As I said in my previous article about Blender, my next step was to add extra details to the tank top and then texturing. I added the extra details using two methods. First, I manually added the tank top edges, to make it thicker in those areas. And second, I used Blender’s sculpting features to add wrinkles and such.

The first step was pretty easy, and no different than adding the same detail in Maya. All I did was use the knife tool to add another loop along the edges of the tank top, and then extrude those faces. One thing I didn’t quite like is how the extrude works, though. Maybe I am missing something, but I saw no way to enter a specific extrude value, unlike Maya. I had to try the extrude many times (and move the cursor really slow) before I got something I was happy with.

Again, maybe I missed the option somewhere, so I will look more into that, but my first impression was not really great. On the other hand, the extrude function has different modes that will fit different requirements, and that’s good.

Next, I switched to the sculpt mode in Blender to add more details. However, before doing that, I baked the modifiers (symmetry and subdivision) so I would have a completely “flattened” model. I then added a lot more subdivisions to the tank top and began to sculpt.

The sculpt mode has a lot of different tools. Using the tools was similar to using the tools in Mudbox or Maya: controlling the strength and size with the pen pressure, holding CTRL to invert the effect of the brush, etc. One thing I forgot to check is if you can dynamically add more subdivisions to the model as you sculpt, like in Mudbox or ZBrush, or if you need to add the subdivisions you need right off the bat, and then bake and add more subdivisions if you need finer detail.

I didn’t check if you could simply bake normal maps out of the high-resolution model in Blender, because I always do this in Substance Designer, so I simply exported both the low and high resolution models as OBJ files, and then I worked on the normal maps, as well as all the entire texturing, in Substance Designer. The model below shows the tank top applied to the CC3 character I used as template. Since I used her as a template, the tank top fits her perfectly.

There’s more things to explore in Blender, so I will be documenting those as well.