Sculpting my Half-dead D&D Character

My D&D character died. Well, at least half of them did. But that still means they need new art for their token. So in this video, I'm going to show you the entire process of creating a concept from scratch and turning it into a finished 3D render. But before that, let me give a little bit of backstory for my character, Renn. I was inspired to make Renn after I saw this image of Vivi by an artist named Apo on Displate. I love the character, and after seeing this beautiful piece of him, I wanted t

o play a D&D character that was like him, but I had to make him unique somehow. It's interesting to me how you never get to see what Vivi actually looks like. His face is just sort of a black void with two glowing eyes. This gave me the strangest idea. What if those two glowing dots were Vivi? Creatures that controlled him like some kind of mech made of clothes. Those eyes kind of remind me of the fairies from Zelda, so that's what I settled on. Yep, I basically played as two fairies in a trench

coat. Lenn and Raana were like brother and sister. Nothing could break their bond. Nothing except death, which unfortunately came for Raana, leaving Lenn all alone. So now that the little guy is literally half the character he used to be, we're going to have to give him a new design. So let's get to it. So to start off this process, I go to Pinterest to gather some reference. I gather enough material to get a decent image in my head for what I want to go for. I'll go around and I'll pick images

that have certain aspects I like, even if it's just like an art style or just like a certain piece of clothing. If it makes sense to put on the character or try it out, I will take it and put it in my little board here. The little box, by the way, is a program called Pure Ref, and it quickly allows you to create a mood board by just clicking and dragging images into it. And it's actually pay what you want, so I recommend picking it up. So the first step in actually creating the concept would us

ually be to draw it. But even though I'm decent at making 3D models, I'm terrible at drawing. So this time I'm experimenting with a different approach. I'm going to use Stable Diffusion to make an image to base the model off of. I know this AI stuff is very controversial, and for very valid reasons, but I just wanted to mess around with this as an experiment to see if this thing could be used in a workflow to generate traditional art. With all that said, if this isn't your cup of tea and you jus

t want to skip over the AI segment of this video, you can either skip to the timestamp on screen right now, or just skip to the next chapter. But with all that out of the way, here's the process. So I start typing in a prompt and having Stable Diffusion generate some images. Here I'm using the model SDXL Turbo, which is a newer model that just allows you to make lower quality images, but pretty much instantaneously as you type. This was actually the main reason I chose to use this workflow. The

standard models work better for detail, but on my setup, this is just a lot easier to work in, especially for just a quick and dirty concept like I wanted. After I generated all these images, it's time to sort through all of them. So what I'm doing here is I'm specifically looking for pieces that I like. For example, in this character concept I used the best hood, the best robes, and I also took some sleeves that I like the look of. I take all these images and kit bash them together using my ima

ge editing software Krita. You can use Photoshop for this, but I just like Krita because it's free and it gets the job done. So I just do some light editing to the photos and as I'm mashing these disparate pieces together. It doesn't have to be perfect as we're going to do another pass after this. As you can see, I already took the base image and I'm now applying a hood and now here I'm just applying some sleeves making them blend into the image well enough at least. The first hood looked good,

but I really wanted to try this other option because it just looked a bit less basic and generic and I just really like how it added like a flowing sort of aspect to the character. So after some minor touch-ups, I took that image and put it back into stable diffusion as something to generate off of. So now it's just essentially making minor tweaks to this specific image. I run it through a few times until I find something that looks good and once I do, I take that image back into Krita to do som

e final finishing touches and that's one finished concept. Here I also tried to really push the limits of how specific I can get with stable diffusion by generating an angle where the character is facing away from the camera, but it just kept giving me nonsense. So just like everything else, AI has some benefits but also some downsides, especially for this specific use case. I quickly brushed up with a couple tutorials on the cloth brush, specifically these two from PixelicaCG as well as the Don

ut Man himself, Blender Guru. So here we're actually starting the sculpting process. The first step is to set up a base mesh, so after setting up the reference image in the background, I decide to start with the eye. So there are a few pieces to this character. There are three cloaks that are sort of stacked on top of each other in layers, and there's also the scarf and the hood itself. So here I'm laying out like the most basic forms of all of these shapes before I start sculpting. For those of

you who are curious about how Ranna left the picture, here's the story. On one of their adventures, they were surrounded by a swarm of zombie plague rats. Lenn was bitten, and we spent a huge portion of the campaign trying to find a cure. Eventually, one of the party members made a deal with an evil entity in exchange for a wish But when he used it to cure Lenn, a worse version of the disease took hold of Raana instead. Right before she was about to turn into a monster, she tore herself away fr

om her brother and burned herself into cinders using her magic. Pretty dark, huh? Here I'm using the dynamic cloth brush to make some clothing folds very simply on this robe. Next I decide to move on to the scarf. I use the cloth brush to give me a start and sort of refine and exaggerate the folds until they look pretty well detailed. So here I'm indenting like the main fold that I can see here on the reference. It's just a lot of smoothing and just making sure everything looks as nice as it can

