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.

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 - 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.

Dragon Bait and Animate

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