Category: Blender Models

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Bassist Extraordinaire

I can’t believe I’ve been listening to music for most of my life but only now heard of Leland Sklar, one of the most recorded bass guitarists of all time.  I stumbled across his Youtube channel a couple of weeks ago and ended up doing a bit more than just listening to his classic bass playing and stories…

He also has thousands of pictures of people flipping him off, which is what inspired this model/scene/photo…

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Ed Grimley’s Bones for Animation

Once I finished retopologizing and creating new textures (colours) for the sculpted model, I used Blender’s built in Rigify system to add an armature to the new, better organized model.  This shows all of the “bones” that can be used to animate Ed, although there are probably a half-dozen main ones…

To make things a bit simpler, it’s helpful to hide the bones that aren’t used (although that still leave a lot!).  I’m sure I’ll be trying to sort out animation for a while (forever?) but these are the bones that I mostly used in the walk animations made so far.  I haven’t done anything with the face or hands yet so those are among those bones hidden (and my model isn’t quite right yet for that level of detail)…

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Ed Grimley Model

I thought it might be fun to make a model of Ed Grimley, a character played by Martin Short of SCTV and Saturday Night Live fame…

Just a start, but here’s a couple of in-progress pics…

After downloading a reference image, I started by creating a rough human shape to sculpt on.

I usually try to start with the head – if this goes sideways, there’s no point in going on.  I’m just trying to get the shape more-or-less right.  Not quite there yet…

By the way, I am not an expert sculptor although I have done a few simple models now to various stages of completion (although probably none of them are anywhere near complete)!

I’m still messing with the shape but have added a bit more detail – the part in the hair, the start of some eyelids, teeth (which will get replaced at some point).  I also start to mess around with the hands a bit (fingers are pretty tricky)…

Usually I take a few minutes towards the end of the session and put a bit of colour on the model (very rough still) just to get a look at how things are going (maybe it’s putting the cart a bit ahead of the horse but it helps to keep me moving forwards!)

This model probably won’t get really detailed but will stay more cartoon-like.  However, in order to animate it properly it will have to be “retopologized” to reduce the number of vertices that make up the model.  This one has the better part of a million vertices – but it should have only about 5 or 10% of that amount and much better organization.  There’s probably a couple of days more work on this one to get it to a very basic usable state.