Imperfect Cell

Since first learning to sculpt in Blender, I've discovered a fondness for using this power to create horrifying monstrosities. I more recently learned how to use vertex painting to paint multiple textures onto a single model without having to painstakingly select individual faces (which doesn't even look all that great when it's doable in the first place), and it has been LIFE CHANGING.

And I guess for some reason, the idea entered my head to try and do a somewhat realistic design for "Imperfect Cell," the Dragon Ball Z villain who definitely came the closest to traumatizing me as a child. Seriously, out of nowhere this punchy-kicky-lasery-shouty action anime just suddenly decided it wanted to be a horror movie for 4 or 5 episodes.

So yeah. I did the sculpting thing, and then the painting thing, and I ran into the big limitation of vertex painting: you can only paint 4 textures onto a single object. (Unless there's some way to get more out of it, but the tutorial I learned it from uses plugs the vertex paint into an RGB separator, and then into mix shaders, so whatever you paint red is one texture, blue is another, green is another, and you can use black/white as a default to get one more.)

It was a bit aggravating because I just needed ONE more if I wanted to do the eyes right, but I initially had to settle for just doing shiny dark blue. Then later I decided I didn't really NEED to paint everything onto a single model, so I just modeled and textured the eyes separately, and stuck 'em in his face. (The tail is also separate from the main model. Rigged with a spline IK, which I'd never done before and was happy to find it was very simple to do.)