Some Sorta Orc: Sculpt Practice

Got a bit carried away with a beginner Blender sculpting tutorial. Organic sculpting is the reason I decided to explore Blender months ago. For me, the ability to sculpt digitally is the most astounding capacity of digital art. To do something like the above by analogue means, I’d need a lot of space, materials, oodles of time, and even then I couldn’t likely have pulled of the cavity off the mouth with the teeth.

With the computer software, you can select an area to make it — here the top of the head — so you can see what you are doing. You can mask areas so that they aren’t affected by what you are doing.

There are more than a dozen sculpting tools, and you can do things that would be difficult or impossible with stone. Below, I used the “grab” tool to pull up the lip to make a bit of a snarl. OK, there was a lot more to it than that, but I used that tool extensively.

Here’s the video tutorial I worked with:

It’s a good tutorial. Ryan King has a knack for coming up with a relatively clear and simple approach for using Blender. I think he got those inverted iris eyes from old master sculptures. Let me just look that up.

Ah ha! It’s really just for the pupils, and you have a crease for the irises. That explains why it looked a little bug-eyed when I did it.

I experimented with my own techniques for doing wrinkles, bags under the eyes, eye brow hair, and the back teeth. I don’t mean nobody else uses those methods, but just that they were different than the tutorial.

Here’s the front and side:

I’ve never really gone in for fantasy. Might be one of my shortcomings, or something wonderful I have to look forward to. I’ve always been more of a sci-fi guy. Point is, the subject matter wasn’t my choice. I did this just for practice. I made my orc an older fellow, probably because I could relate to him better, and it humanized him a bit.

I’m finding that my drawing skills are helping me a lot. A lot of organic sculpting is just drawing from every angle. For example, you pretty much just draw on the wrinkles.

This is very doable if you want to attempt digital sculpture. Blender, of course, is FREE. It doesn’t do the sculpting for you at all. It just make it all realizable with some effort.

What’s it for? Apparently you can do 3D printing. For me, for now, it’s just a way to create a very realistic image, in terms of modeling. It’s also its own reward. And cool!

~ Ends