I'm a British Ski Instructor who's fallen in love with exploring. Chasing the snow and discovering the world is my current dream and I live by this quote:
There are no short cuts to any place worth going. 目指すべき所に、近道は存在しない。- anon
EDIT: Due to the pandemic and injuries grounding me for a while I have decided to write about my journey through my other passion: 3D models and animation. Hope on over to my sister site www.brawni3D.com to see what's up!
Merry belated Christmas from the team (me) at Brawni 3D!
(I know it’s three months late but I’ve been pretty busy sculpting Gabby 3.0!)
Gabby 3.0!
Stay tuned for more updates on “Little Dog” in the coming months!!
All works shown here were sculpted in ZBrush and modelled in Blender by Sarah Brawn. The design and sculpt of Gabby was inspired by real life photographs of Papillons.
Images of work owned and copyrighted by Brawni3D and you must request permission prior to use.
Contribute to Gabby’s acting career by buying her a biscuit!
I wanted to make this film close to home for me, and I grew up surrounded by English countryside. I took reference from typical Georgian architecture, from country living magazines and mashed a few house concepts together.
Gabby’s house mocked up in Photoshop from bits of reference photos
I wanted Gabby to live in this typical British country house surrounded by gardens, and land that her family could run a dog agility and training business on. I didn’t want it to be a whole farm, but farm or country house-like enough to get the gist across that they were an upper to middle-class family with a fair amount of land.
I have never modelled a building before… apart from a horrible gingerbread house which was the first thing I ever modelled with primitives in Blender.
It took about a month of work, and I realised that the Archimesh Add-on in Blender is extremely quick at adding simple windows and doors. The textures were free ones from Textures.com and to be honest I am considering texturing the house later on myself in Substance Painter but for now I feel that I have a good enough model to start with.
Blockout of Gabby’s house and garden
I blocked out the initial concept in Blender with primitives first. It was a starting point.
I really liked the shutters on the original house reference I picked, with the Georgian porch. There was still something wrong with the model. It also looked weirdly familiar and I realised that my family home and the others on the street I grew up on looked a lot like it.
And it was! Pretty scary how my subconscious told me that that is what a typical English house looks like… They are all different, from so many different periods of time but this is what I jumped to. So I decided to go in full swing and use the houses I found on my street in Google Streetview as reference to Gabby’s house.
3D Clay model of Gabbys house
I liked the bay windows, the chimneys, the porch. The overall size needed to change to match the human reference. I even changed the texture colours. I enjoyed making my own back of the house and added a big garage. The house interior had to fit with the shots from the rooms I had already storyboarded in the first scene.
Graswald 3D made my Blender a bit crashy at first on 2.9.2 but after I updated to Blender 3.0 a number of issues went away. Graswald 3D is an incredible tool to build grass and organic models into your scene. I used the new Ivy generator in Blender to create ivy with geometry nodes and Blender’s Sapling Addon to add and a couple of trees.
And this is my final result for now!
Final model of Gabby’s house!Back of houseGarage viewKitchen view
It is a completely empty house… but now that I know what the outside of the house looks like, I can work on building the interior rooms.
I am really proud of how far this project has come as it takes a lot of time to research and learn the programs in order to get it right. I know I’m still not there yet but every model I research, design and make brings me closer.
Stay tuned for more progress towards Gabby’s film!
This is not an affiliate post for Blender, Blender is a free and an open source software and it’s brilliant.
This is not an affiliate post for Graswald 3D, it is an amazing add-on and I highly recommend it.
All works shown here were designed, modelled, textured and rendered in Blender and Adobe Photoshop by Sarah Brawn. The design and sculpt of Gabby’s house was inspired by real life photographs of English houses.
Images of work owned and copyrighted by Brawni3D and you must request permission prior to use.
Buy Gabby a biscuit!
Help us out with rendering costs for Gabby’s future film.
Come and explore Blender 3.0s new pose library with Gabby!
