[Finished] Kasperköpp

Good day, friends of Blender. I started a new project a few days ago. In this project I will create a hand full of heads for punch puppets. Each of them will represent a different character. I don’t have any further plans for them. It’s just to enjoy sculpting, shading, lighting and a good render.

For the start I present you the bad guy. Open the images in a new tab/window to see them full sized.

PS: If you wonder about the name of the thread: punch puppets are called “Kasperle-Puppen” in Germany. “Kasperköpp” means “punch puppet heads” and is taken from the local dialect where I live :slight_smile:

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Wow amazing work…Gefällt mir ;D

Love that wood grain! Great work!

Peersius and Paulchambers3D, thank you very much guys. I appreciate your encouragement :slight_smile:

And here is the next one. The professor.

really good! This wood carving “effect” looks damn good!
Is this wood shader procedual?

minoribus

The artist with many talents, I do not have a look at the forum for a few days and BAM, this. Really nice, that carved wood material also looks very good.

Are you planning to do different wood materials on the models or keep them all the same?

Regards

Shaun

Thanks, strapazie. On the shader: part/part. For the wood grain I used an image texture. And from that texture I derived a roughness map, which is then used together with a mix of voronoi textures to create the chipped wood effect and the microsurface of the wood. This is the node setup. (Open image in new window/tab to see it full sized.)

Thanks, man! I thought about different wood shaders. But I like the one of the first two so much :slight_smile: Feels almost like smelling the tree gum - to me. But perhaps I’ll experiment with some other textures.

For the curious I prepared two screen shots with a matcap from the viewport. They show the dyntopo sculpted models.

And working on the next one, the professor’s assistant.

What an interesting project, minoribus. It’s always fun to see what new and unexpected subject you will be taking on next. I really like the wood texture, and the chipped/whittled effect on the meshes. The faces themselves are well done (I suppose you could call them caricatures?) The professor reminds me of Mr. Burns, but younger and with more fat on the face. Wonderful work!

I believe I have seen photos or video of “Punch Puppets” before, but I don’t have a strong recollection of them. I’ll have to refresh my memory.

Hey, James, nice to hear from you. Thanks for your comment. And what a coincidence! The day I was visiting classy dog films on YT to see if there are updates :slight_smile:

In the last days I was working on another head. Because part of every decent punch puppet ensemble is this guy. I think I don’t have to introduce him. :wink:

I think this most recent head is my favorite so far! The eyes look great, very striking. I suppose it is the contrast of red and green.

I’m finally wrapping up work on the latest Classy Dog video, you can see some of the progress on the Facebook page. There has been so much work going on (both with Classy Dog and outside work), that I have been away from the BA forums for a while. But now I have a bit more time to visit again!

And, here I was wondering where you were at. Sculpting is looking nice and the wood is a nice touch. minoribus you have done a little sculpting in other projects but nothing like this. You have got to be one of the most versatile Blender artist on the forum here. Just one question: You are using your tablet in this endeavor right.

Thank you very much, James and Ghost.

I fully understand that building and maintaining a successful Youtube channel means loads of work, James, and I wish you all the best for this ongoing undertaking. I’ve not been much into sculpting so far, but I really enjoy doing it. Without having experience in any other sculpting software, Blender’s implementation of dynamic topology feels good - after I learned how to work with constant detail size for the brushes. I’m using an older Wacom Bamboo tablet with pressure sensitivity. My experience after the first few heads is, that it is much easier to sculpt the heads than to model them. I did a bit of retopo too, but I didn’t complete it, because at the moment I have no further plans for the heads.

Probably I made a mistake by starting form a four times subdivided cube, because it gets a bit slow after about 500 K vertices.

Here is another character that I have on the workbench: Grandma.

Thanks for watching.

My experience after the first few heads is, that it is much easier to sculpt the heads than to model them.

Blender Guru has a podcast with Jonathan Williamson where that is addressed. (Ep68 31:00 to 42:00 Min.) He comments that sculpting programs have gotten so good that it’s pretty much replaced box modeling in the industry. And, of course Zbrush is working to make retopo automatic for all practical purposes. According to him they have almost accomplished that.

I can see this tablet work being used on future projects, minoribus. For that matter you can sculpt on a MakeHuman character. (See my banned from YouTube Brazilian women) :slight_smile: Yeah, from the looks of this thread I can imagine the tablet being used more. And, didn’t I see a free retopo add-on recently.

You know what’s funny? Currently, if you perform a Google image search for “Kasperköpp”, you mostly get BA pages in the search results.

The Grandma head looks great, very much the proportions I would expect for a grandmother.

Speaking of large meshes, I had a question: what is the largest obj you’ve been able to import into Blender? I’m hoping to build a new PC within the next few months, and want to make sure it will be powerful enough to import raw scan data into Blender. I PM’d doris with the same question (since I knew she sculpted in ZBrush as well as Blender), but I haven’t heard back from her.

Hi minoribus

These are looking really good, how many do you intend to make?

I know that you said in the OP that you did not intend taking this any further, but I think I will encourage you to do a very little animation once you have concluded the sculpting work.

Maybe with a little stage and some little curtains that open and close and some children in the audience clapping and enjoying themselves and…

Just also thinking aloud as you often do my friend. :smiley:

Shaun

Blender Guru has a podcast with Jonathan Williamson where that is addressed. (Ep68 31:00 to 42:00 Min.) He comments that sculpting programs have gotten so good that it’s pretty much replaced box modeling in the industry. And, of course Zbrush is working to make retopo automatic for all practical purposes. According to him they have almost accomplished that.

I fetched some of these podcasts and listened to them on my way to work. He has got some really interesting stuff. And the interview with Jonathan Williamson is a good one. CG Cookie offers a commercial plugin for retopo. What I tried was the traditional way with snapping and bSurfaces, where you can use the grease pencil for drawing edges. The latter worked quite well. There is also F2 for which a demonstration of how this an be used for retopo was on Blender Nation recently. Unfortunately this was only a timelapse with no explanation and guidance. But it was impressive.

You know what’s funny? Currently, if you perform a Google image search for “Kasperköpp”, you mostly get BA pages in the search results.

HaHaHa, James, did it myself now and that’s really funny :slight_smile:

Speaking of large meshes, I had a question: what is the largest obj you’ve been able to import into Blender? I’m hoping to build a new PC within the next few months, and want to make sure it will be powerful enough to import raw scan data into Blender. I PM’d doris with the same question (since I knew she sculpted in ZBrush as well as Blender), but I haven’t heard back from her.

Hm, if ever I imported only small meshes, so their number of polygons don’t count. The biggest scene I ever used was the harbor with all characters in the scene. That have been 5,145,759 vertices. I have 16 GB of RAM on my machine and an AMD processor with eight cores at 4 GHz. The system is installed on an SSD drive, which makes the startup process and every disk IO super fast. Next time I would buy an Intel processor instead of AMD. While the AMD processor performs good I always found that Intel is faster when Blender builds the BVH. Maybe that’s because of some compiler optimization for the Intel instruction set.

but I think I will encourage you to do a very little animation once you have concluded the sculpting work.

Maybe with a little stage and some little curtains that open and close and some children in the audience clapping and enjoying themselves and…

Cheers, Shaun and thanks for your thoughts :slight_smile: Such an animation would be nice and I myself played with the idea of having the heads talk to each other. But I simply don’t feel like making an animation with them.

Your quickly becoming a great sculptor Minoribus. I never really heard of these punch puppet heads before, so I googled them. It seams many are painted, but I like the wood carving. Satin is my favorite of the bunch, but they all look fantastic.

Thank you very much, Harleynut. Here is another one textured and rendered.