Learn to better use the drawing tablet for sculpting.

The bust got a plinth and some final detailing during the week.

The temptation to overdo details when sculpting digitally is a big one. The tentacles on the plinth and the jacket on her still feel very empty to me, but just looking at the bust, I know the whole thing is, in fact, in a much more balanced place than it would be if I put textures and details and knicknacks on every flat surface.

Supports could have been better for the print, but once I get a successful print I tend to want to leave those supports as is. I did focus a bunch on the printability of the model, and I was surprised at how little scarring and smaller details needed to be supported on the model. Plinth was hollowed out, and standing pretty straight, so a lot of the support scars are both on the backside of the model - where they can be utilized as “skin texture” for the tentacles - and on the inside of the plinth - where they don’t matter. The bust itself was supported almost entirely on the “cut-off” line and so they’re on the part that I’d assume anyone painting her in the future will paint black. There’s also always a little bit of softening of details on the side where the supports are, and so having her face and front be completely without supports, the print looks crispy and clean.

I’ll close the project here. Files for her will be put up for sale on my Cults3D page once I’ve finished painting her.

Overall, I’d consider this another successful DK30 project. Second time I’ve judged myself to have enough time that I decided to take part, and the second time I’ve achieved a new level in the skills I’ve wanted to practice.

Week 4 has passed, and the update is not here - before this one.

To begin with, I liked the last sketch well enough that I decided to repurpose it for a base. I thought the ratios were good enough, the sculpt was more lifelike than the previous ones. I think this was because I put more meat on the bones, so to speak, rounded and inflated parts a lot further than I had before. The base I was using was almost a malnourished kind of asexual generic android looking thing, but until the last two tests I’ve been keeping the features too close to the base mesh.

To fix that glaring issue I have with it - the uncanny valley kind of “can’t tell if it’s good or not” feeling - gave her some hair and that helped a lot.

Then I went with the inspiration one friend of mine and her “31 days of Halloween makeup” pictures gave to me, and went with a bit of a disturbing look.

And that’s where I’ve been for the past few days. I’m going to be honest, that Vampire Survivors has taken over 60 hours of my freetime in the past two weeks, and that has a lot to do with how little I’ve achieved. I mean I still feel I’ve achieved a lot of the goals I set out for myself: I have learned to use the tablet to a point where I don’t have to second guess myself when I set it up and get cracking, but the secondary goal of completing the bust all the way to “ready-for-print” has not happened and will not happen in a few days at the very least, even if I’d pour my time to it. The tertiary goal of sculpting at least something 30-days straight did not happen, not even close. I’ve maybe done two days a week when I’ve had the time.

The bust needs clothes. I’ve gotten enough muscle definition to the body that I’d be comfortable leaving it bare as well, but I feel it needs more detail. Thinking about it, I’m drawn to something like a duster coat and a pendant of a religious/pagan symbol, making her out to be more like a demon hunter/ of a fantastical setting, who has been possessed.

So we will see if I can make it to the deadline. I can always put in more work after the fact - and I do like what I have enough that I think it’s good after some refining and extra detailing has been put in. Even if I haven’t quite reached all my goals I’ll still call this a success. Learned to sculpt face anatomy a lot better, learned to use the drawing tablet, have a bust almost ready for release.

Week 3 came and went, with again a bit too modest of a showing for it, as real life got in the way. But in my defense, it’s not every weekend you get a free ticket to a festival AND a free entry day to two museums in a single day. And if that’s not enough excuses, I also started playing Vampire Survivors and it consumed all the free time since Thursday.

But it was not all spent with arts of visual, auditory and interactive nature. A grand total of five heads were created as well. Two in the first day, and three later in the week. Are they still a bit uncanny? Yes. Most of that is the lack of any body hair, but they are also a bit too similar in proportions overall. I suspect the reason being that I’m too timid in changing the proportions of the base mesh prior to increasing the detail level.

Beginning the fourth week, my plan according to the goals is to make a bust. Spend a whole week on one or possibly two head sculpts. As is usual with matters that interest me, a billion ideas have already been floated around, and I do have two candidates that have floated to the top. Following the one bust I’ve finished some time back, the ideas are very much horror themed. Getting to work today, this week might result in more updates than the prior weeks, more WIPs of the project in various stages to show the flow.

Until the next update!

Week 2 and life was still getting in the way a bit, but I still managed to get a few days in. Mouths seemed straight forward. I think getting lips to look right requires a bit higher resolution than what I’m currently using while sculpting, but the basic shapes seemed to flow relatively well. The corner of the mouth and the muscles that move the lower lip are the tricky parts for me, both seem to have a massive impact on the look of the face and whether it looks right or not.