. A little bit of detail about the scarf is when Lenn and Raana were still together. and their body was still made of like red and blue cloth. Raana controlled all the red cloth, while Lenn controlled all of the blue. As you can see from the concept, the scarf I'm making is going to be red in the final model. That's because this is the last scrap of cloth Raana left behind before she passed. Lenn keeps it with him as a way to honor her memory. *chuckle* Depressed yet? So here's where I start tr

ying the cloth simulation, and I realize that I'm gonna have to pose the character before this is gonna work. Because the cloth simulation is working pretty much fine. The real issue is that it's calculating against this just generic pose. So I focus on getting the pose right before I finish modeling the character. In order to get a clear idea of what I should be going for, I use a program called DesignDoll to help me with the process. It's basically just like a little action figure that you can

pose in 3D space with very simple controls. Don't mind the fact that it looks like an Eldritch Abomination. That's just, you know, sometimes you have to get your hands dirty when making art like this. But I use this to rough out the pose. and give me something to start off of. I wanted to go for something that felt sort of pensive and reluctant, but still carrying forward. I ended up changing a few things with the pose later on. And when I get there, I'll explain what those changes were and why

I made them. So this is the first time I've had to pose something before finishing the modeling process. That means that unless I want to redo some of this work and put this guy back in a pose or a T pose, I can't really rig him effectively. So that's a little bit of a downside with this workflow. So using the pose brush in the sculpt mode, I took the sleeves and I just started bending them into place until I got something I was pretty happy with. I used a cloth simulation to simulate how they

would just fall naturally. This character is very childlike in nature, so I wanted to emphasize that by just having these sleeves that were way too long that sort of added to his naive appearance. So I changed some details of the pose. Namely, I made him grasp at a scarf, which is the last thing that remains from Raana, his sister. I figured it would give it a little bit of a sentimental touch. And I think it adds to the piece a lot for those who know the backstory of the character. There's just

a lot of noodling around here just to get the look and shape right. Then here I decide I want some dynamicism in the pose. So I go for a sort of billowing wind effect with all the layers of cloth. I'm really happy with this decision and I think it really pays off in the end. So here the cloth simulation was just really like just grinding to a halt because of how complex all the geometries were. So what I did was I duplicated my mesh that I wanted to collide with and I used the decimate modifier

to simplify the mesh while keeping most of the shape intact so the computer could have an easier time of processing everything. But even so, there were still a lot of issues with the cloth in general. I looked up some fixes for this and they just said to increase the quality steps but when I increased the collision quality steps it actually just made the problem worse. And oddly enough, turning the quality of the collisions down actually fixed the problem for the most part. At least for me to g

et a decent enough initial look. So here we're finally moving on to the hood itself, just adding a little bit of detail to this horribly simple base mesh. Just enough so I can use the multi-res modifier and really just hone in on getting the shapes looking right. So I ended up tilting the entire hood to the right, as I just sort of liked the way that the model was looking from that angle. So here is where I made the choice to have the final camera angle go a little bit off center. And I think my

favorite instance of using the cloth brush is around is right around here when I sculpt the details of the hood. All I do is like just gently collapse in the hood a little bit and it just man, it looks so natural with such little effort. So after we masked out the entire hood, because I like the general shape of it, I go around and I sort of use the cloth brush to drag up and crease the cape, just sort of wrinkling it up at the neck area to get that sort of layered and ruffled appearance. I was

originally going to use cloth simulation on this, but the cloth brush for this particular case worked out so well that I just stuck with it and used it for the entire thing. I'm making the cloth a bit more stylized and wavy in that sine wave pattern, just getting that wavy look specifically toward the camera really adds a lot to this I think. And here we go. The sleeve on the left looks great, like fantastic, but the sleeve on the right just wasn't working out for me. It just looked odd somehow

