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Salkah Model 1.0 and Failed Beginner Projects // Oct 18th ~ Oct 22nd, 2, 022
I became interested in 3D modeling when I went down that lovely spiral of conjuring up such fanciful projects. The only way I can know whether it’s possible for me to follow through to fruition is attempting to go through all facets of it. This relates to an idea I had to make a chatbot of Salkah, and to separate it from a glut of lazy unsociable chatterbots, I want a 3D model of her to rig for certain movements in the chatbot and such. Dumb fidgeting when idle for long enough, wave and smile, able to follow basic commands (like turn around, dance for me, do a peace sign, etc). After going through trying to model her, I realized that I also want to make models of fish, sea animals, things such as that, just to create animations with her. I’ve been aware of Blender for years but have always shied away from it because of its intimidating learning curve, and also because I was annoyed with seeing peoples’ rudimentary donut renders all over the place. I guess it felt like they now saw themselves as some artistic visionary, when really there was not an aesthete bone in their body. Another major barrier was also my hardware, and still is to some extent. I can run Blender fairly well now, but still not well enough to make massive models, and I’m not sure how my computer would handle rendering.
Firstly, I started off with attempting Blender Guru’s beginner donut tutorial. Evidently I did not get very far. Just with the frosting I struggled with the solidify modifier and the vertices hiding beneath the mesh, leaving me unable to pull them out again. The donut kept clipping through the mesh, and I could not figure out how to drag some portions of the frosting down without them disappearing or creating massive holes, so I could only drag them up a small amount. It looks very boring. Then when it got to the frosting dripping down the sides, my extrusions only came out as glitchy blocks and I had little idea what I was doing wrong. This original donut has only one spiky drip of frosting because that was the only place where it seemed to work.
I felt that I had done something wrong and that I had already learned a lot, so I scrapped this donut and tried to make a new one with my newly perceived skills. For this one, I figured that I should give up on a donut with runny frosting, and just vary the “waves” of the frosting. This still did not turn out that well, indicated by the hole ripping through it and the boring, blocky variation. I felt slightly more comfortable with the interface though. I got as far as pinching in the middle of the donut before I got frustrated with it and decided to work on another project, because I don’t feel particularly interested in pastry-making.
I was done with creating donuts, I wanted to create an actual character. I felt rather impatient. I found this video, and while I don’t really like this kind of style of character, it seemed approachable enough and so I decided to try it out. I quickly grew inpatient with it, especially since it wasn’t really working out for me. Her voice kind of aggravated me too. I was able to finish the body, albeit it looked very clunky and unattractive. I could not figure out how to close the bottom of the feet without them ending in sharp stakes. I was trying to keep it low-poly, which didn’t really go in my favor. There's unseemly seams at the nape of the neck, arms, and shoulders. When I tried to duplicate a portion of the body for the T-shirt, it looked like artificial pecs implanted underneath the frog’s abominable stomach. I gave up on it at this point, but I did come to understand how easy it is to make incomprehensible horrors in this software. Just grab a couple misaligned vertices and pull them up.
My previous attempts were massive failures, so I kept looking for videos on the basics of character modeling, and found this playlist. I wanted to use it as a template to create my first model of Salkah. I had already drawn out a reference to use on monday, front and side view, so I was able to set this up with relative ease. I followed along up to the fourth video, where I decided to go and bumble around on my own, and the task of creating her consumed me for most of the week. A good portion of Wednesday, all of Thursday and Friday, and a good portion of today. I honestly felt a bit deranged, as I completely dropped all of the other things I was trying to maintain. I stopped reading, learning German (via Anki and Duolingo, so nothing serious), working out, writing with my non-dominant hand, and literally everything else! I felt completely consumed in it and excited to make a comprehensive model of my own! It feels right to be so engrossed in something, but also wrong to throw everything else away, but it seems I only operate on those two extremes. It’s difficult for me to allocate an equal portion of time for everything I feel passionate about, and I don’t think I have to. Fucking around in Blender really brought me such unadulterated joy, the joy of creating and learning, a desire to constantly push on and improve. . . It feels great, really.
This was the state of my model on October 20th. For the feet I originally drew them out to the side, as is on the reference, but scrapped it and moved it to the back as I felt it looked awkward and weird. Salkah really just has alien feet and I’m not sure how to best go about them yet. Later on I moved it back to the side again.
For her hands, I used this tutorial and it was pretty straightforward. The more finicky part was adding the webbing to her hands. I joined the Blender Discord server, despite knowing that it would likely be completely useless. They made me verify my fucking phone number and they didn’t even answer my question of how I could go about it. Large Discord servers are never worth anything, it’s impossible to form a connection with anyone in them. I left and ventured off to do it on my own. It was a smoothed cube that I kept scaling down and messing with until it appeared to be squarely between the fingers, and shaped the vertices into a curved shape. Then I joined the hand and webbed part together. It sounds simple, but it took me a while to figure it out, and it wasn't a particularly elegant solution, anyway. When I colored the faces to the darker cyan, it didn’t apply well because I suspect I might’ve duplicated the vertices or something, somewhere. . . It’s a bit disappointing but you can see what I was trying to accomplish there. I’m curious as to whether they would rig properly but as I’m scrapping this I’m not going to try it out. I could not figure out how to properly attach them to her wrists, either.
Her hair took me several hours to wrap my head around, and I’m still not satisfied with it. I wasn’t sure how to lay the hair on the back of the head, so it ends in a very awkward upwards loop. I didn’t know how to make her hair as voluminous as it actually was, either, so I just settled for hair cropped close to her head. I used bezier curves and a circle curve to form the hair. You can also use a path curve in lieu of the circle curve. I used this tutorial to guide me. It took me a while to learn how to manipulate the curves in my favor and place them properly on the head. Twirling hair is super fun and useful, and I used twirls to frame her face and provide some variation in her hair.
I was going to rely on sculpting to better shape the body and face, but I couldn’t figure it out in this instance. Trying to remesh the model resulted in it essentially collapsing in on itself. Any sculpting I did had little effect, and at this point I was feeling a bit weary of sailing a sinking ship. I knew from the beginning that I shouldn’t jump into it without having a decent grasp on what I’m doing, but the opportunity of making her right away was too irresistible. This way, it also serves as a baseline for future models of her and future progress I make. I gave up on it pretty quickly, but atleast I learned that my graphics tablet works natively in Linux.
Since I had given up on sculpting her into perfection, I thought I should probably get into texture painting before rigging her. . . I don’t plan on rigging her up anymore, there’s no point, she doesn’t have a face and I don’t know how to give her one. Her topology was always a mess and I spent a long time just trying to realign the faces and digging out vertices that had gone into the mesh. It didn’t really result in much, and when I tried to UV map any part of her model, it was an unreadable mess that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I would love to add all her freckles and other textures, but it seems that its not viable to do this as the time.
Here is her model, if you would like to download it and play with it for yourself. I learned a lot from modeling her. I shouldn’t have gone in so blindly, but I’m still happy that I did, because it allowed me to discover a lot of things for myself, without anyone’s hand to hold. For now I think I will follow along with some tutorials and gain a stable footing before venturing into smaller projects. I want to finish the donut tutorial and Daniel Kreuter’s character modeling tutorial, then figure it out from there. I hope to make another model of her by March, with working teeth, eyes, full rigging, texture paint, a nicer mesh, all of it! I’m really excited to see if I’m capable of it and how it will turn out if I stick with this.
Anyone who can love me is the purest kind of angel.