Brawni 3D
Gabby’s face rig ready for action!
Thanks to the new update from Blender, 3.0 will make animating an absolute breeze. They have introduced an Asset Library and Pose Library, where you can store your models, textures and even pre-made poses of your characters so that you can access them quickly. So much better than digging through the thousands of folders and my amateur-made library I did some time ago to access my textures…
Yes, it is a nightmare, I will fix it…
Something I haven’t had much experience with at all in the last year of Blender is animating. I’ve struggled along trying to do all of the movement and fine tweaks in my first pass and then getting frustrated when I lose track of my bones. I know, a rookie error but everyone starts somewhere. This pose library will change all of that.
Blender 3.0s Pose Library
Ok so what I have figured out so far is:
You can find the Pose Library in the “N” menu (the same one that shows you the dimensions of your objects and things by pressing the “N” key) underneath the “Animation” tab.
You must be in Pose Mode to see this “Animation” tab. (click on your armature and change Object Mode to Pose Mode.)
You must have all the bones selected in Pose Mode to add your pose to the Pose Library. Once you have posed your model and you’re ready to add a pose click “Create Pose Asset” in the Pose Library menu.
A nice little snapshot of your pose will appear in the library. It’s taken based on where your camera is in the scene. Clicking on these snapshots will change your model to the pose that you have created.
You can also find the Pose Library by clicking on the “Editor Type” button to access the “Asset Browser” window. So useful to have a split window interface with your Asset Browser in view so you can find your assets and add them to the scene.
From here you can edit your poses in the Pose Library, give them names, tags, a different image reference in this window’s “N” menu.
In Edit > Preferences you can set up your Blender Asset Library destination in the File Paths menu. It looks like you can have multiple libraries here too which would be useful for different projects.
I’m sure there is a bunch more stuff you can do with it, but already it looks really easy to use.
So using my new found Pose library, I could play around with Gabby and not have to worry about having to set a key frame for every new pose I wanted to keep. Excellent!
Gabby looking cute on her bed ❤
I could make multiple poses that I wanted to string together to make a movement VERY easily. Here is an extremely basic blockout of using just 4 poses:
Blocking just became MUCH easier!
I can see how it would be a huge time saver for animators. Gabby and I had a lot of fun and we will continue to explore Blender’s animation features a little more in the coming months and get back to you with what we discover.
Waking up in the morning be like…
Great job Blender team, I think I can speak for the 3D Art community when I say we really appreciate your commitment to giving us the opportunity to create things from our imaginations that we wouldn’t be able to without serious financial support.
We will be back soon with some more modelling progress!
This is not an affiliate post for Blender, Blender is a free and an open source software and it’s brilliant.
All works shown here were designed, sculpted, rigged, animated and rendered in ZBrush, Blender and Adobe Photoshop by Sarah Brawn. The design and sculpt of Gabby was inspired by real life photographs of Papillons.
Images of work owned and copyrighted by Brawni3D and you must request permission prior to use.
Buy Gabby a biscuit!
Help us out with rendering costs for Gabby’s future film.
Here she is, covered in gorgeous shiny fluffy papillon hair:
Fluffed Gabby
But she still looks very, very… dead.
Kind of like if she had been alive once and someone had stuffed her.
So nows the time to get familiar with Blender’s rigging tools and create a backbone for my courageous puppy.
I decided to try out Rigify, which has looked promising in the past only to me ending up having to create the rig from scratch because I couldn’t work out how to create a Frankenstein rig for my winged dragon on my MSI project.
But this time I wanted to persevere!
Enjoy my rigging journey:
Gabby with the Rigify Wolf Rig
Gabby’s Facial Bones
Rigged and Test Poses!
Facial Rig Tests
I used the wolf rig. Its a cool rig, you line all the bones up carefully with your model and click “generate rig” and voila! All the IK joints and fancy controllers and deformation bones are made for you… a beautiful thing for someone who doesn’t understand rigging that much.
