INTERACTIVE :: 26/10/16 - Still sculpting

More progress has been made on the moth!  Yesterday I finished his hair, complete with tiny spirals.  I fell back onto using a NURBS curve + extrude method to make them.

I wish i'd added more edge loops to it though, because the shape ended up kinda awkward.  It still looks good though, so I'm quite happy with it.  The moth is starting to look like a little sheep.

But today, I have finished the basic model!  Instead of struggling with modelling the neck from scratch, I cheated a bit and used a torus.  The fluff on the arms are made of individual spheres.  I also created a second set of spirals using the NURBS curves.

Now that that's been done, I've been doing some housekeeping and organized parts of the moth into layers and groups.  All of the individual parts have been frozen and the pivot has been centred on each of them.  I had a little trouble with objects that I mirrored refusing to freeze, but I got around it by combining and duplicating the meshes and deleting the halves that I didn't need.

INTERACTIVE :: 20/10/16 - Moff progress

Been slowly working on the moth sculpt over the week!  I'm utilizing as much of class time as possible to make progress on him, and its starting to look pretty good!

This is where I was at on the sculpt yesterday, the basic shapes of the body have been pretty easy to make.  Initially I considered making the wings out of planes, but making a thin 3D shape seems to have worked out pretty well too.  Its slim enough that it shouldn't be too hard to move when end up rigging.

Today however, i started sculpting the moth's hair, using one giant piece for the main hair body and smaller parts for the fringe parts.  As much as I wanted to sculpt the entire thing from one piece, I had a hard enough time with the base part, so smaller, individual hair parts are probably the better idea here.

Its been pretty slow going, but I'm hoping to have that and the neck fluff done some time early next week so I can start rigging.  I need to add more circular shapes to the sides of the head and make an indent for the moth's goggles.  Not entirely sure how I'm going to go about making the little curls on either side of his face but I guess I'll figure that out when I get there.

INTERACTIVE :: 18/10/16 - Making Moffs

My job within the group now is to build and rig the protagonist model for our game, animate it, and I'm assuming also program in its required behaviors for Unity.  I began work on this last week by drawing up a sketching up a turnaround to model the character off:

As of right now I'm not sure how I'll be modelling things like the character's hair and fluffy parts out of single pieces of geometry, but I'm focusing on on its basic body structure for now!

It was very frustrating, but I forgot a lot of what I learned about character modelling last year, and it took me so much longer to get underway than I would have liked.  However, I did get started, and so far have a basic head shape to work with.  I'll be constructing the body and arms next, and from there figure out how to create the hair and fluff parts.

INTERACTIVE :: 12/10/16 - Toon shaders

After our tutorial today, I asked Lena and Regan about toon shaders in unity, and was directed to a downloadable package.  From there I used various duplications of the 'ToonShaderLit' material in order to re-create my mushrooms with a more cartoony/comic feel to them.

I quite like these shaders as I was able to use the UVs that I had previously made with them.  The shading is based on a simple gradient which I was able to open in photoshop and modify in order to create a harsher gradient.  Here are the screenshots I took while I was playing around with them

I quite like the results, though I may need to play around with gradients a bit more and see what happens when I put in things like a colored gradient instead of just plain greyscale.

This evening I plan to redraw my moth character, or at least tweak the drawing i did from the first assignment so that I can spend the next few days trying to build a model in Maya.

INTERACTIVE :: 11/10/16 - Assigning group roles

Today we sorted our roles out for the rest of the project for the semester and it is as follows:

Adrian - Character
Patrick - Level design
Dora - Environments
Joseph - NPCs and Enemies

Knowing what I'm going to be doing now means that I can focus on building, texturing and rigging the character to get it ready for the game environment.  The nice thing about it is that it doesn't have eyes, though I feel like it could be an issue modelling the hair and making it animate.

Going to have to pull up what I remember from last year, but at least the overall character will be simpler than my last model.

INTERACTIVE :: 04/10/16 - Animation Demo

Part of the requirements for our submission is to provide a working animation demo for our presentation!  So here are my lil cluster of mushrooms just doing what mushrooms don't normally do in the wild

In the event that this video doesn't work, there is a tumblr version

INTERACTIVE :: 26/09/16 - Mushroom Delay

Spent today working on the cycles of my mushrooms and attempted to find a solution to making my mushrooms delay the way I wanted them to.  Searching on google provided a few scripts, but when I attempted to put them into effect, it came up with a lot of errors and was just generally lots of things that I didn't understand.

My solution is perhaps not the right way to go about something like this, but I created a 'delay' animation that consists of a single still frame of the animation cycle.  By adjusting the speed of this animation, I can make the mushrooms pause for different amounts of time before they begin their cycle again.

Initially I had the delay play once before the mushrooms began their looping animation

but I eventually found that the overall animation of the mushrooms was not as distracting if they had a slight pause after each animation loop, so created transitions going both ways for them.

I understand that a script would be easier and make a lot more sense, but as it stands, the values and how to make them work are so difficult for me to understand.  I'm hoping classes next term will shed more light on understanding, and I think what I really need is just an expert to walk me through them and help me understand what each individual part of the script is for and how it makes sense.  Even things as simple as a yield value and labeling values left me really confused.

In the meantime though, I'm quite happy with the results and I feel like my mushrooms would be a much less distracting background element now.