Roguedevelopmentdiary

Rogue Development Diary

Tutorial by Lee 'almighty_gir' Devonald

Week 1

Week one started with a bang. We all got together on Google+ (something I was sceptical about... I’m not a social networking fan) but actually it has some AMAZING features. Screen sharing is just mindblowingly fantastic even if it’s in its infancy and lacks some features. I’d strongly recommend it to anyone considering a collaborative project.

This week consists of choosing our girl, collecting reference, and... Drawing. Emphasis here on drawing. I’m not a fan at all; I think I suck at drawing which makes me not want to draw which has led to it being a self fulfilled prophecy! I don’t practice because I think I suck and because I don’t practice I DO suck! But that’s okay! This isn’t a drawing master class and truth be told I totally understand the reasoning behind the drawing part of this exercise.

When top artists tell you to try drawing your subject before you model them it’s to help you become more intimate with the subject, to see it from more angles than you may already have and more importantly it actually helps you to find out things you might have missed at a cursory glance. There are quite a few things I picked up drawing Rogue that I would have missed if I didn’t do it. The relationship between the shoulders and hips, the elongation of the torso... these are things you can make a guess at by looking at pictures, but when you start to draw the character you quickly understand how they’re exaggerated, and how easy it would be to go too far and make it all wrong!

It’s at this point I’m going to introduce you guys to a couple of things. I don’t really have a massive concept bible. Instead I focused on a single fantastic reference. This would be my primary sheet, the one I use when all else fails.

Once I had put together the bible reference I started out on secondary reference. This would be fan art or other secondary sources that I thought were good reflections of the character. In some cases this even included real people’s faces, hips, chests etc. All things I felt would be good to use in building the model, things that screamed “sexy”, or things that really spoke to the character of rogue... the mischievous southern belle, cursed to love from a distance, that fierce and eternal tease. And finally it included any and all of the sketches and drawings I did, yes I’m aware they’re horrible! But it’s spurred me into wanting to do more drawing which is a good thing.

I’ve decided to upload the secondary bible in a .psd file, I think it’s important that you guys see how I built up the sketches (and help me do it better). I started by doing a block out stage, where I focused on main body shapes... the hips, ribcage etc.

The Sketching!

An important note here is that I actually did my orthos first... and that’s a mistake! There’s a lot missing from the orthos. They lack character, and in a lot of places they seem to lack all of the things I learned from doing all of the other sketches. They also weren’t as good! After sketching as much as I did for the rest of the sheet I’d gotten into a much better flow, and by comparison the orthos were just bad! But that’s part of the point of this course, to learn and do better next time. Here’s how I went about the sketches

• Start out by gathering reference, scatter it across your drawing space, or put it to the top or one of the sides. But most importantly make sure it’s always visible!
• Block out your character, my blockout is in red. You can see I focused on basic shapes. A cylinder for limbs, very blocky shapes for the ribs and hips, and the head is made with a circle plus a blocky piece for the jaw.
• Use guidelines with your blockout... try to keep those sexy curves in there, let your blockouts follow those curves!
• Sketch over your blockouts... it doesn’t have to follow the blockout 100% in fact if it does you’re probably doing it wrong... remember that there are organs and muscles present that aren’t there in the blockout, the skin goes around those!
• Analyse your sketches guys! This is super important. As much as it’s good to get external feedback, make sure you’re learning from your own work! By analysing, you can tell yourself “okay, this part is important to get right...” and it will help other people spot things you might have missed.

The Analysis

Analysis is important here. I wasn’t just looking at women (although that’s important); I was finding the differences between real women and marvel comics women...

• Real women tend to be around 6.5 - 7 heads tall.
• Marvel women tend to be around 8 heads tall.
• Real women have shorter waists than marvel women which make them appear a little broader.
• Marvel women have elongated waists, which makes them appear slimmer... they aren’t ACTUALLY slimmer; they just appear that way due to the elongation.
• Real women have “soft” features, soft jaw lines, delicate shoulders, and some “bubbling” at the waist/hip area.
• Marvel women have “harder” features, almost masculine jaw lines, broader faces, square shoulders, and curvier waist/hip transitions.

It’s also important to note certain anatomical things... most of you probably know them, but for those who don’t, here are some of the things I picked out. When a leg bends, the hip doesn’t... bear this in mind when rigging especially. It also creates a subtle “seam” on the body, which is an inch or two below the natural seam from the iliac crest and the crotch.

