Character! We...were almost there.

 

Meet our hero. He doesn't have a name, just yet. Unfortunately he won't look exactly like that , as this is a high resolution model and Blender doesn't cooperate well with my current technical equipment, so i could leave him like this. On the other hand he will be like that but some of his details will be lost cause of technical difficulties. "What's the problem" you'll say. Let me explain:

Because i decided to get to know better the sculpting tools Blender has, i found very intriguing to experiment with multires modelling. This doesn't necessarily means, vast amounts of faces and countless hours of rendering. Let's make the argument more visual:

                         

The above models have nearly 300,000 faces. They sound too much for a character like this? Not really. I've been contacting artists in the Blender Artists forum and something they explained to me was: " Just because the character you are creating won't be used in Blender's game engine, and because you are using sculpting tools, so that the animation to be more realistic, 300,000 is a very reasonable amount for that kind of a character. Usually professional modelled characters tend to have millions of faces, so to be more realistic and smooth". 

Problems though were waiting for me just around the corner. After modelling and texturing the character, i created the armature that would bring him to life...and it did. But for some reason, the armature caused many deformations when applied on the character.

                                   

That was the turning point for this little guy. Because with 300,000 faces Blender used too much memory, so all the processes were going slow, i reduced the multires level to a previous step. Now the character has 175,000 faces which made things easier and faster. Was the problem with the armature solved too? Well, not really, at least not by just reducing the faces.


The good thing out of all these handicaps was that i experimented much with all the tools that blender has to offer for character modelling. Now i am happy to say that the majority of  problems, the armature was causing, are solved by building a more detailed one with extra bones and Ik controllers(still there are few problems left,but i am on it):