Finals!

Wow that was a really tough term!  I just about survived the 11 weeks and I am so ready for a break now!  Can't believe I'm going into demo reel next term it feels so surreal.

So this is a bit of a throw back to week 8 or so when I was working on the card hair for my character. I still have some work to do on it now but it has been quite fun actually budgeting time to learn Xgen and realistic character hair.

I wound up redoing the braids and cutting down on some of the mess of this pass at the hair.  I think for the final pass I will be trying to use Xgen to actually place the remaining cards where before I was placing them by hand myself.

Some final tweaks on the Zbrush model before I moved onto retopo and texturing.

I was mostly focusing on slimming down a lot of the shapes and keeping the overall feel more elegant and streamlined since that matches her character.

The face topology Eric taught us was waaaaay denser than I was expecting but this is around the polycount that was used for the new God of War game I think it almost looks film rez but it makes the baking stage a lot easier.  I may build a rig for this character so I look forward to doing some blendshapes with this mesh too :D

Here is the reference from Bloodborne

 Here is my final hand in for Character for Games.  There is still a lot I want to do to improve some of the textures, materials and shapes since I will be using this for my demo reel but I have to move onto other things for now.  Still I am really happy with the level I was able to get this piece in the time we had :)  I also have a turntable you can check out in my Google Drive Folder .

 

 

 

 Here is my final for Game Creation 2  I will be using this piece in my demo reel too so it definitely needs  a lot more work but as a starting point I am very happy with where it is and with a few more weeks of development I think it will be in a good spot.

 

 

 

 VFX ended on a high as I won the final competition yay!! It was a bit of a pain timing everything but with a couple of nights of very little sleep I managed to bring it all together and get the look I wanted.  There is still a few tweaks I want to implement since I hope to use this effect in my demo reel too!  Check out the full animation in my Google Drive Folder .

I also never posted my beam assignment for VFX but I had quite a bit of fun quickly mashing this little guy together rigging and animating him to be the emitter for the beam effect :) again check out the Google Drive Folder to see the full animation.

My final for rigging went well and I hope to reuse most of it for my demo reel characters too.  Towards the last few weeks we focused on some extra techniques like quadruped rigging, twist joints, extended cloth etc.  It wasn't too hard to put the final touches on my rig but I did set up links for the props so they could be parented to multiple positions on the mesh.  When it was all finished I played around with posing the character a little to see if the rig would have any unexpected issues and thankfully I didn't run into any yay!!

Houdini just fell apart in the end I didn't have the time or patience to finish off the renders but I learnt just enough to use Houdini for creating landscapes and maybe using it in the future.

I created this piece using Houdini and Zbrush then baked it down onto a game rez model to use in my environment for Game Creation 2.

Here it is in Engine with some tillable textures and foliage

Thankfully I had an extra week just to work on my Advanced Zbrush and with all the time that VFX character and game creation needed I really benefited from that extra week.  Its been an amazing class and I feel that I have a much greater understanding of Zbrush now :) which will definitely come in handy moving into demo reel.

So yea that was easily the toughest term at Gnomon yet but we all survived and now its onto demo reel super exciting!  I have a rough idea in mind for exactly what I want out of my reel and I plan to put together a little shot by shot block in to get a feel for how it will work.  It simultaneously feels so long ago that I was starting my first term at Gnomon and at the same time like I have been here for ages! anyway I hope everyone has a great break and good luck to us all moving forward.

Week4-6, Midterms done!

Looks like its been a while since I posted an update but here are my projects now as we all move into week 7!

I have been following some Houdini tutorials trying to get a better grasp of the program and even though I cant get anything to look good I do see the appeal.  These rocks and corresponding fiber crystals are all dynamically modeled which could be a helpful tool to use in the future combined with procedural scattering, uv'ing and decimating.

For the Midterm we are building an procedural envrionment.  I still dont know how to render well in Houdini but generating this mountain and scattered trees, clouds and rocks wasn't as hard as I expected.  I think if I learn a few more terrain tools in Houdini I won't need to use World Machine any more.

