Sengoku project 28mm.

[clibinarium]

I've decided to embark on a project on one of my first wargaming loves- the Sengoku Jidai. I thought it might be of interest to document the journey here, and it will give me an incentive to keep at it.

I am starting pretty much from scratch, in a quite literal sense- I am going to make the figures from concept to tabletop. I've been learning digital sculpting in my spare time for a couple of years, and it's been slow going, since spare time has been hard to come by, even during the pandemic. I January I'll be doing an intermediate course (I did the beginner's course back in 2019), and while that will no doubt boost my skills I do need to practice in the meantime to gear up. So I decided this would be a challenging but doable task, I am going to use it as a sculpting school of sorts for myself.

So to get the ball rolling here's a pic of my initial 3D sketch. It looks super rough because it is literally a sketch- effectively a piece of digital clay that's been sculpted like you might a real piece of clay. That's why a lot of bits that should be nice and straight are very wobbly looking. The idea is that you sketch your figure out so that you can get the overall look and proportions right and then begin to build the actual model from the sketch . This is only one approach to 3D modeling, but it's the one I've found the most intuitive. You may have seen some of my figures for Dave P. in the Schleswig-Holstein thread- they were done differently (and much to my chagrin much more inefficiently!)

To do the sketch I began with a base mesh of a male. This is a basic male doll I've sculpted to be generic and usable for figures generally. His hands are oversized because he's going to be a figure, as is his head. I cut his head off though to give me control over its proportion to the body which I may wish to change later. Plus I'll want to sculpt a better head later on in the process so the current one is temporary; actually everything here is temporary, it will be replaced as the process goes on. He's in a "T-pose", or more accurately an "A-pose".to allow me to work with symmetry. Once all the gear is made the figure will be posed. This is the opposite order from traditional work- hand-made figures must be posed when they are wire skeletons at the outset.

I make a copy of that naked base mesh and shrink it very slightly so that's it's nested inside the original. I then "draw" on it (like adding clay) so that the strokes are made on the copy, but they poke through the skin of the base mesh. So you end up with this kind of sketch. The helmet is done slightly differently; I added in a couple of basic objects which I've done some basic manipulation of to get the shapes I need. The particular pieces of gear are just to get the ball rolling, I'll be doing various kabuto, do, etc.

This is a long way away from a printable figure, but I hope to share bits and pieces of the process, so people can get an idea of how digital figures are made.

[Codsticker]

Very ambitious project. So far, your digital sculpting is very impressive.

[Bowman]

Not to get off topic too much but what software do you use for your sculpting?

[clibinarium]

Thanks Codsticker; I am hoping the benefits of working digitally will make the large scope manageable.

Not off topic Bowman- this is as much a thread about the process as the subject. I use ZBrush for most things. It's got a fairly steep learning curve, and is not cheap, but it's the best for doing organic work. I've been practising on and off for about 2 years now, and it's finally clicking. What it's not great for is "hard edge" stuff- what wargamers call straight-line work; machines and weapons and such. It can do that, but not as well as other programs. Its the difference between sculpting and "modelling". Modelling in digital terms is more like building things from edges, verts and faces, it's more like engineering and is a different skill set. I am only getting started with that stuff. For that sort of work programs like Rhinoceros, 3d Max, Maya or Blender are more useful.
Sculptris is the free, cut-down version of Zbrush if you fancy trying it. Blender is totally free and actually has the hard-edge stuff and sculpting tools. But for sculpting it is not as well optimised as ZBrush, and tends to lag heavily on all but the fastest PCs. It got a big update last week so maybe that's improved?

[clibinarium]

didn't get a huge amount of time to work on them this week, but below are some pics of helmet shapes I'm exploring. This is the beginning of the modelling stage. I take the shape of the cranium and simplify it until I have a shape of a couple of hundred (or less) polygons. This I can pull around into different shapes, and when I've got the shape I want I subdivide it (split the polygons into quarters, so a four-sided quad becomes four quads within that shape, then sixteen if I divide again, and so on). With smoothing switched on it makes the surface nice and smooth rather than faceted.
Anyway here's some examples.

Pumpkin shaped. Bulge at the back to provide a space to absorb shock from a downward blow from a shafted weapon.




Eboshi shaped- imitation of the shape of a courtier's cap. Probably higher ranking samurai.





Peach shaped.




Chinquapin shaped. Type of Chestnut.



No details on the helmets yet, like ribs and rivets, at this stage just exploring the shapes. Because I have the basic shapes in a low subdivision (a "low poly" version) I can alter them fairly easily if I think they dont look quite right. If you only had the high poly version it bexcomes very tricky to alter the overall shapes.

[wkeyser]

Have you tried Blender for sculpting. Am thinking of trying it out for some earlier war Napoleonics 1792-1796.

[clibinarium]

I have tried Blender, not so much for sculpting, but for modeling. I did have a look at the sculpting part, but it lagged very quickly when the polycount started to climb. Blender is an extremely powerful program- you could produce a Pixar quality movie with it (plus lots of other things) if you put the time in.

 But I cannot get along with it after spending time learning Z-Brush. The other day I lost access to Z-brush for 48hrs and decided to use Blender instead. I hated it. There's nothing wrong with Blender, it's just that it's hard to use a program where you already have internalized another. It has major advantages over Z-Brush- better sense of scale and units, better modeling tools (especially if you add in Boxcutter and HardOps), it's free (which is a big one; Z-Brush is 30+quid a month, which hurts). Zbrush has more sculpting brushes and can handle large amounts of polygons more smoothly.

Honestly, if I were starting now, I would probably start with Blender. Flipped Normals have some good tutorial series for beginners (the quality of what you learn from counts a lot). I've heard it said Zbrush is easier for artists to learn, Blender for those with a more mathematical/engineering background. I found neither easy to get to grips with, so "easier" should be understood as a relative term.