The 3 day weekend is really helping me stay on top of homework this term... so far. Though this week I am cutting it pretty close. I have tried approaching my projects in a slightly different way recently. I have been taking each project to a quality that is OK to hand in and then when everything is at that level I go back and push each project. This way I don't spend way too long making one project way better than all the others. This is working so far but as the term progresses I will probably be picking favorites to focus on. Anyway onto this weeks work.
For Character modeling we started with the our characters head. We began with a box modeling block in first, all in Maya. This is a really hard but very controlled way of working. It's also exactly how I used to do everything way back when I was first learning so it was kind of fun to go back to and remember all the frustration :p The above pic shows where my initial box model ended and then how it ended after about 3 hours of sculpting! I think its because the topology was so clean that I was able to sculpt so fast on this. We will see because this is the same technique we will be using for the next 6 weeks or so as we move down the body. I remember back to my first time modeling humans in Maya... it is really not an easy task! Still nice to see that all the real sculpting and figure drawing from last year has payed off :D
I am basing my characters face off Liu Yi Fei, she has been in a lot of movies including The Forbidden Kingdom and IP Man 3 but I mostly chose her because its really hard to find side profiles of Asian actresses apparently... I don't know how close I really got to a likeness but I am going to push it towards a more stylised look by the end of the project anyway so I didn't want to spend too much time on the realistic look.
For animation the assignment was to create a short using a little drone rig with a tail. The focus was on follow through and overlapping animation. I also knew that our final assignment is to polish one of our previous projects from the term. So I decided to jazz this one up quite a bit to make my final easier. I had a little trouble with the drone's idle hover the tail kind of jitters but if I do end up returning to this for my final I will tidy that up. You can watch the full clip Here in the Term 8 folder. I also got the dog, a great free rig from CG Meetup, which was really fun to work with.
I am trying to take my bunny from last week a little further with some optimisation and better texturing. I am getting a lot of great help with this mini project, hopefully over the next few weeks I will have something super cute to rig over break. It was a little tricky but I was able to cut the polycount from around 2,100 polys to 750.
For props and weapons we had to get a box based prop looking cool with only 100 triangles!!! It sounds like a lot but that allowance gets eaten up super fast! I hit some real challenges while working on this but I think I got a pretty good result. My thinking is that if a prop is really only 100 triangles it will be either very small or a background element so you wouldn't ever study it up close... at least that's my excuse for the issues I couldn't fix with skew painting :p
Figured I might use this prop in my level design project so I did a tiny bit of texturing work on it too.
Level design was tricky!! I made a library of 18 modular environment modeling pieces for my dungeon level. Making the geo was super easy but getting it to export correctly with its collision mesh was a little taxing. Towards the end I had a checklist of about 5-8 processes to remember between creating the piece and getting it to import properly. I think I have the hang of it now though.
And here are a few shots of my level block in. We haven't had any lectures on how to light or anything so I just threw in some basic lights for now but we will see where we go from here. I also put some of my break tutorials to use and created some animated textures for the fire and swirling portal!! :D
Digital photography and character development have started pretty slow this term so not much to report on there, though I have a presentation on Thursday for character development. We have to choose 1 example of good design and two examples of bad design. I have a hunch that next weeks assignment will be something to do with these choices so I am picking LOL designs!! VI for good design obviously! she is awesome and Shen for bad design! I actually like Shen's aesthetic but he plays like a tank and I think that totally conflicts with his appearance. You don't really see ninja and think tank :p I also threw the new Death Note live action interpretation of Light Yagami. That whole movie is a master class in bad design.
OK onward to week 3
No comments:
Post a Comment