Characters – Brawni 3D

March 18, 2022March 16, 2022

Smile for the Cameras! It’s Gabby 3.0!

Woo hoo! I’ve got shiny new teeth! Cheeeeeeeese!!
Gabby

After Gabby 2.0 had been rigged and tested with fur and basically I had learned how to retopologise, rig and animate a quadruped, I realised that there were some major elements missing from Gabby’s sculpt that she will need if she is to express her emotions to her audience.

The first was a working mouth! I was so so tempted to buy a wolf mouth from various internet vendors… but I resisted and made my own specific to her face, which I am much happier with.

Image courtesy of ILLUMINATION ENTERTAINMENT/UNIVERSAL PICTURES

There was a lot of back and forth discussion over whether to sculpt a human mouth to aid with talking and human expressions, or to go full realism and sculpt a very realistic dog mouth, as she is a dog. Did you know that all the Secret Life of Pets characters have a set of human teeth?

Image courtesy of https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Buster_(Toy_Story)

I decided to go halfway and sculpt a more stylised dog mouth, a bit like Buster the dachshund from Pixar’s Toy Story. Buster also has eyebrow bumps and near-human like eyes for the extra character.

Alongside sculpting her inner mouth and tongue, I re-did her muzzle to make it look more dog-like, and re-sculpted those huge butterfly-like ears.

She is an expressive character and I still wanted some human-like features so that she has a full range of expressions. After storyboarding her first scene, we realised that there would be a lot of close up shots of her feet, and the previous sculpt I believe didn’t have adequate animatable paws, so I did a complete re-sculpt of her toe beans.

I then, of course, had a bit of a play around to see if her teeth closed together, and her lips would move nicely over her teeth.

Now for the fun taking her back into Blender to colour her up and rig her for animation!!

Thanks for reading!

All works of Gabby shown here were designed, and sculpted in ZBrush by Sarah Brawn. The design and sculpt of Gabby was inspired by real life images 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.

A$5.00

December 10, 2021November 22, 2021

Gabby’s First Pass at Rigging in Blender

She’s Aliiiiive!!!!
Brawni 3D

Here she is, covered in gorgeous shiny fluffy papillon hair:

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!

A$5.00

December 3, 2021November 22, 2021

Making Gabby The Papillon Fluffy in Blender

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:

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!

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!

A$5.00

November 26, 2021November 22, 2021

Sculpting Gabby The Papillon in ZBrush

She’s a feisty little redhead Papillon who just wants to be like her big Collie sister, jumping through hoops and running as fast as she can.
Brawni 3D

I did a few thumbnail sketches to warm up and get into the Papillony-mood (it’s a thing you know). I used these references kindly borrowed from the good people of the Google Search Engine. Thank you for your inspiration.

Reference Images and Thumbnails for Gabby

I then made a rough representation of her Character in a stylised way. In hindsight I didn’t stick too much to this concept whilst I was sculpting as I wanted her to be a little bit more realistic.

She was sculpted in ZBrush and then transferred to Blender where the rest of the work began. This is her progress throughout the sculpt. She began as a chihuahua Zee Zoo collection of ZSpheres where I had to adjust her proportions to fit my Papillon references.

This is my FIRST sculpt in ZBrush. It was a lot of pushing and pulling the mesh around but I think I finally got it to a place where she looks cute and stylised but also will be somewhat relatable to a Papillon once she’s got those big flooffy ears!

Stay tuned to see her fluff up in my next weeks post!

All works shown here were designed, and sculpted in ZBrush and Adobe Photoshop by Sarah Brawn. The design and sculpt of Gabby was inspired by real life photographs of Papillons courtesy of Google Images.

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!

A$5.00