, so I spend probably about an hour or more just on the sleeve and trying to get to look correct. And the end result is... passable, I suppose, but I just couldn't work on it anymore. It was too much. Yeah, this is where the finicky nature of the cloth brush really came into effect. It was either doing nothing at all or just making the sleeve implode in on itself. It was a hassle, but I eventually got something acceptable out of it. So here I'm going through and applying textures to all the diff

erent parts and pieces. I decided to use textures from Polygon because they just had the perfect amount of textures I needed for this piece and their add-on made it really simple to just apply them in one click. So in my mind, Len's outfit was always just cobbled together from a bunch of disparate materials and pieces. So to emphasize that in the design, I decided to give each piece a different material. For example, the innermost is just a very simple cotton. Above that, the sleeves and the coa

t above that are made of a sort of weaved material, like a sewn material almost. And then the cloak above that, just below the hood, is more of a fancier, warmer material. I'm not sure what it is, but it looks like something you'd buy at Macy's. I don't know. And just to keep that smooth look, I used this simple cotton texture on the hood and the cape. I don't usually texture my characters, I usually just leave them in a solid colored state, almost like a clay. But for this one, since he was mad

e of cloth and I just need to get a little bit of texturing under my belt, I decided to give it the extra detail it deserves. It was looking pretty good, but I remembered I found a tip online from Southern Shotty who gave some tips for creating realistic looking cloth fabrics. The tip he gave in this video was specifically to use a little bit of sheen on fabrics even if they're not made of velvet, which is what it's typically used for. It's not perfectly realistic, but by adding the sheen it jus

t adds a little bit of visual interest and a softer light effect to the cloth, which I really wanted to go for. So after getting the material sorted out, I tried to sculpt the hood in such a way that it gave a sort of expression to the character, but it was tough to figure out. I actually ended up looking for reference in the form of Pleakly from Lilo and Stitch. I see it was the only Cyclops character I could think of that would make a sad expression. And yeah, I tried my best to get it to work

, but it was pretty tough. I'm not sure if it reads very clearly in the final piece. And now as for the lighting, I looked up a very simple three-point lighting setup, which is essentially a key light, which is your main light, fill light to lessen the contrast of the shadows, and then a rim light, which outlines the character and sort of makes them pop. I ended up altering the setup a little bit with a second fill light, just to sort of really get those shadows not as dark. I really needed to m

ake sure that the innermost parts were lit enough so you can distinguish the forms in there and give it a little bit more clarity. I also added a little spotlight to the grasping gesture to bring attention to it and tinted it red, just to imply that there's still a connection to Raana there, either if she's there with him in spirit or if he's just remembering her as he clutches it. That's sort of ambiguous. So for the colors of the different materials, I knew I wanted the outermost layer to be t

he lightest. So I just worked down from there and just decided that each layer going more inward would be a little bit darker, just to get a sort of gradient going to add a little visual interest. And here is a last minute detail. I decided to add a belt to just imply that he has some adventuring gear on him. Since the character is just a bundle of cloth and a lot of his body is covered, I could just sort of add a belt and your mind will fill in the details of where the actual pouches and contai

ners could be. So luckily that actually ended up saving me some time. And after I gave it a quick render, that is a finished 3D D&D character. Very nice. So I'd like to go over what went well in this project and what really kind of didn't. First thing is I really like how the cloth folds turned out. They really have this sort of stylized wavy texture to them that I'm pretty happy with. In terms of the design itself and how it matches up to what I imagine when I play him, I'm really happy with ho

w close it was to my original vision of the character. The first and the biggest thing is the silhouette. If we look at it here, it just sort of all blends together into like a clump. That might just be the nature of the character, because even if I had his arms outstretched to the sides, it would still be tough for him to really break the silhouette of all the layers that are on him. So I think that's just a side effect of how the character is designed. I'm not really sure how I would go about

fixing that, because the character is just so layered. I mean, he's literally made of clothes. If you guys have any suggestions of how I could have made the silhouette a little better for this character, I'd love to hear them in the comments, because I'm honestly at a loss. I'm just happy it looks as good as it does. The other thing that sort of doesn't sit right with me all the way is the expression I think doesn't read very well. Does it read as sad? Does it look like he's looking at the scarf

that he's holding, or does that just sort of get lost? Let me know what you guys think. And that about does it. Thank you so much for watching this breakdown of how I made this little character. I really appreciate you watching all the way to the end. If you guys could share your thoughts on what you thought about the process, or the end result, or anything in between, just go ahead and let me know. Comments mean the world to me. Thanks again, and I hope you have a good one.