Creating a Little Dog Character in Blender and Substance Painter
Timelapse
I recorded the process of creating this model! See the time-lapse here:
Project Goal
I created this character model in 2022. The intention was to use it as a mascot or avatar for my online social presence. Ultimately, I decided to take a different approach for that, but the model is still pretty cute!
Designing
When I started the project, I knew I wanted the mascot to be some sort of cute cartoon dog. As I mascot, I also wanted it to represent me or my brand in some way, but I didn’t know how.
In these early concept sketches, I play with hair styles on varying small dog breeds. I especially experiment with poodles and Yorkshire terriers, because both of those breeds are ones that I’ve owned, so I feel more personally invested in them. I decide to go with the yorkie, because mine passed away and at this point I really like the idea of using one as a mascot.
Having decided on a breed, I get annoyed with sketching and do a rough sculpt on my IPad using Nomad.
I turn out to really like this design, so then I proceed to create a concept sheet and character orthographic around it. I don’t use the sculpt itself in the actual model, however. I have no idea why not.
Blocking
Now that I have a design to work from, I get to 3D modeling it for real. I start a lot of my sculpts from quad spheres. I create one quad sphere that will forever remain in the center of the X axis, and another that will forever remain to the side of it, mirrored by the mirror modifier. The first quad sphere gets duplicated multiple times to create the shapes for the head, neck, torso, hips, and tail. The second quad sphere gets duplicated to create the shapes for the legs, ears, and anything else that a dog has two of. After all the shapes have been positioned, I use the grab brush in sculpt mode to position them according to the character sheet.
Sculpting
To begin sculpting, I join the blocked shapes together little by little using voxel remesh. I keep this model completely symmetrical except for the tuft of hair along the top of the head, which will be added later. I think this model had an extreme ugly phase!
I don’t want to groom the model later, or use hair cards, so I sculpt hair details using the clay strips brush instead. When the model is refined enough, I add the elongated tufts of fur to her face using nurbs curves.
By the time I’m finished sculpting, the model is pretty dense, so I have to retopologize. The hair tufts stay their own separate meshes, but do get converted from curves to geometry. I was a lot less experienced in 2021 when I was making this model, so the topology is somewhat messy.
Once it’s retopologized, it gets UV’ed so that I’m able to texture it.
Then, the details from the sculpt are baked into a normal map and applied to the new mesh topology.
Texturing
After retopology, the model is ready to texture! I do this using Substance Painter. I start by creating all the colors I plan on using, and then masking them to where on the dog they’re supposed to be. From there, I use a combination of hand painting and generators to get the dog looking how I want. The generators give me a cel-shaded style base to work with, especially for the body. Overall, I find the process similar to illustration. The colors start as flats, and I add lights and shadow until I’ve got a painted looking dog.
Finished Model
Having been textured, the model is complete!
