Master's Project - Head Modelling

I was pretty unhappy with the initial base mesh I had built in Maya that I then took into ZBrush. I had intended to use this mesh as a base for my Master's Project as well but I wasn't happy with the topology so I started again in Maya. This time I just aimed to create the head that I could use to test how the wireframe might look.

I started off by sketching up what I wanted the character to roughly look like in Photoshop, taking some inspiration from celebrity photos. Then I loaded these image planes into Maya to begin modelling.

After watching a few different methods of how to build a head in Maya I started with a single plane and slowly built up detail and geometry as I needed it.

Considering I wanted a low poly, stylised, hard edged look, I may have too much geometry in this initial model but I'm much happier with it than the base mesh I had created.

I also did a quick wireframe render and overlayed it in Photoshop to see what it might look like when my character starts losing polygons.

I'm not entirely sure if I like this, I may have to switch on 2-sided rendered to see the other side of her head or I might have to put a shell on the model to get the same effect. I could also just make the wireframe up in Photoshop which could be slightly more creative and detailed and not just follow the real wireframe.

Comments

Cure - Advanced Skeleton 5

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point. There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de...

Cure - Feedback and Final Tweaks

After our final presentations on Friday I took on board the feedback from the lecturers and implemented it into a final version of Cure. I agreed with everything they said and listed off what needed to be fixed: The biggest issue was that the story wasn't coming across properly as the 'dying polygons' were only ever there in the first few shots and the character didn't seem to lose that many polygons. There were some camera shots that lingered for almost 10 seconds and they needed some variation. Some of the animation needed to be more obvious and expressive. There were errors in the recording from Unity, the eyes flickered and the lighting updates needed to be cut at the beginning of each camera change. The sound needed to be boasted as it didn't come across through a TV. I first fixed the issues of the dying polygons by adding more black polygons to the character that progressively spread as the film went on until she got the cure. I kept these to the...

Tumblr

I've really enjoyed keeping a production blog throughout my masters course so I'm hoping on over to Tumblr where I can follow some other awesome 3D artists! So you can find me here: http://harlequin-werewolf.tumblr.com/ Also, a few of my classmates are on Tumblr here: https://diebrigkuchler.tumblr.com/ https://myanimationjourney.tumblr.com/ https://picturemoving.tumblr.com/ https://tututugod.tumblr.com/ http://mayacossette.tumblr.com/

Dragon Bait and Animate

Search This Blog