Dragon Bait and Animate

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 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...

I spent a little while working on setting up a basic scene in Maya and found a lot of inspiration the the PS4 game 'Bound'.  I love the way they do the far away scenery and I like the idea of the world cracking and moving around my character so I tried to incorporate this into the test scene I was building.  There's a lot that still needs to be worked on, especially the far away background but I'm happy with how it's slowly coming together. I also spent a bit more time playing about with lighting in Maya and trying to get it to look a bit more like I wanted it to look originally and the idea that the face is projecting it's own light and coming to life. Again, there's lots more to work on but I feel like I'm getting somewhere.

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've been spending some time in ZBrush this week and last week to try and build up my character model. I'm actually really enjoying using it but it is quite difficult to get into the interface which is taking up more time than I would like. However, I really like working in it once I get going and have made some progress with my character. I started with a really bad base mesh. I had made it in Maya but I was really unhappy with the topology so I Dynameshed it as soon as I took it into ZBrush. Then I just continued to built up shapes and increase resolution. Still a long way to go, but getting there!

For my character assignment, I've been working on some storyboards for a while now. They are very rough and very basic so I want to go back and re-do them with a little more focus on movement and also have the ratio correct (16:9) or at least as close to that as I can. The story revolves around the Dragon Walker summoning a dragon from the fire outside her tent. Ideally, I think I'll add in an audience or the rest of the tribe watching her summon this as if it's a massive event that people come from all over to witness. Last week I also worked in ZBrush. Outside of class, this is the first thing I've created and I wanted to start with something a little smaller but still with a lot of detail so I decided to make the skull from the Dragon Walker concept art. It's still a really low resolution so I'll add detail later and increase the resolution to get a good final product.