Character Dichotomy: Postmortem

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to talk about my last project and reflect on what went well and what didn't go as well.
I was meant to post this earlier but I have been very ill the past few days and I had no energy. All I did was to barely eat, sleep lots and whatch Feng Zhu tutorials in bed.

Anyway, I think this project has been very successful although I feel I could've managed a better character. Perhaps I should've spent more time concepting but I was kind of rushing trying to find a good duo. After I finished my final concept, almost everyone was doing their 3D models and it kind of put pressure on me to skip details and focuus on modelling only.

I did some sketches to see what my character could've looked like if I improved its silhouette and its overall feel.

All of this means that my time management was poor once again, or at least not as good as it should've been. I still have to find a workflow that allows me to produce good amounts of work in a short period of time.

I am also a little bit disappointed that I couldn't do an animation for this character. I know it was a stretch goal but still, I really wanted to learn how to create idle animations. It just makes your work look more professional.

Zbrush....I feel I could've pushed my model a lot further, I was being cautious. I am scared that if I try too many things I will get overwhelmed by the software but it is something I need to get better at.

It seems that every project I do punches me in the face while yelling to get better and that's all I can do. I have to keep going and keep pushing myself. I do not wish to be average by the end of my third year.
It's been very tough and it'll only get harder but that's how it is and I am happy to take on the challenge.

Well, with this project done and with my illness almost gone I have decided to dedicate my christmas holiday to revise my fundamental drawing skills! I recently bought an awesome book called how to draw by Scott Robertson and it is incredible to learn design fundamentals.


See you soon!

Leveling up

Hello! today is the last day of term and I couldn't be happier! I finished my dichotomy character project in time and it turned out quite well!

I feel like I am progressing on my 3D a lot faster than I did last year and so far I've been enjoying every project.

okay, let's go back to my dichotomous character:

Texturing was long but enjoyable at the same time. For this project I went back to use diffuse and specular maps instead of PBR. The reason for that is that I wanted to keep my character in 3DSmax since I don't know how to rig and animate in unreal and time was limited for this project.

Halfway through texturing I realised that I had an error in my UVs. The ear mesh was overlapping with the head one which meant that when I textured it, there was a  patch on the side of the head where there was no hair...At this point I didn't have enough time to go back and change my unwrapp, therefore I had to tweak the UVs once the texture was applied to the model. It looks okay now but the UVs seem a bit streched on that particular zone.

These are some of my final renders in 3Ds max. In the end I didn't have time to create an animation which would've been awesome...

I decided to put my mesh into marmoset just for fun and surprisingly it looked good!

I am very pleased with this project. It's so much better than my gladiator one! I feel that every project I do is better than the last one. Hopefully the tutors will like it as well!


With this project coming to a close, my Christmas holiday has officially begun! Time to wrap myself with thick layers of clothing and hibernate (and do some personal work from time to time).

See you soon!

Carla.

Last week of term!

Hello everyone! I can't wait for christmas holidays as I'll be able to have some time off from uni and focus on my own personal work.

The character project is coming along nicely, although I will run out of time to do what I initially had planed..

From the begining I knew I wanted to create a realistic character and fairly high poly. I did the basic mesh  in a few hours and then I started slowing down the process as I started paying attention to detail. The hands and the ears were the most difficult part. I almost spent a whole day modelling them!

For this project I did my concepting alongside my 3D, by the time I had my final concept I had to change my 3D model slightly. I had to make it more skinny and improve its clothes. I tried to capture his facial expression but it was quite hard. I also rigged the character because I wanted to animate at first. I added as many bones as possible and I even added a tail to avoid the 'skirt' to merge with the legs.

Once I unwrapped the model, I took it inot Zbrush and I refined it. I added wrinkles and folds to make it more realistic. I really enjoy using Zbrush but I still don't know how it properly works...I hope to learn some more over the christmas holidays.

Baking took some time, specially in terms of rendering my maps. I sat a whole morning wating for the renders. It was worth it though.

Right now I am finishing off the textures and hopefully, I'll have everything ready to go tomorrow!

As part of my visual studies module I made a wire armature for my character which helped me visualize the human form outside my computer. It was a nice distraction after spending days in front of a computer.

This is it for today, see you soon!

Dichoto..what?

Hello! This is week three on our character project and somehow we got an extension which means our hand in date has been moved to next week! I am happy and confused by this news as I thought deadlines were not negotiable specially this year...The good thing is that it will allow me more time to polish my character.

Anyway, last update I talked about the idea of making two chinese warriors but in the end I decided to change it a little bit. The tutors were right, my characters were very similar and the brief said very explicitly they had to be dichotomous.

