Sculpt fan art in Blender

Follow these steps and learn techniques for sculpting characters in Blender with polygon modelling

Glen Southern teaches us top techniques for polygon modelling characters

There are many ways to model and sculpt in 3D, and often an artist will just start sculpting and have no regard for the underlying topology. At the end of the session it is fairly routine now to retopologise those models and then move onto UV and texturing.

You can approach this in a different way, and that is to use polygon modelling tools at the start but use the sculpting tools inside Blender alongside them. You can use basic sculpting tools like Grab, Move, Flatten, Smooth and Inflate while you are working on a very detailed, fairly low-polygon model. This can be quite useful when you’re doing character work and you know the character you are going to make.

Switching back and forth between modelling and sculpting is very simple and after a while you don’t notice that you’re doing it – it all becomes part of one seamless creation process and Blender has got this down to a fine art.

Add to that the amazing realtime render engine Eevee and speciality sculpting tools like the Pose tool, and you have a very powerful set of features that make Blender a must-have creation program. Let’s take a look at making some fan art.

02 EXTRUDE AND TWEAK

To start shaping up the body select the Extrude tool, and extrude the legs down. Do it a couple of times to give yourself some geometry to play with and then switch to Point mode so that you can use the Tweak feature and adjust the shape using just single points. Shape up a rounded body with a thinner neck area. Give the belly a bit more volume than the chest area.

04 BLOCK OUT A BODY

Okay, it’s time to head back to Edit mode and also back to extruding. We can now block out an entire body. Select faces at the bottom of the body and extrude down several times to create the basic leg shapes as shown. Do the same at the shoulders and create a basic set of arms. Now in Tweak mode you can adjust the shape point-by-point while it is still very low polygon. You won't be able to do this later and all of the moving will be done with the sculpting tools.

06 SUBDIVISION TIME

At the moment we are looking at the shape as a low-polygon form. The final is obviously going to be sculpted and rounded so we can take a look at the model in a more organic way by adding a subdivision modifier. Add a Subdivision Surface modifier from the Modifiers panel. Set this to 1 so it will round the model but not be too intensive on the system just yet.

03 JUMP BACK AND FORTH TO SCULPTING

A great thing about Blender is that you can jump from polygon modelling to sculpting at the click of a button. From the top right of the menu go from Object mode to Sculpting mode and you will see all of the sculpting tools appear, allowing you to manipulate your model as if it was a sculpted asset. We will be doing this a lot back and forth. Now you can just hold down Shift and anywhere you click on the model will be smoothed. You don’t even need to call a tool.

05 CREATE EARS

From the side of the head select a couple of polygons and extrude them out three times. Tweak this basic shape into the rough outline of an ear. Now in Point mode tweak the shape at the back and front to make sure it is thick enough and can hold its shape as we continue modelling. Remember this is only an armature for us to sculpt on: we aren’t looking for perfection at this stage.

07 ADD FACE DETAILS

Now with a combination of Extrude and Loop Cut you can add details like the mouth and eye sockets. We just need to put an indication of where the mouth and the eyes are going to go and ensure that there is geometry in the correct arrangement. We are always looking to create loops around areas like the mouth and eyes which helps if the model is ever to be animated.

08 BACK TO SCULPTING

Switch back to Sculpting mode and try to shape the head a little closer to your design. Make sure the head looks right from the front, back and sides and that the mouth is the right kind of width. You can achieve most of this using just the Grab tool from the sculpting toolbar. Grab allows you just to move large or small areas of geometry depending on the radius of the brush (right-click). Add some detail around the nose, which in this case is quite a simple shape.

10 START TO ADD MORE DETAIL

We can keep adjusting the underlying topology, but it's time to try a bit more sculpting. Do a pass over the whole body using Smooth and Grab and also a few of the other tools such as Clay and Flatten. Build up areas of muscle and smooth down areas that are becoming too rounded or blobby. Feel free to change the colour in the material panel at the bottom right if that helps you while you are sculpting. Be careful with the Smooth tool; as you can see here the fingers went too thin and I had to inflate them back up again.

12 CUT GEOMETRY

Where the geometry isn't going in the right direction you can use the knife tool. If you don't want to run a full split around the model you can simply use the knife tool to click between the points and add the geometry to suit the area that you're working on. Overall we want to maintain quads and if needed we can leave one or two triangles.

13 DETAILING 09 HAND AND FINGERS

Use the same process as we did at the start by selecting faces and then extruding the hands and fingers out. Create joints as you would see on a real hand and try to keep some volume in the fingers as they can flatten out quite easily. Add a thumb and then use the sculpting tools to smooth and grab parts of the hand. Take your time with the fingers as they are intricate parts to model.