Ears were probably the easiest part to sculpt. A bit of blob tool on a deformed cylinder and bam! Ears for days.

Third week kicks off with a target on getting a full face sculpted in one go. A lot more character needs to be sculpted in that I currently do. The attempt was to keep the left one ‘masculine’ with sharper edges and more pronounced jawline and such, while making the right one ‘feminine’.

I think I just smooth out all sharp edges and it leaves the whole face looking androgynous. That and the complete lack of facial hair of any sort makes even judging the face and how far off it is very tricky. I might have to just do a bit of eyebrows and even just a blob of hair just to get out of the “I, Robot, but somehow slightly worse” look that I currently seem to always gravitate to. Or just stop being such a wuss with the sharper features and lay off the smooth tool.

In any case, progress has been made. Not as much as I’d maybe like to, but this is still just a hobby and life comes first.

Welp real life got in the way of last week, so nothing happened for the rest of the week unfortunately. That’s a half-lie, Rocket League had their Halloween event.

But, week 2 kicked off with a more directed approach. Started the first day by sculpting some rough eyes and eyebrows. Not much variety there. I’m still planning on sculpting mostly for 32mm figures, and busts at most, and the level of detail shown on these eyes is already too much for 32mm figures on a standard 0.05mm layer height print.

For busts, I will need to get a bit more detailed, and for good 32mm minis, less detailed and more “heroic” in terms of proportions. The eyes are all also very “samey”: No age difference, or gender, or racial features. I think eyes will need to be returned to a couple of times.

Second day of the week, I made some noses. With the noses, I think I found a better references to get the underlaying muscle and cartilage structures how they’re supposed to be. Once you ‘get’ how those go in their place and interact, it’s easier to vary up the sculpts as well. I think I have a good enough handle on noses to not spend much more time on them, until it comes time to put everything together again.

Of the individual parts, lips and ears are left. I think I will start with lips, and once I get some understanding of the planes and muscles underneath, try and do some expressions - snarls, grins, that sort of stuff. I’ll try to stay in a similar level of detail for now, this middle ground of “too detailed and not enough exaggerated for 32mm, and too low detail for a bust”. I can still get a feel for when things are going right at this scale, and get some detail in, but it’s not detailed enough to bog me down on time. The noses I sculpted in a three-hour window in the afternoon, while half-watching a cooking show at the same time.

Day 3. I will cut down the number of updates a bit going forward to keep this from bloating too much.

Today was another smaller thing, just a couple of hours with a flat terrifying pancake of doom. Local stores didn’t have any tablet or book holders at all, so I could not get the tablet in a much more comfortable angle. I did however rest it on the wrist padding I use with my keyboard, and that gave it a small angle. This was already loads better from it being flat on the table, no uncomfortable feeling of strain after two hours of doodling.

Postal services also delivered a pack of those hand protective gloves that have two fingers in a sleeve so your hand doesn’t rest directly on the tablet. And as useless as that thing may seem, I think the feeling alone is worth the price of entry. Five bucks is not a bad price to pay for four gloves that makes you feel like an artist. It does also make your hand glide effortlessly over the tablet. The difference is drastic, like I’m in genuine shock at how big of a difference a tiny two finger glove makes to the whole experience.

So while today might have been more about getting comfortable and faking it 'til I make it, I think I took some good steps forward.

Expect next update around Sunday!

Day two. Getting familiar with the controls. Bit of a busy day outside of the challenge, so only had an hour to doodle. But the goal I set for myself for the first week was to get more familiar with the tablet controls, so doodling on the premade head is a great way to do just that.

So that same base mesh, but a bit of an undead decay on the face. The teeth I’m not happy with, but I already I feel the tablet is starting to feel more like the mouse, an extension to my hand instead of something I constantly have to combat against.

One issue I do see looming ahead is longer sessions. I don’t have any sort of holder for the tablet, so I’m drawing with the tablet flat in front of my keyboard. After an hour I already feel the tension in my wrist. Possible solution would be a cheap smart tablet holder from the supermarkets around me. I think I need to go shopping for ergonomics sake.

So here we are, first day! I’ve only been going an hour, tried to struggle through setting up the keyboard and tablet and how to figure out the controls. I searched for a video about setting up blender, found this one.

Well it turns out this settings is the only thing I had been missing from the controls. 3-button mouse emulation. This enables you to use alt, ctrl and shift to pan, rotate and zoom in sculpt mode. Click that on and I already feel like I can do so much more, so much faster.

I grabbed the basic face planes sculpt from Flipped Normals, decimated it to hell and back - to the point where it’s only 90kb as an stl (the model from their sample project is 60Mb, that is way too much to begin with), and I’ll continue to fidget with the face and get more comfortable with this 3-button mouse controlling. I think that’ll be enough for day 1.