• When the leg bends, the arse cheek follows (see right hand sketch/analysis).
• There are living people with almost super hero proportions... find them and use it to your advantage!
• Breasts hang... even the small ones have gravity against them. This leads to a sometimes subtle natural seam beneath them. Pay attention to it as if you get it wrong it will make the girl look masculine!
• Breasts themselves add another curve to the body, they are ROUND, if you want to study the shape of a breast and don’t have a girlfriend, or your parents think you’re looking at rude images... try filling a balloon with water and hanging it against something to see how it hangs.
• Arses come in all shapes and sizes, sure my character has a heart shaped arse, but yours might not. Pay attention to what makes your characters arse special! Some women can be identified by their arse alone... it’s as important as the hands or the face!
• Remember, skin is like Clingfilm... it might occasionally form a natural concave, but more often than not it will simply stretch over a hole or gap. This is especially evident at the abdomen.

Week 2

Now, the course at this point takes a wider scope... weeks 2, 3, and 4 are actually joined at the hip. They focus on making a base mesh, blocking out, and sculpting.

I built a base mesh during week 1, while sketching. I wanted to stay a little ahead of the curve if possible, and I LOVE sculpting. So getting into that part of it as early as possible was a must for me.

Anyway! Rambling aside this is how I went about building my base mesh.

The Head

I wanted to keep it quads where possible. This is a good rule to follow when you’re looking at sculpting, too many triangles and even too many “poles” (vertices which share more than four faces) can give you an inconsistent smoothing result which is obviously not a good thing. That said, my mesh has a couple of poles here and there, and two triangles... well, two in “prominent locations” anyway.

I had originally intended the head of the mesh to be as plain as possible... pretty much a subdivided cube attached to a neck. But then I also wanted to practice my topology, so ended up making a head with edge loops and such. No truly defined features where possible, but still decent topology. So when making the head I focused hard on clearly defining these loops:

• Creating a nice strong loop from just above the nostril, to the chin, this goes around the mouth completely. If you want to know why, go look in the mirror and open your mouth as wide as you can. You’ll see the line I’m talking about!
• Creating loops around the eyes can “seem” like a pain, but only if you’re trying to force detail in. Remember this mesh is for sculpting... vertices will get pulled and pushed around all over the place. As long as your topology is nice and clean, it will hold up in your sculpt. It’s easier to move a vertex into a new position while maintaining your good loop structure, than it is to have to deal with bad topology and the sculpting issues that follow.
• Nice loops around the lips. Remember that the lips do NOT end in a point at their corners, when the mouth is open it should make a nice O shape, no poles, no triangles, and no excuses!
• Some nice loops around the ear can’t hurt. They help to support a nice even topology within the ear itself. This is one area of my base mesh where anatomy is almost entirely forgotten in favour of even topology... I’d rather sculpt the inner ear completely than try to model it and have to worry about topology.

Hopefully if you’re looking to build a base mesh and you keep these things in mind, you’ll have a finished product that will hold up well in sculpting, and will serve as a half decent guide at the same time. Remember that a lot of these loops are placed according to muscle structure, so when you come to sculpting you’ll find less resistance along those lines, and more resistance along lines which aren’t supported anatomically.

The Body

Here is where things can be quite interesting. I decided to keep a largely even polygon distribution so as to make sculpting easier, but at the same time try to include loops around areas which would have naturally high definition.

• Pectoral – Bicep transition. This line would be present in a male character and in actuality, would be far easier to produce. But alas, women have breasts, and in this case they got in the way somewhat! The line would normally trace the lowest part of the pectoral, up to the deltoid, and down the bicep. But in the case of a woman I thought it should trace naturally around the breast instead of the pectoral. Notice also how the breast is largely formed of a sphere and merged into the topology of the chest.
• A clear area of definition for high definition is the connection of the neck muscles to the clavicles. The clavicles themselves tend to be fairly well defined on slim and muscular people, but the neck muscles themselves can tend to protrude slightly.
• Twisting the edges from the elbow to the wrist can really help when it comes to sculpting the arm muscles. They naturally twist this direction on the forearm which can help reduce resistance when sculpting.
• Belly button! An entirely optional thing. It can really help to find the “centre” of your character by defining their belly early on.
• Defining the knee like this can be very helpful, like the belly button it is a natural centre for the legs and is one of the most defined areas on the human body.
• Here’s another area where you can keep a fairly even polygon distribution but also help to define a muscle group; this one is the transition between the latissimus dorsi and the trapezius.
• Depending on how well defined you want your character; this set of loops can really help sell the triceps, the humorous, and the elbow.
• This loop is introduced to help define the shoulder blade (scapula).
• This loop serves a dual purpose. Firstly it forms a great terminator for an edge loop that comes over the top of the skull... there were just too many loops to let them go across the body! And secondly it allows for definition of the neck muscles.

As you can see, I put some effort into keeping as even a distribution as possible, whilst trying to define some key areas.

The Zbrush

And the final stage was to create suitable polygroups in Zbrush.

Image upload needed

The polygroups include everything I could see becoming a problem area, or an area in need of focus, such as fingers. The mesh also includes an inner mouth (excluding teeth, tongue and gums) which is its own polygroup.

The Freebees!

Please feel free to download any of the following base meshes: