Making a Character in picoCAD | TMNT Metalhead

[Music] hello there my name is brandon and i make pictures out of tiny squares and a few weeks ago we were taking a look at picocad a program designed in pico8 for building and texturing low poly 3d models in that video i created a few simple objects to get started and today is going to be a journey into getting some experience making something a little more ambitious i've since learned that there are regular picocad jams hosted through itch where users can create and submit pieces based on a certain theme one of the recent jam themes was toys and while it has since ended it gave me the idea to try translating one of my plastic robot toys into a low poly model this is a figure of metalhead released by neca toys in 2020 metalhead is a robotic ninja turtle developed by krang in the original teenage mutant ninja turtle cartoon series and you may also recognize him as one of the bosses from the turtles in time video game the character design and the stylization of this figure make it a great choice as a reference model for a project like this there are hard polygonal edges and flat cell shading style for hard shadows it's as if it were ripped straight from the cartoon and brought into the real world so let's boot up picocad and see what we can do to build this design piece by piece in low poly pixel form [Music] all right to get started with the head i'm right-clicking and adding a cylinder and this is going to be the top part of the head where the eyes and the headband wrap around then underneath this will need some kind of rectangular shape so i drop in a cube to become the bottom part of the head in order to elongate this to come forward rather than resizing it i click on the front face and select the extrude face option and this will copy that section one more time in that direction so the benefit now is that there's a vertex in the middle of this shape and that allows us to create an angle on the back half of it while keeping the bottom front of it flat which resembles what's going on in the profile view of the reference figure now the sort of ear pieces are cylinders so it would be the proper thing to drop in some cylinder shapes and rotate them into place to make these i didn't do that at this point and the reason was partly that i was overlooking things like the rotate function i'm still kind of fresh to the whole 3d modeling thing so i wasn't exactly warmed up into that mindset yet so i dropped in some cubes for this and then tried extruding the top face to create the antenna and eventually ended up stacking another cube up there just to accomplish that so let's just kind of think of them as placeholders for the time being and we'll come back around by the end if we can get fancier with it then [Music] so here's a look at the mesh for the head overall just a simple translation that works pretty well to convey the character appearance i've added in a slight angle along the top front face of the mouth similar to how it is with the back bottom so it's doing a parallelogram prism type of thing if we toggle on the default flat shaders and rotate this around it helps for planning out the pixel art texture artwork my main concern for the artwork is to position and center the eyes and headband around the faces of the cylinder and then most of the rest of the faces here can probably just be simple solid shades of either gray or green to create the texture artwork i'm over in a sprite now working on a canvas of 128 by 128 pixels because that's the maximum allowable dimension to import into picocad i'm getting started with the eyes and i decided to translate those triangular shapes into perfectly angled lines with one pixel and two pixel segments and then created a bordering beyond those the color palette here is one of the presets in a sprite and it's called pico8 this is the one that's used within picocad like if you import artwork with other colors it'll auto convert into these so if you can imagine it's obviously just more controllable to design using this palette from the start and that way you know exactly how to look once it's imported into picocad i'm also using gridlines here to try and plan how the faces of the low poly model could correlate to a 16x16 tile or something like that i found it helps to have some visual reference or constraints for blocking this texture sheet consistently like here i'm doing the part of the headband that wraps around the back of the head and keeping that sizing the same as the front for the back detail i've just made a singular piece because it can be mirrored to the other side when mapping this would have been a good thing to do for the eyes also just to save room on that canvas but at the time i felt like it would help ensure a perfect alignment for a critical piece like that just to have the whole strip after exporting the image from a sprite as a png file this is imported into picocad by dragging the file into the texture view window and then i get started mapping the design onto the mesh each face of the mesh has a corresponding box which assigns the artwork so one at a time i'm moving these into the proper position on the artwork displayed below for pieces that are broken up into multiple faces like the entire strip for the eyes i'm making sure to line up the edges in a way that where one stops the next one starts and that they're all sized to the same height [Music] for something like the back design where we need to mirror the mapping you can just drag two of those corners over the others and you'll end up with the mirrored design it's kind of just like flipping a sheet of paper around but you have to do it in a way to keep track of which vertices are the proper ones to move from here i'm just doing a review of the initial map parts and trying to spot any gaps or changes to make one thing is that i feel like the edges and angles of the mouth should be a little bit more accentuated rather than just bleeding from one to the next in that same gray tone so i revised the texture artwork to include a piece that had some light gray edges around it and i used that to map a bit of border into it almost like it's a highlight along the edge of the metal to break it up you can also see that i tried to create the suggestion of a circular design on those ear pieces which is maybe a cheap move to try and suggest that shape but like i said there's a bit of experimenting at this early phase and we'll come back around to some of these choices once developing more of the character for now though it's a good start and it was a nice warm-up exercise in just working with multiple shapes to translate part of a character design like this so let's move ahead to the next piece [Music] probably the easiest place to start for the torso is with a large rounded design uh something that's like a big barrel or drum would be a good starting shape so i got this going by dropping in a cylinder and then dragging out various sides of it to give it a larger circumference and height from here i extrude the top face of that cylinder twice and that's going to stack them so that now we have a tall cylinder that can be manipulated further to create a bit of curvature to it if you caught the last picocad video you might remember that this is the same technique we looked at for creating spheres except in this case i'm looking to have the back pop out a bit to work as a shell while the front stays a little bit more flat and when viewing both head on the corners are folded inward so that they'll have an overall curvature like a very polygonal oval i've also popped in another cylinder to use as a neck this one didn't require much modification beyond mostly deciding the good height for the head in the end i think the angles worked out really well in this case especially for the shell since the segmentation pattern lends itself well to a low poly look and metal headshell in particular should be more angular design than what the actual ninja turtle shells would look like so the rest here is really up to just the texture design going into the artwork for the torso i realized that i sized the eyes a little bit too large for this canvas especially if i wanted to maintain some consistent pixel sizing down into the torso but i liked how those eyes turned out so i just went with a smaller scale for the chest and back design and i think the nice thing is that when you're zoomed out in picocad it's going to kind of scale everything to that zoom level so the pixel art whatever resolution it is always ends up getting reinterpreted to a certain degree so i think we can still make the match in some way the translation here was pretty straightforward i was just doing the entire design as a flat panel and using the figure itself to reference the placement of details i was debating how much line work to use because it can often get a bit messy depending on the zoom level in picocad but i figured i'd give it a try with it first and then scale back later if needed for the shell design i'm using the symmetry function of a sprite to place the little bordering segments all in one pass definitely very handy for speeding up symmetrical designs like this or you could always obviously plan to do half of this and then mirror it while mapping in picocad but in this case the torso patterns take up three panels going across so i just laid down the entire thing to have a good idea of how to lay across the entire mesh the texture mapping for this section is also pretty simple although the only thing i wanted to point out here is that some of the application boxes were mapping these things on sideways like rotated 90 degrees i'm not sure exactly what dictates the orientation of these boxes by default but i would just grab one corner at a time and essentially manually rotate them and try to find that proper fit once it's mapped the result is a pretty good start the only things i'd like to change are that i don't really need the yellow highlight on the chest and the shell i thought it'd add some cool dimensionality but i think it takes away from the orange pops of color among this character and i'm going to clean up the line work on the chest to improve the readability at this zoom level that decorative line under the chest plate can probably just be a single line of black pixels rather than that outlined look also we're missing a piece to have the belt wrap around the side and then of course we need to do the grenades on the front of the belt also but i'm going to create those as 3d objects rather than as a texture i figured they could be simple spheres so again i'm using that trick of stacking cylinders and then folding in the corners to create the rounding by dragging over the object you can select everything and then use your arrow keys to bump it around and whatever window your mouse is highlighted on is going to use that axis view to make that movement so i nudge it into place using each of those views to guide me once you have an object mesh like this you can copy it by right-clicking on the framework and selecting clone mesh and it'll drop a copy of it into the workspace this is best to do once you've already mapped texture to it so that you can save time on that step as well in this case i needed four of these total but when i went to copy it again i got the notification that i'd actually reached