Master's Project - 3D Modelling

Well the winter break has been miserable for me. I have been really ill for the past 3 weeks which has been super annoying and I haven't been able to concentrate at all. So this week I'm going to do my best to get as much done as possible before going back to uni.

First things first I want to simplify my character. I pulled together a simple model in Maya yesterday but I want to speak to my lecturers about topology and general modelling before I go too far.

I think I might push the shapes further rather than just having a basic female shape and see what I can do to give the character more personality without adding too much detail. My issue at the moment is the face as I want to be able to convey some emotion through the face but I still need it to be low poly so I want to see how I can create facial features without 'breaking' the model.

I also want to look into putting in a very basic rig and seeing what kind of movement I can get from a low poly model as I've never animated one before. And I also need to keep testing how I'm going to make my character 'lose' polygons. I think I might roughly UV the character and see how I could work a texture into the loss of polygons.

I also have a few (bad) sketches that I whipped up before Christmas where I tried to rough out what the character topology could look like so I will need to get those scanned in soon.

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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

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