Goals

After years in motion/graphic design, I was getting burnt out in 3D. Knowing I needed a fun project for myself, I jumped into building a character. I don’t have a lot of experience as a character artist, so I made my primary goal as comprehensive as possible: I wanted to go through the entire process of creating an animation-ready character from scratch – аrom sculpting to retopo to materials to rigging to rendering. All the steps along the way were going to be a learning process. I wanted to create a character that was super expressive and could fit into different roles with different clothing or hair. This exploratory learning process was just exactly what I needed. The ability to try out different things without fear of a deadline let me be super creative.

Additionally, I’m learning character animation because there are very few easily accessible characters to animate with in Blender. As a secondary goal, I wanted to release Iris as a downloadable character to try to fill that void a little bit.

Features of Fully Rigged Characters

Developing a character for animation is a bit different from just creating a cool character sculpt in ZBrush because the character needs not only to look good from every angle but also in many different poses and expressions. Building a still sculpt allows you a little more freedom in terms of shape language. You can ‘cheat’ because you only need the model to look good in a specific pose, sometimes only from a certain camera angle.

A lot more time is put into polishing the design making sure that the mouth and facial features look good from every possible angle and work when the characters face deforms. I’ve got a folder of almost 100 different renders of Iris, at different stages of sculpting and refining.

Additionally, there’s some technical hurdle: retopology and actually rigging the character. The model has to be constructed, reconstructed, and weight painted in a way that lets it deform well. This is less a difficult process and more of a puzzle-solving one. Referencing good topology and patience will get you to the finish.

Developing the sculpt for a project like this is only the starting point. The sculpt geometry is only used to design the character. From that design sculpt, you need to construct a functional version of the character via retopo and hand modeling. Only then can you start building materials and textures.

Crafting Iris

The process of building Iris has been a special one, and this project has kind of become a symbol of where I am as an artist. Over the past 6 months, I re-designed, re-built, and re-rigged Iris 6 times in total and worked on her in between other work I was throwing myself into. And each time I came back to her, I stuck to the basics – anatomy and appeal, trying to learn and apply as much as possible.