Doing some old-fashioned sculpting with oil-based clay today, trying to get a better read on Grumpy Squirrel’s facial shapes. His current virtual incarnation doesn’t register a pouty scowl properly from all angles, so I’m roughing it out with real media.
It’s my first clay sculpt in a while. I discovered something new about how to build a cartoon squirrel nose today, so that’s kind of cool. I don’t know if I’m going to refine this too much more – it was really just to get an idea of how to shape a frowning mouth that frowns whatever way you look at it.
Lattice to the rescue! Don’t forget to save offsets as shape keys for easy and convenient god-i-hate-this-let’s-start-over-ability.
Just apply a lattice transform to the sculpt then translate those little dots hither and thither. Here I’ve stretched the nose, plumped out the cheeks and reined in the ears a bit.
Here’s the mesh with 100% of the lattice effect. Bit extreme.
This is the lattice effect with 400% strength. Included here mainly for silliness and to show Blender is still the wonderfully trusting program we know and love.
Hey, 75% percent looks much better. I can either apply that as a shape key or destructively apply it to the model. If I’m going to keep sculpting, and I am, destructively it is. Don’t forget to save!
I was sculpting Ktish but the head was coming out all.. woobly and not good. What to do? Lattice that stuff back into submission at once!
Lattice deform is the process of applying a lattice to a mesh in order to warp it into a different shape. The lattice is a grid of points; the points in their default configuration represent “start” positions, and wherever you move those points to is a “destination” position. When applied to the sculpt via a lattice modifier, mesh around any given “start” position warps towards the “destination position”, and this way you can non-destructively deform the sculpture.
It’s great for coarse form experimenting, correcting sculpt shapes that aren’t right, and any task where you want to move around a heap of polys at once (e.g. in a sculpted mesh where dynamic topology has been used) without having to hit up Edit Mode and faff around with proportional editing.
Related are Mesh Deform (instead of a square lattice you apply an arbitrary “cage” mesh over the top of something – slower to set up but arguably finer control) and the new Laplacian Deform which comes from hooks and science.
Just mentioned this technique on Twitter so I thought I’d show it as pictures too. 🙂
