Original subtitles

Now is the time to create these wisps here, so I will press ctrl-tab to exit the pose mode,

go to the layout view and we can go back for a little while and inspect those from a reference.

So you can see it's a really very easy model here with just some light effects.

So I will not be using the mesh modeling techniques that you already saw,

but we'll do a little bit of a sculpting for this, very simple one.

So this is not a chapter to really introduce you to sculpting,

but maybe if you haven't touched it yet, it will give you a glimpse of what the sculpting actually is

and how you can use it sometimes to easily create something small to enhance your designs.

So first of all, I will press shift-a and add an object that we will sculpt from.

And for that I will use a round cube that can be found within the extra objects add-on,

so make sure you have that one active.

And now let's create a round cube.

And now depending on your Blender version, this might already create a quad sphere for you

if you use earlier 2.8 versions of Blender.

Since I think 2.82 or 2.83, this creates really a round cube, beveled round cube like this.

But there are some presets here that you can use to create a quad sphere, so let's choose that one.

And now I really want dense mesh for the sculpting,

because the only thing that the sculpting does is that it uses some kind of brushes

that manipulate your mesh in a certain way.

And to really be able to organically manipulate the mesh,

you will need a much higher density of vertices and faces.

So let's set this to 20.

Let's confirm.

And we'll make this a little bit smaller, so something like this, like you saw in the reference.

And I will right-click and choose smooth shading for this object here.

And now let's go to the sculpting workspace here.

And we can press slash on the numpad to isolate this in the local view.

Let me zoom out a little bit.

And you can see the viewport for sculpting looks a little bit different.

There are no grid lines, so you can focus on your model.

But this is the same viewport you know.

It's just set up in a little bit different way.

And right here on the left, you can see all those sculpting brushes that you can use.

And I tend to expand this a little bit, so I have those brushes in rows.

This is a little bit easier for me to navigate.

And you can try to play around with some of these brushes here.

I really like the scrape brush, for example, where you can flatten some of the surfaces

and basically scrape some material away.

Let me go back.

And if we enable wireframe view, you can still see this is a mesh.

And with these brushes, you are just modifying it directly.

So sculpting is really destructive operation when it comes to mesh.

It's not like using a modifier or something.

And it's good to have like a really dense mesh.

You can make a density higher.

There are some options here to remesh or use dynamic topology.

But again, the sculpting is really not the scope here.

So I want to just show you how you can use one simple brush on already dense mesh

to extrude some of these tentacles or whatever they are called on those wisps.

And there's a great brush for that, the snake hook right here.

So let me enable that.

And I will disable the wireframe overlay right here.

And I will also disable the symmetry option here so the sculpting is not mirrored.

And now we can try the snake hook right here.

You can see how the cursor snaps on the surface.

And we can try to drag out some of these tentacles like this.

So this is how the sculpting works basically.

And right now, you saw right here when I went back in history with Ctrl-Z,

the mirroring got turned on.

Sometimes going back with Ctrl-Z can be a little bit annoying.

So remember to turn this off once again.

And same as before, you can use the F to make the brush larger.

So let's try to extrude some of these tentacles.

Something like this.

And maybe one other here.

I will make this larger or zoom out.

So this is all I will do right here.

Just trying to come up with some organic shapes.

I went too far a little bit here, so I will go back and try to fix this.

Okay, I think this can work.

So this is the sculpt for the wisp.

And if we enable wireframe overlay, you can see how some of these faces got stretched a little bit.

So right now, I want to make this a little bit more even.

And there is a remesh tool right here.

So let's just set the voxel size to something really small like 0.05.

And let's click Remesh.

And you can see immediately how this model got remeshed.

And it has much more consistent face size.

At the same time, if we now turn off the wireframe overlay, you can see how some of the parts got distorted.

And the object is not shaded smooth anymore, so I will hold CTRL, tap, switch to the object mode,

shade is smooth, and go back to the sculpt mode.

And now we can use the smooth brush.

It's this one right here.

And you can use it to smooth some of these parts a little bit.

And we can reduce the strength on the brush so it's not destroying our sculpt.

And it depends on your sculpt.

You can use this here and there mostly to eliminate some really strong mesh issues like we had up here.

And I think this will be fine.

And now we can go back to the layout view.

So our sculpt is finished.

And now I will press G, then Y to move this in the front and to the top.

And we could use this like this, but I feel like the mesh is unnecessarily dense right now.

So we can go to the modifiers tab and add a modifier called decimate.

I'll do if we enable the wireframe overlay once again.

If you move this towards the zero, you will see how your mesh gets simplified.

It creates triangles, but I don't worry about that right now.

And we can reduce this all the way to something like 0.08.

And you can see how these faces are a little bit larger and some of these things are more evenly spaced out.

So let me disable the wireframe overlay.

And now we can apply the decimate modifier.

Go into the edit mode, select all with A, press U and smart UV project.

Now I've done this because I want to paint those eyes on those wisps.

So if we check the texture paint, we have still the image there and you can see they have these dots for eyes.

And if we go to the UV editing tab, you will see the generated UV.

These are quite a mess.

I wouldn't use this for anything serious.

But here, when we just need to place two little dots on something, it's good enough for me.

So I will leave it like this.

So we can go back to the texture paint and let's create a new material for the wisp.

And back to the drawing option and create a texture for that, for a base color.

This one should be enough as a 1K texture, but let's do 2K texture just to be safe.

Let's confirm.

Now I will load up the texture here as well and let's save this.

And let's save it on disk.

So I will save this quickly.

Okay, so it's saved and you can see it here in the shader editor that we have the texture connected.

And now let's change the color to white.

And you should still have the paint bucket active.

If not, switch to that and change color to white and just click somewhere.

So we paint the wisp white.

Now rotate so you can see it from the front.

Maybe we can use the front view by pressing 1 on the numpad.

And now I will switch to the brush.

Pick a black color.

Reduce the size of the brush with F to something like this.

And paint two black dots here to represent the eyes.

Okay, maybe they are too large.

Let me go back.

Reduce it and make them a little bit more apart.

Okay, I feel like this is better.

Good enough for me, so I will hover here over the image editor, press Alt S to save this.

And go back to the layout view.

And now I just want them to layout around the scene.

Let's just bring up a new window down in the bottom here.

And let's switch this to image editor.

Let's load up that render reference so we can see the position of these wisps.

So one of them is kind of going towards our character, towards that extended arm.

So we can press R, Z, 180 degrees.

And place it there and make it smaller, I feel like.

So something like this, like it's going towards him.

Maybe not so much, so a little bit of that eye is visible there.

And now I will go to the top view by pressing 7 and Alt D, the wisp.

And place it here in the front, rotate.

So this one will be rotated more towards the camera.

We don't have the camera set up yet, but I just want to set up the scene a little bit.

So something like this.

And one here behind the character going towards him, so...

Something like that.

Okay, that will be fine.

And we'll need, of course, to place the camera later and rotate the character.

So to save the position of this wisp in relation to the character,

we can parent them to the armature as well, but not with automatic weights,

just as a child object so they move when we actually move or rotate the armature itself.

So let's select them all one by one by holding Shift,

then the armature as the last object, press Ctrl P and just set parent to object.

So right now if we decide we need to rotate this, we have the whole set up

and the wisp position towards the character are the same.

So again, don't forget to save, don't forget to save your texture.

And we can move on, finish some materials and start working on lighting.