Today involved some experimenting and some practice.
First up:
These chess pieces were made using a lathing technique, by taking a curve and spinning it around an axis to create a solid form. In the case of the rook I also made use of some nifty boolean operations to get the cut ins for the parapets. Kind of basic stuff, but also stuff that I haven’t had much practice with, so it seemed like a good exercise to do, especially since I was winging it on my own, rather than following any specific tutorial. There are plenty of them out there for chess pieces, but it just wasn’t what I was going for.
The second item is this at least vaguely familiar little guy who may or may not have been modeled off of a semi-popular video game character:
He was a bit of a rush job, to be honest. I was mostly just using him as a way to play around and practice some techniques. I tried, at least to an extent, to follow some of the pipeline workflows that I’ve been learning, so this character involved going through and actually modelling out a more or less viable version of the character as a low-poly base mesh, unwrapping the uvs for that mesh for the texturing, sculpting out the fine detail in sculpt mode, hand painting the texture in texture mode, baking the sculpted details out to a normal map and applying it to the low-poly version so it would look like the more detailed high-poly version, and rigging and posing the low poly model. I also put together a super basic desert scene to put him in and tried to go for a nicely framed shot. Considering the subject matter and the amount of time I was willing to put into this particular piece, each of those steps was pretty much the simplest and most bare bones version of itself possible, but the whole workflow was there, with the exception of retopology. At first I was wanting to play around with that as well, there are some alternate techniques I’d like to try out, but there actually wasn’t much that really needed changing at all for this guy, he’s just not complex enough to be worth bothering.
Regardless, even for a rush job that was focused more on the different parts of the workflow than the actual quality of the work, I feel like he came out pretty decent. I may try to do a few more of these super fast character sculpts in the future, to help get all of the different techniques really down pat. It can be a complicated process with a lot going on, so being able to do all of it in a single session could be really good for retention.