For once it’s nice to be able to say I’ve achieved this week what I set out to do after last week’s blog post!
First of all, in Monday’s session is Visual Design I asked the tutor to take a look at my model, all in all he didn’t see too many problems with it. However the bellowed trousers appeared to be an issue as the didn’t conform to gravity, and things not conforming to gravity might look a bit weird believe it or not. So using the ‘soft selection’ tool in 3DS Max (which moved various vertices as well as the one selected depending on the strength selected) to move the wider portions of the trousers down a bit to make them look a little more realistic.
Pushed Down Pants (Still Held Up By Rope)
I also created the prop for my character this week. Remember I was tossing around the ideas of either a sack or a wheelbarrow from my posts a few weeks back? Well after some though I decided on creating a sack, however, not one that my character would carry like my initial concepts would suggest. I decided to create a sack that would strap on to my character’s back on his belt strap. Looking back I probably should have done some visual development as to how I got to this final idea, but I was worried I would have enough time to do this as well as finishing off the character itself. If I get time at the end of the project I will make sure to get down my though process as to how I got to this decision.
Character with Sack
Character with Sack
My character also got hair! Which will be handy for keeping his head warm if it gets a little chilly in the village he’ll be living in. I wasn’t totally sure how to approach this at first, more hair on characters is done with alpha planes overlapped to give the impression of hair strands. However after talking to other students, to make this look good for a full head of hair, it would take a lot of planes and eat up the triangle budget. So in the end I decided to build out from the base head itself to create a blocky looking hairstyle similar to those seen on stylised games that Telltale create.
Hair Built Out From Head
Blocky Hair Comparison from Telltale’s ‘The Walking Dead’
After getting to a stage where I was happy with my model I saved (and backed up multiple times because I wasn’t going through all that again for sure) and got to work on my UV Unwraps. When unwrapping we had to be careful where the seams on our model were as we didn’t want to make a texture look out of place and wrong in a really obvious spot.
With a character placing in seams isn’t always too difficult, especially when they’re wearing clothes (which I would imagine most do…) as you can put seams on the model where seams would actually appear on clothes in real life. This includes places such as where the sleeve starts as well as down the sides of both the shirt and trousers. Although, saying this, my shirt doesn’t actually meet in the middle due to the belt strap going across his chest so I could get away with having the seams at these points. For the skin portions you are supposed to put seams in paces the camera is less likely to see, such as under the arms that are usually hidden by the sides of your torso and the back of the head which is often covered by hair or a hat/hood of some kind.
Seams (Green Lines) on Character
After having some trouble with the material IDs of my object, the unwrap didn’t take too long to complete so then I quickly managed to render the templates as well as the AO Maps I could use over the top of my textures.
Character UV Template
Character Ambient Occlusion
Sack UV Template
Sack Ambient Occlusion
Speaking of textures, I’m currently in the process of painting my first texture. However I’ll share it once it’s completely, so you’ll have to wait until next week’s entry for that!
This week’s Critical Studies had us looking at peer assessment once again however instead of looking at each other’s work we look at how we can assess each other’s work better. Hopefully this will make future sessions that are similar to last week’s even more useful.
That’s about it for this week though so I’ll be seeing you again next week with my finished character! Bye!
Intamasic(art) 