I might still get some more feedback on this, but I don't know what other people think because this is really a specific design decision on if the suit is supposed to stop at the turtleneck over here. What is this then? Is this a mask? Should this get a different color? If it does get a different color, like the cyan-gray ones over here, then will this be perceived as the skin color of the creature, of this character? Because he does seem a little alien, so it wouldn't be out of the ordinary if the skin color would not be normally skin colored. So it's definitely something to keep in mind. I'm just going to keep straightening this out. I'm going to hide... Oh, I'm going to hide these guys again. Interesting. It's hiding both of them together. Oh, I guess it's because the material colors are interfering with the face set colors? Probably. So if I use single, yes, then they would have the same face set. Interesting. So if I isolate them, I can mask off this part. W, face set from masked, and dissolve the mask, and now they have individual face sets. It's way nicer. Anyway, I wanted to get to some other design adjustments, specifically about the volume of the limbs. That was one of the notes that I got that they could get a little bit of a volume boost. So the legs could be a little bit thicker. Just because the character is already so tiny and if the legs won't even be registered anymore, that would be not that good. There we go, pushing this a little bit more in. Okay, and H to bring in the other parts of the body and material colors. Bringing that back. So that's nice. Yeah, that's definitely something to keep in mind. Other design adjustments, this was mentioned to be a little bit higher so that it can be a little bit more easier connecting into the hair. But this is even making this issue worse. So I might not do it. This strap is really ideal for covering, so for being an extra element to cover up any part of the face that we might see. So I'm gonna push it up a little bit, but not too much. This is quite a difficult decision over here. But yes, other things in the draw over. I did address the thumb, but I could make this guy a bit more blobby. Just a little bit. And then the palm a bit more rounded. Right now it's not looking that appealing. It's like a weird flap. I'm actually going to again use the form only off so I can actually see the final shape while I'm sculpting it. But the trade off of this is definitely a slower performance. So that's something to keep in mind. It's really interesting when I usually show this sort of process in a time lapse. If you see it in real time, it does become more obvious how much painstaking tweaking is happening all the time. Like 80% of the time of a modeler is pushing vertices around. So I think that's still pretty true. Even though workflows have become a bit more flexible and more towards sculpting. Oh yeah, this guy. I'm going to enable proportional editing again, which means I have to switch to my mouse. Unfortunately. Yes. I'm going to change the falloff curve to sharp. This way it's going to wrap around nicely around the body. Like this. This was definitely a note for the animation that I had for the animators because the arm can really easily intersect over here with the strap, with the belt. And this shape should be treated more as a belt, not just as a strap for the backpack. So I don't mind if it's wrapping around the body a bit more, just to make it an easier process for the animators to put the arms down. Of course, I forgot about the other side. I'm going to again just delete this part. I can't use the mirror modifier because there's already some asymmetry going on. But I can just switch into a wireframe mode, select all of this, set the 3D cursor with the Pi menu to the world origin, set the pivot point to the world origin, duplicate, control M, mirror, X, and shift N to recalculate the normal. Select the two edges, control E, bridge edge loops. And then of course, these edge loops need to be sharpened again. So there we go. Now it's symmetrical again. What else? There was a note about the backpack curvature over here. I think this is really supposed to be a bit sharper. That was like the general note, which of course involves a bit more fine-tuning again. Yeah, I still think for the general appeal of this shape, it might be better to keep it as it is a bit more rounded. I can make some other adjustments. There was a note about this area. This can be pushed out a bit more to make this more of an angle. There were a lot of tiny notes in the draw over, but I don't mind. It's just the fine tweaking that I'm doing anyway at this point. Yes. What else? There was... Let's just bring the body back. I think I'm going to add a little bit more volume to the hands. Just a bit more. Yeah, I think one of the features I'm most looking forward to in terms of sculpting process and iteration, seeing in back and forth what the changes look like is sculpting layers as in shape keys for sculpt mode and the prototype for snapshots, which is just like... I made a lot of small tweaks right now in this area and just being able to have this as a different layer and then toggle back and forth between them would be really nice. The way to do it right now without that feature would be to just duplicate the object and toggle between those back and forth, which would also be fine, but it's a bit slower. From the front, I can also just add a bit more volume to this. There we go. I'm also going to add a bit more volume to the feet. There we go. Right now I really wish I would have aligned the cylinder better when I made these legs. It would have been really nice because there's definitely a bit of twisting going on. If you look at the arm from the side, the loop is not going straight up, but instead a little bit to the side. It could be cleaner. Next thing, the hair. Making it straighter and removing some of the volume. In this case, I'm going to try with a pulse brush, but it's not that great if you have way more curvature. For limbs, it's fantastic. For curvature, I mean I could add IK segments, but it's still going to be a bit tricky to work with that brush. I think in this case it's still best to use the snake hook brush to straighten this because I can move it and with the rake functionality on over here, it's going to rotate a little bit with the direction of the brush, of the brush stroke. Also, I'm not sure how many people watching this actually know about some of the recent fixes, but in basically forever in Blender, if you would use the rake brush and the snake hook brush and you would use the rake setting, the rotation would just go off in weird directions if the object had rotation values. But this got fixed recently, so now the rotation of the object could be anything, essentially. And the rake setting and the snake hook brush would still work exactly how it should. So that's a really nice little improvement that probably no one will ever care about. Also, I noticed right now I should apply the scale. Always have the scaling on one if you're planning on sculpting on an object or even using it in edit mode, adjusting anything. I think this is as straight as it's going to get. I'm going to hide this. And I'm going to, with a 2D brush, just dent this in a little bit and have a little bit more volume over here. I'm going to have this a bit more of a straight and I'm going to go into edit mode over here and rotate these guys. Oh, I still have the pivot point set as the 3D cursor. I should fix that. Yeah, these guys need to be rotated a little bit and tilt it. Tilting is done with Ctrl T. And of course, I'm using the tools, so it's just going to switch to the tilt tool. Or at least I think it's called the tilt tool. Yeah, it's tilt. So in editing curves, there's definitely the need of extra scaling and rotating options because you're not just scaling. Normally, you're just scaling the points, the handles, but you also need to be scaling and rotating the effect that it has on the 3D geometry it produces. So tilting is just... You don't see a noticeable difference in the curve, but it is setting a different tilt value over here on the side. So there's tilt, radius, even weight, which I don't think no one... I think no one ever uses. Right. I was supposed to make this shorter as well. So I can just use the 2D grab brush and just push this in. Nice and smoothly. Yes. And then from the front, have a little look. Of course, these guys will need to be heavily adjusted. None of this is finished, but at least from the base shape over here, this guy, that should be solid. At least in terms of proportions right now because I'm going to add a decimate modifier on top and then this is going to be sent off to rigging already.