Dragon Bait and Animate

I've spent the last couple of weeks tweaking the character mesh to tidy it up for rigging. I used Advanced Skeleton 5 again to rig this character as well as looking at a few online tutorials to make sure I got the most out of the rig. I also used Advanced Skeleton to build a facial rig which works better than expected although the blink function didn't work properly so I added in my own blend shape to allow the character to blink. I also tweaked some old assets and built a couple of new ones to bring into the final environment.  I forgot that there was an email about sending in artwork that might be selected to be used on the Masters show posters so I posed my character and pulled together a render in Maya that I felt represented my project and compared to earlier work, I feel that this has a lot more style and personality. So now I'm pulling in all of these assets and final ideas into Unity for the final project and I hope to have this all set up b...

I was away on holiday last week so spent a couple of days working on my anatomy in ZBrush Core but it turned into a little piece based on an old painting of mine. I'm actually really happy with how the face came out so I might re-purpose it for another project, possibly Diebrig's as she needs models for the Bee Hand Maidens. 

I started sculpting Elara the mermaid almost a month ago! But Going Live and my Research Presentation kind of got in the way and I didn't have time to finish her. So I sat down at the weekend and today and finished her up. Based on a piece by Nikhil Shinde More on my ArtStation! This was the first time I sculpted in pose and based on someone else's concept art. It was loads of fun and I'm looking forward to doing some characters based on classmates work for upcoming projects. 

I was thinking today about an older concept I had when I started developing the current idea for 'Cure' and I think it would be easier for me to focus on research on something I really care about: Mental Health. The narrative throughout 'Cure' was initially developed with the thought of depression and loneliness being at the centre. The loneliness aspect was singled out for most of the continued development but I would like to bring it back to its roots of depression. With this in mind, I spent today thinking about lighting. After running a couple of tests in Maya, (Lighting in Maya is hard) I sketched up some rough thumbnails of how I wanted the lighting to appear to the audience. So I want to run some more tests and practice lighting in general for the future. In other news, I put together a little comparison image of some concept art and the final model.

I finished a base mesh of my model and it sits at around 1600 polygons. From here I extruded clothes and hair before adding in some grey shades through Hypershade as well as making the hair pink but I'm not sure if that's going to stay. With hair, clothes, eyes and the 'device' in my character's ear, I have around 2000 polygons. I want to run these models past my lecturers to see what they think and if the character looks 'low poly' or just like I have bothered smoothing out the character.  With a model finished, I tried messing about with the Quick Rig tool in Maya which was actually super easy to use and gave me a pretty good base that I could build on.  There are some issues with the rig, namely under the shoulders and the hands that need to be tweaked in the future but it's a start.

I'm going to put this here before I forget. I spent some time today trying to build a different head for my model as I do want to have expressions on my character but I ended up going back to the head I had modelled in November. I spent a while going through edge loops and deleting what wasn't absolutely necessary until I had something I liked a little more. As a test I imported this new head into the model I had finished up yesterday to see if they would work together and I think I like this style more than what I had initially whipped up. (Although there are several triangles... don't tell Sang).

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 mod...

I finished my final renders for my character assignment yesterday. I had spent the day before posing and lighting the character to try and get it to fit with my chosen image. My character's story revolves around performing a ritual in front of a bonfire before dozens of other people so I wanted her to be near a bonfire and ready to summon a dragon. It was a bit of a challenge to get the render's lighting similar to the image and considering we weren't using Arnold or Keyshot with a retopologised model, it made it a bit more tricky. It was a lot of tweaking and adding texture and noise in Photoshop to try and bring everything together as best I could. I'm pretty happy with the results and hoping to have time to retopo the model in the future and get some nice posing and renders finished.

I spent yesterday and today finishing up my model and putting some colour on it. I've since added more detail to the paint as well as posing the character and adding in some lights. I just need to tidy it up and render tomorrow.

I'm very nearly finished my sculpt, just need to add my skirt and tidy up a few things before I paint and pose. I was really unsure to begin with how I would make my braid for the hair but I found a video on YouTube that really helped: So I used this as a basis to build my braid before adding a sphere for the rest of the hair and sculpting it until I was happy. With the hair finished I tidied up some things on the body before adding in some clothing. I built the bracelets in Maya using a torus and pushing the inner ring further into the centre to create a more concave shape. I also built the basis of the gauntlet in Maya using primitives of boxes and deformers to build the basic shape before importing the individual pieces into ZBrush to build the whole gauntlet. I then used masking and the extract tool to pull out the base clothing before going in and adding in bandage-like details. I'm really happy with what I've been able to achieve so...

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 lo...