11 ADD DEEPER LINES

For this step, you could add extra loops and then push those loops inside, which is a great way to add more definition to an area like the nose and around the eye. The Crease tool in Sculpting mode can also achieve the same sort of effect, and it's great to do a combination of both. For the sculpting you may need to go higher on your Subdivision, so perhaps turn it up to 4.

Keep switching to Sculpting mode and refining the shape until you are happy with the overall volumes from all angles. Start to think about detailed areas like around the eye and under the nostril, and start to tweak the points or smooth an area until every area on the body is covered. By now the model should be looking quite accurate when you subdivide it.

14 REFINE WITH SCULPT TOOLS

There are actually lots of tools in the sculpting section of Blender, but you don't really need too many of them at this point. You should be using three or four of the brushes I've described earlier and going round each part of the model looking for areas to either grab, build up or smooth down. If you find an area isn't looking right go back and tweak it in the geometry first rather than trying to sculpt your way out of the problem. See under the nose in this image.

16 ALIGN THE TEETH

If you don't want to do it manually you can just do half of the teeth set and mirror it across, exactly as you did with the body. Breaking the symmetry and keeping the teeth asymmetrical actually helps to make the character come alive, even in this early stage. Make the teeth a little bit crooked and put some unevenness in the height as you set them into the jaw. Make sure that you check it from all angles as it could look fine from the front but not be working well from the side.

18 RENDERED MODE

Feel free to add a new shader and switch to Layout or Rendered mode (Z on the keyboard). We won’t be able to spend much time on rendering in this tutorial, but it does help to look at your model with a shader and the colour set to closer to the final look. Working this way means you are cutting out the retopology part of the process and spending more time on character creation.

15 ADD TEETH

For the teeth let’s add in another default cube using Shift+a. Use the Loop Cut to add about four or five loops. Switch over to sculpting and using Smooth and Grab, pull the shape into a pointed tooth. Now simply duplicate several times and line them up across the top jaw. Repeat for the bottom jaw; you can group these together if needed.

17 CHECK THE WIREFRAME

At the top right of the menu there is an option to turn wireframe on. Now is a good time to make sure the wireframe looks how you imagined, as once we finish this section we will move to UV mapping and we can't really change the geometry after that point. The model should still be relatively low polygon but with the subsurface modifier we still have that ability to sculpt details in.

19 INFLATE AND ADD VOLUME

Back in Sculpting mode, work your way around the model inflating areas like the cheeks and the forearms where you feel there may not be enough volume. Rotate the model around and find any areas that look flat or deformed and take your time using Smooth, Flatten, Inflate and Grab until you are close to your desired look. Inflating areas like the top of the ear can really help.

20 UV UNWRAPPING

Turn the Subdivision Surface down to 0. Enter UV mode from the top menu. Start selecting edges you want to use as seams on the texture map: around the shoulder area for example. Mark these edges as seams (right-click>mark Seam). Once you have a full set of seams marked you can use the Unwrap function to flatten out the UVS for you.

21 PAINT OR TEXTURE

There are a few ways to texture a model in Blender. You can use vertex painting, texture painting or just simply export it and paint it in a dedicated program. Here I used Zbrush and I simply did a very basic colour pass across the whole UV model that I had exported from Blender. I then reimported it and it came back in with the vertex colours as seen in the image. I had also grabbed a texture map to use with Substance Painter at a later stage. To do it in Blender switch to texture painting and create your masterpiece.

22 BASIC RENDER IN EEVEE

With Blender Eevee it is so easy to make a realtime scene to show your work in progress. To make sure you are using Eevee rather than Cycles (Blender’s main render engine), under Render Properties (bottom right) look for the dropdown that allows you to switch between Cycles and Eevee. You can add a plane for the floor and, selecting a back edge, extrude it up to make a ramp.

23 BRING SCENE TO LIFE

I decided to add some little ducks which are made out of a very simple cube shape in the same way I made the main character. Using a combination of the modelling and sculpting tools I quickly created a cute little duck model. I only vertex painted this one as that would be enough for the scene I wanted to create. I duplicated them and scattered them around the main character.

24 POSE

Blender has an amazing posing tool in the sculpting menu. Switch over to Sculpting mode and look down the toolbar until you see the Pose tool icon. Now, by working around the model you will be able to pull and twist the jointed areas of the mesh and create the pose that you want. This is a great way to experiment with poses without having to spend time learning how to rig a model, and it gives you a great way to just see if your model is working well when it is deformed.

25 GET A LITTLE CRAZY

Have some fun with the Pose tool and try all kinds of different poses for your character. For this project I tried a walking pose, a sitting pose and also some poses where the hands were in very complex arrangements. If you feel like you need to go even further with posing, then it would be a great time to look into how to rig inside of Blender. •