I’m really enjoying this hobby, project, exercise.. whatever this is. It’s a mix of technical work with code and pipelines and then very loose art. I say loose art because I’m not formally trained. I have no idea what I’m doing and muddling through it but I am really enjoying this.
From the image above you can see the base object that Rodin provides based on the photo (also added here), then I apply the shaders via displacement (full process explained here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-use-ai-to-120617822) and then I do sculpting.
I suppose the traditional method for creating these figures would be to use an icosphere with a reference image and block out the general shape, subdivide that and then really go to town sculpting things. I’m skipping that first part and starting with a partially sculpted model and my process is like tracing over the existing faint details using sharp sculpt to loosely draw in the lines then inflating/deflating and smoothing as needed.
What I’m finding is that when it comes to sculpting it’s tough to know when you’re “done”. There are always MORE details that you can add, more flourishes, you can also add extra objects (this model I kinda wanted to add an axe but then I’d have twist her arm and I don’t wanna do that right now). As I’m progressing it seems to take more and more time and this idea of hitting 1000 figures seems like it could turn into thousands upon thousands of hours of effort – and I guess it should – what’s the point in putting hundreds of hours into low-effort work? Is there really even such a thing as hundreds of hours of low-effort work? I suppose it comes down to perception of the viewer it could look like a super low-quality model and with my “publish or die” mentality there are going to be done that are rougher than others and as time progresses the relative roughness on past models will continue to increase!
So anyways – I’m happy with zombie_female1 for now (files attached to this post!) and have completed my first draft of my zombie collection now which I’ll publish in a week or two here. When I’m ready to publish zombie_female2 I think the quality of that model will make this one look pretty darn bad just as this one makes some of my other models look pretty darn bad. We’re getting better with each model and I’m having fun.