Game Creation 2 is coming along, though I had a major setback mid week 5 as I couldn't get Unreal to display 3 materials on the terrain mesh without crashing :(  Tried everything I could think of and in the end I got some help from our instructor and it's all fixed now yay!!! (as it always is in Unreal it just needed one button or drop down menu changed and it all worked fine)  The base environment is done so the next few stages will be adding foliage, rocks, and buildings.  Then after that I hope we will cover some more lighting and post processes to make it all look pretty! I know I've had a few classes in how to light well in Unreal but it's still a difficult process I want as much practice as I can get!

 I also played around in Speedtree (which marks the 3rd new program we have had to learn this term :p)  It's a really nice piece of software and gives great results really fast!  Once I have LOD'd these trees and grasses I will be able to scatter them all over my environment.

As always learning some pretty cool new tricks in Zbrush this term with Paul.  I am still holding back on the final for just a tiny bit longer till he covers Sculptris Pro next week then it's all engines go in a race to get my final done.  This week though we experimented with the Zmodeler brush to do some Maya like modeling.  It's pretty good even if the interface and controls can be a little confusing but I am definitely going to use this more regularly now that I know how powerful it is!

 We have covered facial blendshapes IK spines and IK FK arm and leg switches in Rigging now.  That pretty much marks the extent of the stuff I was already kind of familiar with after last term, next week we will be covering cloth and costume rigging! I am really excited for that!
 

Character for Games has been taking up the lion's share of my time these days but I am really enjoying the results!  I have pretty much finished the costume sculpting barring a few little tweaks here and there and the face is really coming along too, thanks to a lot of help from my classmates and instructor!  I am trying out carded hair for the first time too which is really fun but very time consuming! I spend the entire day yesterday just placing cards for my characters hair! and I still think its going to take another hundred or so to really flesh out the style properly!

I built the cards using Xgen, which is very straightforward in terms of actually generating hair but a real pain apparently for moving files around different computers.  I tried to take my Xgen files to Gnomon to render out the hair cards on 3 occasions before I managed to get it to properly load in the Xgen files :(

This is how the hair looks atm just previewing the AO pass on the cards to help with placing them.  Once I am happy with the layout I will take the model into Marmoset or Unreal and see how the cards look with their whole material working.  Then I can set up a back and forth while I add new hair cards to fix up the final look.

So wow all in all I am still just about surviving this term. It's been really tough so far and there are still 5 weeks to go but I can see the faint glow of the light at the end of the term 10 tunnel! good luck everyone

Week 2-3

Well these last few weeks have been pretty tough! I'm making plenty of progress but the workload is getting tougher and tougher.

Rigging is progressing well.  We have moved onto corrective blendshapes to fix some of the skinning issues.  Next up is facial rigging and face blendshapes :D It's pretty fun to be bringing this character to life after not working on it for so long.

 

 Houdini is still really tough, I am following online tutorials to try to understand it better but there is just no time this term to chase down information so its pretty frustrating :(

We missed a week of Advanced Digital Sculpting which gave me time to catch up with character but I think my Cyber Jaguar is progressing well we will see in time when I start working on more finalised parts.

In Game Creation 2 we have started blocking in the environment for the final.  I am going ahead with creating the port town of Bitteryarrow for my story.  I started with a sculpted block in using Unreal and then using World Machine I was able to run some erodes and noise maps to make the environment look more realistic.  I also built a simple script for use in Maya that should help with modeling objects in place.  Essentially it lets you model in XY space and then update your set dressed instances even if you are adding new geometry.  I want to add Bitteryarrow castle, the port town and maybe some boats moving around the harbor.

For VFX we created a rainy scene using a bunch of particles, some animated textures for godrays and a simple blueprint for lightning.  You can check out all the effects animated in my Term 10 Google Drive folder.

Character for Games is progressing just not quite as much as I wanted.  I spent a long time in Marvelous designer trying to block in all the folds.  I guess I can finally move into Zbrush and start fixing the forms and sculpting better folds.  I just wish there were more hours in the week :p