The wolf face bones looked so complicated and on the first try I got it all wrong and it made her face look a bit funny… They are supposed to simulate the muscles of the face is the information got from an awesome human face rig tutorial on Blender.
I tried again and really tried to be more accurate this time and thought that recalculating the bone rolls on the whole rig would be a good idea… It wasn’t. So I had to start again.
The third time I got this weird twisting in her torso when I moved her hips… and I ended up just recalculating the bone roll of a couple of spine and the hip bone and it seemed to fix it… I’m sure professional riggers would cringe (and if you do, please help me!) because it made the Rigify hip controller sit at an angle… but it didn’t deform the mesh weirdly and it still moves fine… so… I guess we will see in due course!
She has emotions!
I did realise during this rigging journey that I had left out a very important part of Gabby’s sculpt – her inner mouth. She will talk and lick and stuff so this is definitely a consideration for future development of her character so for now I will use this Gabby model for fast movement shots like running and shots where she won’t be seen talking.
Stay tuned to see more of her progress!
All works shown here were designed, sculpted, modelled, textured and rendered in ZBrush and Blender by Sarah Brawn. The design and sculpt of Gabby was inspired by real life photographs of Papillons.
Images owned and copyrighted by Brawni3D and you must request permission prior to use.
Contribute to Gabby’s acting career by buying her a biscuit!
The journey into Gabby’s hair dynamics has just begun!
Brawni 3D
So this is where we left off with Gabby, a sculpt from ZBrush that I am happy with:
ZBrush Sculpt of Gabby
Her poly count at this stage was 2.7 million. In layman’s terms the little squares that make up her 3D mesh were so so small that she just looked completely black when you viewed her wireframe in Blender. Also Blender hated me. So I had to retopologise her. Which means you build her completely again using modelling tools.
Why wouldn’t you just build her in Blender and skip the sculpting you say? Ah, well because we can assign some really cool texture maps to the low poly model from the sculpt to make the low poly model *look* like the high poly sculpt. With the added benefit of my computer won’t burst into flames if I tried to just rig the sculpt straight away and animate her…
It also means that not only can you build this low poly model to look like the sculpt, you have control over how many polys it has AND you can engineer the new model to bend in pretty ways for animation.
Here’s my progress:
I had to also UV unwrap the model by adding seams (the red lines), so that I could add the colours/textures, so that they would look nice and uniform like a tidily wrapped Christmas present and not stretch in a horrible way like melted cheese over the model. I added a chequered texture to help see where the stretching was.
Painting her colours was really fun. There is this texture paint function on Blender where you can just get a paint brush like in photoshop/procreate and just paint colours all over the model. Like painting a miniature… I used the same process to paint a black and white layer to use as my roughness map (black is super shiny and white is super rough).
After a few attempts at creating fur on spheres and testing them to see if the fur moves in a desirable way, I got to making her fluffy. I used Blender’s particle system and added the hair in different particle groups to have more control over what length of hair I wanted where. I am hoping later on to add in hair dynamics to some of the fur groups to make them sway with her movement but we will see how happy by computer is when it comes to it!
Awesomely I realised that you can use the texture paint material as her fur colour, so the fluff matched her “skin” underneath. I actually used two, one for her skin that has the custom mostly rough, roughness map and another for her fur that had a second roughness map that was shiny on the red spots.
After a lot of brushing her fluff, tweaking hair settings and doing a final render, I feel that Gabby is almost better that what I envisioned her to be.
I love her ears and I can’t wait to see them moving and I am hoping that I got the retopology right for her rig so that she deforms properly during animation.
Stay tuned to see her go through the rigging process!
All works shown here were designed, sculpted, modelled, textured and rendered in ZBrush and Blender by Sarah Brawn. The design and sculpt of Gabby was inspired by real life photographs of Papillons.
Images owned and copyrighted by Brawni3D and you must request permission prior to use.
Contribute to Gabby’s acting career by buying her a biscuit!
Brawni 3D 