Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

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 - Animation Tests

I created a really simple and rough animation to test out a kind of animation style I had been looking in to. I know I don't want something smooth or too natural looking as it wouldn't match the character art or environment. I recently saw the Into the Spider-Verse trailer and was really intrigued by this kind of 'stop-motion' style of animation so gave it a go in Maya. I tried the animation with auto tangents before switching to stepped tangents on every 2nd frame and then every 4th (roughly). I actually really like 4s but I want to see how this looks with a full body animation rather than just facial.

Going Live 2018 - Storyboards and Animatics

We started work on our storyboards sometime last week and after the Beano's feedback we had another meeting and discussed how we could incorporate their feedback. We had a lot of back and forth and eventually managed to tighten up our ending and keep our pacing and momentum throughout the short. Anna and Tao created the storyboards, basing everything on Anna's art and I pulled together the animatic and adjusted the timings. We also added a little music to keep some interest. And here are a couple of my favourite storyboards from Anna and Tao.