24/08/15 - UV editing.

I don't understand the process of UV editing and this both terrifies and frustrates me so much.
I understand you have to cut around edges and faces in order to flatten out a mesh but what I'm struggling with is the process of HOW to do that.  I don't know what I have to click to MAKE cuts.  I don't know what options I have to select to fold everything out.  I understand the concept, but its how to go about the basic, unaided process that I'm really struggling with.

I have a script called bt_autoUnwrapUVTool from when I studied 3D modelling and animation briefly at AUT in 2011 which automatically unwraps UVs for you.  Chances are I'll end up using this to unwrap my character model, as its been a very stressful and anxious process trying to understand the method that we're learning in class.

At this point, falling back on something familiar to me is a lot better than stressing myself out over something that I don't understand.

20/08/15 - Completed Prop and Character Turnaround for Submission

COMPLETED PROP:

COMPLETED CHARACTER:

In the off chance that neither of these videos work, prop turnaround can be found here and character turnaround here on the daevabird tumblr.

20/08/15 - Completed Character Model!

Spent today working on finishing my character model!  Spent today figuring out how to add in his hair and sculpt his headband.

Here's the finished turnaround:

 I'm actually quite sad that I don't fully understand how UVing works right now - I feel like he'd look a whole lot better if I could at least texture map his eyeballs and fill in his pupils.  Currently he looks quite terrifying with his blank yellow eyes.

But on the bright side, he definitely looks like a golem with only that single tone on his whole body.  He is quite clearly a small being made of clay, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

I'm working on a turnaround for him now and playing with lighting effects - here's how that's looking:

As soon as my model finishes rendering, I'll put it up on here under a submission label, so stay tuned!

18/08/15 - More sculpting

Since most of my character's body has been made up, I've been focusing on sculpting his face:

I've come to the realization that his face was too wide and his eyes weren't quite in the right position, so I've worked on fixing those.  A lot of the time was spent adjusting his lips and trying to make his nose look really sharp and solid.  Even now something looks off about him but I'm not entirely sure what it is.

I've also realized that by joining all of my geometry together, I've made it difficult to color all the parts of the model accordingly with lamberts.

17/08/15 - Prop Turnaround

Turnaround video of prop for Assignment 2 submission:

In the off chance that this doesn't work, the same video can be found on my tumblr.

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!

10/08/15 - Character Modelling

Today's lesson was an exercise in physical modelling!  Tutor gave us some clay to sculpt our characters, in order to figure out how we would go about wireframing and mapping out their basic shapes and dimensions.

Here is the little Embry that I managed to make in that time:

Drawing a wireframe on him was a little more difficult!  But it helped to have a visual drawn on him and gave me a few expectations for creating his actual wireframe in Maya.  A few places needed more subdivisions than others (most notably his feet needed the most and his arms had the fewest), and having a physical sculpt made me put quite a bit of thought into how I would sculpt certain parts of him.  I'm still honestly rather stumped on how I'm going to do his hair and if I really want his hands to be so blocky.

More progress has been made on my crystal prop and I'm certain I'm almost finished sculpting it.  I do feel like I could have done all of the facets in a bump map or in mudbox now that I look at it, and the final has a lot of edge loops in close proximity to create the sharp edges of the facets, but smoothed it actually looks quite nice.  I'll upload a screencap when I next use the program.

In the meantime, I did manage to draw a frozen Vasili for the plane within the ice crystal itself: