Working on the Base Mesh
My main goal this week was to complete the base mesh. I got close, but it still needs some amount of tertiary detail before I can move on. I want this sculpt to show off what I'm capable of, so I am spending longer on the base mesh to ensure things are anatomically correct. This means next week I will spend a lot of time on the hands and feet to make sure they look good because I'm well aware hands are a weak point of mine.
I started out the week by working on the secondary detail of the body and face. There's a bit of speculative anatomy going on with the legs, but I based the parts below the human knees on cat bones and muscles. It was at this point I knew I wanted to spend more time on the hands and feet, I just needed to wait until I could go up a subdivision to do that. I also realized I wanted to do something about the tail because at this point it was just a tube. I looked at lizard tails and saw they weren't perfectly tube-shaped. They had a slight bony ridge to the top and they had musculature to them.
The next day I wanted to focus on the hands, feet, and teeth.
The hands and feet are still far from finished, but they are fleshed out more at this subdivision. I was hoping to add the claws to the hands and feet this week, but that never ended up happening. This is because I wanted to wait until I was more comfortable with how the hands and feet were looking because I do know from experience that they can move around and that would mean having to completely remake the claws. I did think about how to make them though, by deforming cones.
Working on the teeth was delightful as it immediately added so much to the face. Something about the fangs just makes her have so much more character already. I also added in horn cavities so I had an idea of where her horns would sit on her head. I did at first add more raised bits, but I decided that those would ultimately look better as separate subtools coming out of her head.
I really want this sculpt to stand out against my other work, so I wanted to spend more time on the face to make it more realistically proportioned. To do this, I took pictures of my own face to sculpt off of. I realized very quickly that it is very hard to be objective about my face, as there are a lot of aspects about it that I thought I knew intrinsically. I've done many self-portraits, but sculpting is a completely different beast.
I think another issue was at this point it was looking uncanny to me because my face is asymmetrical and this is a symmetrical version of my face so it looked like me but it also looked off. Regardless, the proportions were looking much better and this is definitely the most realistic-looking face I've sculpted. I'll be making alterations to the face once I'm happy with everything to make sure it doesn't look exactly like me.
I do think after doing this to the face that I really want to do hair cards on this sculpt. I'll be starting out with sculpted hair and then doing those cards. That won't happen this week, but it will probably start next week.
I finished the week off by doing more detail work on the body and face to really get it to a good point. It's ready to go up a subdivision, and then I can do more work on the hands, feet, and face to really get it to where it needs to be. The base mesh is very nearly finished, and I'm confident it will be finished by next devlog. I'm proud of what I did this week, as I think the face and musculature are my best looking yet.
Next Steps
I'll be finishing up the base mesh next week and starting on other aspects of the sculpt, like eyebrows, hair, eyelashes, and claws. The base mesh is always the part of the sculpt that takes the longest for me so the rest of it should move by a bit quicker. It also helps that I'm healed from my surgery and have more energy to get some work done. I'm very excited to see where this sculpt goes in the future.