the project limit here see when you read the user manual it states that projects will get limited to 16 kilobytes i saw my file had actually reached 28 kilobytes and you know i could actually start to feel the 3d rotation kind of bogging down quite a bit but you know i just charge the head anyway uh for now i popped in the two grenades that i could have just to get an idea of where things would have been heading if allowable but the whole point here is to find out what's possible within the limitations presented by this software so to move forward i deleted the grenades the neck the antenna and this brought the file size down to 21 kilobytes which means we've now only got seven kilobytes to account for the arms and the legs uh so let's keep going with some really heavy stylization to the limbs and then we'll see if we still need to make further cuts or if there'll be some leftover space to reintroduce any of those removed items [Music] okay in the new mindset of keeping everything really simple and stylized i'm starting the arm as a rectangular prism and i've extruded it once so that i can fashion one end of it into an angled shoulder to meet the body while the other side of it angles down and away from the body the leg is pretty much the same story i start from a cube and i extrude the front face to bring it forward as a foot then extrude the top face to bring it up as the leg one of the pro tips in the user manual is to always extrude as much as you can rather than creating new shapes you can actually get pretty far just by chaining items together like this and i'm beginning to suspect that you know maybe my happy-go-lucky use of all these individual shapes was what contributed greatly to my file size downfall in the first half of this project because the shapes of the arms and legs are so simple i was thinking like what if i just make up for it by creating all the missing details through the texture artwork so i'm doing a lot of line work and shading on this set of artwork just to see what it would look like because if it pays off it may be a nice way to offset the simplicity i'm kind of grateful i hit that project limit when i did though because if i had managed to make a little bit of progress into the arm design before getting that warning it would have probably been a lot more backtracking to simplify that design and then make the leg after that and try to match it at least this way i was able to treat the arms and legs with the same stylistic approach from the beginning and because they're a sizeable portion of this design overall there's at least a lot of cohesion set just by the way that these pieces look together so after mapping those textures here's the look with the arms and legs so far once again the heavy line work kind of lost its appeal at the zoom level so i ended up simplifying those textures by removing all those details and just going for solid color blocks that suggest things like the elbow pads and the wrist pieces throughout this exercise i'm starting to see how they landed on those incredibly stylized low poly designs like the overworld sprites in final fantasy vii like if the shapes have to be quite simple due to the constraints getting too detailed with the texture artwork is sort of at odds with that design philosophy so it just works much better to stay on that level of simplicity in the artwork too with the single arm and leg the file size is now up to 23 kilobytes which thankfully means we're doing pretty well and have room to copy these out again i right click on that object and then select clone mesh to get a copy of the arm since it's facing the wrong way we can flip it around by using the rotate mesh option what's important to note with rotating is that the rotation will happen along a different axis depending on which of the orthographic windows you have highlighted at the time in this case i'm on the one looking at the character from above and it's rotated the arm along that view to sort of just flip it around the way that we need to this happens in 45 degree increments so it should just take a few times to find the rotation that you need for the leg i simply copy the mesh over and move it into place but then i adjusted the mesh a little bit just to find a good way to join it up to the body after these arm and leg copies the file size was at 25 kilobytes so i figured i could push it just a tiny bit more and that'll lead us into the finished model [Music] in the final appearance i've gone back to swap out the ear pieces for the proper rotated cylinders and i've brought the antenna back in using a cube sitting on top of those after these changes the file size got to 28 kilobytes where it had topped out before so there wasn't really any room to push the mesh any further than this and as a result i have the arms and legs and head just kind of floating slightly beyond the torso rather than having kind of proper connection joints even with all the modeling and texture revisions though it was a great piece of practice and i love finding out exactly where that line for stylization had to be within this program to translate a character model like this and end up with this exact result let's go ahead and close out with some crt time to see what this looks like on there and be sure to check out picocad if you're interested in trying this kind of thing too i'll leave some links down below for that so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 79,254

Keywords: picoCAD, 3D modelling, character modelling, low poly, 3D pixel art, pixel art, pico8, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Id: 581KVHraAKw

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021