I put together one last mood board after I spoke to one of the teachers and he told me about this people that lived in boats along the coast line of china centuries ago. They would rarely touch the firm ground and they were considered outcasts and gypsies by the hans (the people who lived on the ground).
I thought that was very interesting, therefore I decided to base my characters around this idea.

I liked the idea of a master and an apprentice and so I recycled a bit my ideas and started sketching:

By this point I knew the overall look of my characters, so I moved onto colour testing!

I started by picking colours from my mood boards, but towards the end I tried to narrow down the colors to those I felt worked best with the characters.

Then I did a quick value study and finally I had my two charcters ready to model!

This year is a lot more focused on 3D and we barely have time to concept, everything must be quick and efficient and I wish I could spend more time making pretty pictures but oh well..we're 3D artists after all.

This is it for today, next post I'll be talking about the modellig process!

See you soon!

Sentry Gun postmortem

Hello! Today's post is about refelcting on my work! Well, my sentry gun project in particular which I loved.

Here's a video of my sentry gun in action:

I liked this project because they gave us complete creative freedom for the first time. I think this is the first project I am happy with the result. Up until now I never liked my work, but this time was different and it made me feel more confident about my skills and it made me more determined to work harder.

Even though I believe this project was sucessful, there's a lot of room for improvement!

One of the things that the tutors pointed out is that I could've come up with a stronger design if I had done more iterations which I completely agree with. I feel that the rock could've been different, more exciting, a better shape with a better texture.

We get set projects with tight deadlines to push us to work fast through the concepting and spend most of our time on the 3D aspect and that makes me skip a little bit through the steps. I certainly need to learn to work faster...and make the right visual choices faster.

I strated this project with a completely different idea and I spent a few days working on it until I realised that it wasn't working and that mistake shortened my overall project time.

I also feel that my baking could've been better. It was my first time using Zbrush and I came out better than I expected but it could've been way better. I really like using this software and I want to keep using it and improving!

One of the major problems I came across was time management. I need to allow time for the unexpected. I kept on working on this project unitl the night before the deadline and I missed out on adding sound to the scene...
I am proud of what I have accomplished, specially the lightning particle effect but I could've done a bit more if I had allowed myslef more time.

Also, I was pointed out that the emissive color for the rock cracks wasn't standing out a lot and looking at it now they are right. It might have been due to my normal maps or my texture or most likely both of them.

In conclusion, this project has taught me a lot, and it has raised my standard of quality on my projects. I learned how to sculpt in Zbrush, and how to create particle effects in unreal which seemed very difficult to me before this project started.

It's made me realise that I am not as bad I think I am and that maybe, I have a chance to make it into the industry someday.

bye bye

Carla.

Character dichotomy project

Hello! This week we have started a new project, a character one! We have no restrictions in terms of design, triangle budget and texture budget BUT the only rule is that we have to come up with two characters and they have to be opposite to each other.

This project almost screams at you to go towards a stylized approach but I am not sure I am ready to push myself that far away from my comfort zone.

This was my first mood board which I separated by themes. I tried to combine them to come up with something interesting and at first I was quite keen on making a futuristic cyborg lolita character but in the end I decided to go with the oriental theme.

I wanted to create two warriors with different personalities, size and clothing. I also liked the idea of master and apprentice.

This is my silhouette study. I took a generic male and female body and painted on top of them. I do plan on changing their shape and size as I refine them further.

I picked the ones that stood out the most for me and added a bit of detail to them.

By doing this process I found out straight away wich shapes worked quite well in any kind of outfit and which ones didn't. It was hard picking my two characters as I liked most of them.

After I had my pick I moved onto analyzing their shape. We were told at the beginning of this project to look at primitive shapes and what are they characteristics. What do they that make you feel like?

After the teachers had a look at my progress they told me that at the moment, they compliment each other rather than oppose each other. They suggested me to push those basic shapes to a certain extreme to make sure they become different characters.

I suppose that if I had gone in the stylized route I could exaggerate them as much as I wanted to...

I have a few ideas in mind on how to tackle this issue and I might end up adding a little bit of stylization but hopefully, I'll have a pair of awesome characters by th end of this project!


See you soon!

The forest wrath

Hello! I am happy to announce that my sentry gun project is finished! I handed it in on monday and I could not be happier.

Texturing was fun. I decided to go for a stylized look for my turret since realism wasn't working very well for me.

