17/08/15 - Character progress and completed prop!

Over the past week, I've been working on building both my prop and modelling my character.  The lack of updates can be contributed to this; I've mostly just been doing grunt work and slowly making progress on my models.  I've tried to document as many stages of progress for these so far, so below are the screenshots documenting this.

First up, my character.  This is how he's currently looking, and the process of building him was simple enough.  I had a few issues with his feet, but rotating things about seems to have fixed them for the most part.

I'm also rather proud of his hands.

He's still missing a few key parts; I need to sculpt in his hair, eyes and mouth, and I may also have to do some refining on his nose and general face area.  The part that connects his arm to his shoulders also seems a bit sketchy now that I look at it, and I may work on refining that too.


As for my prop, it is quite possibly complete!  There has been quite a bit added to it since last time.
First off, more edge loops to keep the sharpness of the facets:

I texturized it with a Blinn shader in an attempt to give it a glassy/icy look:

Transparency was bumped up so that you could see through the ice and then an image plane with the character was inserted into the middle of it to make them look frozen and suspended:

Now more or less completed, all I needed to add was a turntable and play with some lighting effects to make the crystal really stand out.

Once I was finished, however, I noticed that the image was flipping when the back of the crystal was towards the camera, which destroyed the illusion of the character turning about.  In order to fix this, I duplicated the plane and changed the file input to a plain, single color version of the image.  It makes the ice at the back look more dense, and doesn't show the character's face on both sides, which is what I was aiming for.

The final turnaround will be uploaded in a separate video, so stay tuned!