Putting things into engine took longer than I expected due to the position of my pivots. Everytime I imported the meshes and try to put them together and hit play, they wouldn't rotate the way they were meant to. Finally, when my turret was working fine, I came across a bigger challenge...emissive maps.

I had to use emissive maps to make the crystals glow.

I first started by choosing a single color connected to a timer but it only glowed that specific color which made my albedo map irrelevant.
Then I decided to mask my albedo in photoshop so that only the parts I wanted to glow would show up in the emissive channel and it worked just perfect.

I also decided to change the pre-set particle effect to a lightning effect and thanks to a very useful tutorial I managed to do it. For some reason though, it glitches and when the turret fires. It creates a weird lightning effect on the ground...

And this is my final product! I added a few target lights on the base to emphazise the crystal glow. I also wanted to add sound effects but unfortunately I ran out of time.

I am incredibly happy with the outcome. I believe it's the first time I genuinely like my 3D work which makes me more deremined to work harder and be better at it.

I also did a small clay model of my turret.

And we were asked to produce a poster for our sentry gun project as part of our visual sutdies module.

I am not very happy with it... I suppose not being particularly good at graphic design didn't help either.... I might do a better one later on but for now I must put this project aside since I am already working on a new one and it will require all of my time (or most of it anyway).


See you all soon!

Crystalize

Hello! This is my 3rd week working on my sentry gun project! At the beginning of this week I felt a bit anxious since I was a little bit behind on work. Reading week las week didn't help getting things done, but I have been seadily working and I aim to finish this project on friday.

Here's my progress so far:

I used the colours on my mood boards to create my colour palettes and some of them I really liked. In the end I thought that the element that stood out on my design was the contrast between the dark rock and the glowing lines around it. Therefore I went down that route.

I did a quick value separation study using my 3D mesh and then I coloured into my final concept.

Creating the 3D model was pretty straight forward and I didn't struggle too much. I wish I could've added more crystals but they take a good amount of geometry, even though I made them as low poly as possible...

I knew from the begining that using Zbrush was a must in this project due to the organic shape of my gun but I had never touched this piece of software before.

And so I learned how to use it in a day. Well, I learned the very basics but I enjoyed using it! It was a lot of fun and I really want to learn more about it!

Thanks to the notes I took on this lecture and a little bit of help from a course mate I managed to make my first bake. I couldn't get rid of all of the red areas because they were hidden geometry and therefore not very accessible. I tested my baked maps and I couldn't appreciate the red areas so I think there's no point stressing about it. Next time I'll be better at it.


Well, that's it for today. We have also been asked to create a poster to potentially sell our sentry guns, but mine is a gun created by nature therefore I am struggling a little bit on how to make it into a product. I have a few ideas in mind on how  it might work but that's a topic for another post!

See you soon,

Carla.

Sentry Gun project

Hello! This week is reading week (no lessons) which means that I get to sleep for a little bit longer every day. The only inconvenience is that there's barely any contact with our teachers and I have a few questions about this new project...

We were asked to design, model a sentry gun. It could be anything we wanted, from schi-fi nuclear shooting gun to a snow ball cannon. I was incredibly happy to hear about this project because so far we barely used our creativity for our second year projects.

We were given a presentation on how to go through the design process so that we would end up with an awesome gun.

First step was to create mood boards so I searched the internet and that's what I initially came up with:

My initial idea was to create a futuristic turret that would fire electric bursts and I spent about two days working on that.

I created a bash kit by stealing shapes from my mood boards and then I put shapes together to create cool silhouettes.  When I was half way through the process one of our tutors advised me on not taking big shapes from other peoples work because it will end up looking like theirs.  

At this point I looked at my progress and I just didn't like it anymore. I was doing it without any motivation and I decided that I had to start this project all over again.

I chose to randomise the theme for my turret because I had too many ideas in my mind and in the end, fairy was the winner.

At this point I didn't have a clue on how my gun was going to look like but at least I was doing something that excited me. 

I started by looking at tree roots, flowers, butterflies and nature in general and slowly I incorporated more fantasy elements, like glowing mushrooms and crystals.

Then I stole some shadows from my mood boards and created a bash kit.

I shared my turret silhouettes with my friends to find out which ones were the most popular and I was surprised to see that some people picked my least favourite shadows, I suppose they weren't that bad after all.

I picked the most popular choices plus my personal favourite and refined them. Then I looked at functionality and only number 4 (from left to right) worked. It also became my favourite so I was happy with my choice. Looking back I think number 1 looks quite nice, it reminds me of a carnivorous plant. 

Next post I´ll be talking about color picking and my 3D model!

See you soon, 

Carla.