Kimiko and co!

Finally, here's the videos of the base mesh of my character, and the finalised props for the project we've just finished! The main aim of the project was for us to get used to using Maya as an alternative to 3dsmax. Annoyingly I've now developed a little bit of a love hate thing for Maya...  half the things seem to take twice as long, and then the other half are super speedy quick. Now if only I could remember how to navigate the viewport in max...

Here's Kimiko from Dresden Codak and props =) (Kimiko and other designs all belong to Aaron Diaz, I have simply edited them to try and get them to work in 3d. Now go read his webcomic if you haven't http://dresdencodak.com/)

Next step in this module will be to take the character and put her in a games engine and look at shaders and such, which I am really looking forward to!

Dr Sketchy's

Managed to get some life drawing done the other weekend and thought I'd share. Went to the lovely Dr Sketchy's in Nottingham (http://www.drsketchynottingham.co.uk/ if you haven't heard of it, and damn, everyone should have and go regularly! Amazing fun and awesome models.)

And for something completely unrelated I found in my sketchbook:

Yeah, I think I was doing anatomy studies. Hm. So. That went well.

Dresden Codak - Part 1

And so Maya happened. Well, we have been instructed that for our first university project of the year we have to model 2 props and 1 character in 3 weeks, but instead model it in Maya instead of 3dsMax.

We we're told to try and pick something that already existed so we didn't have to spend too much time putting together turnarounds and so I choose to go with items and Kimiko from the Dresden Codak universe, as I'm just a little bit in love with the webcomic. (Webcomic here http://dresdencodak.com/. Go read.)

Here's the two props I choose to model, and will later texture. It's Kim's bag and the Nephilopolis (that's like a prop... right?). All designs belong to Aaron Diaz and have been bastardized for 3D.

Sprinkle of WIPs

Just to show I haven't died. Two WIPs I hope to get finished within the next couple of weeks. Trying out different styles atm to help find where I want to head with my drawing. 

Found Small Girl

Little girl I've spent my time while not working on. She may be appearing in a game I'm co-directing for our 3rd year project. Need to get around to finish texturing here. Or just giving her another shoe...

She's just got a diffuse on here.

Touched

Haven't been up to too much since I got back to Bristol, mostly been rough sketches and playing with Unity. So here's the first thing that looks half decent!

I like the horns, but I think I need to work a lot on rendering hair. Also probably need to redo the lips, and actually look at further rendering the torso and her dress. Might make the next picture I do focus on hair, and possibly Tangled for research ;-)

Evaluation

Crazy Skull Lady
This was my only character that I modelled during major project, and I found that it was the project which interested me the most. While orginally not expecting to enjoy the character project as much I found that the organic modelling process was more enjoyable. The modelling on the character could have done more to incorperate edge loop principles around the different muscle groups to allow for nicer modelling for shape and for deformation. I found that the texturing on the character was very fun, but that it fell short of what I wanted in many places. Though I did take the model into mudbox I fell that I could have done a better job on the normal map, as although it looks good from some angles, at others it's too subtle.

 Alice in Wonderland Hotel
This project ended up moving much further away from my orginal intended colour scheme, though still incoperating many of the elements I had intended. I had orginally intended to use much darker colours, however I found that with the theme having such dark colours made the hotel room feel grotty and unclean. Instead I moved into a cleaner colour pallette and brought in some lighter greens and creams to help the brown look cleaner, however still bringing in the feeling of the rabbit hole.

 Pier
This was another project in which I struggled with the lack of details in my concept work and found I had to make up a lot of the details while modelling. If I could have redone the project I would have liked to have spent more time focusing on the textures and how they would effect my modelling, so that I could have done more work with normal and spec maps. While I did use these within the project I feel I could have used them to greater ability.

Victorian Street
While I got through the modelling of this project fairly quickly, I should have allocated more time towards the texturing of the project. I feel that the detail they're lacking really takes away from any sense of realism, and that I should have had a greater focus on the construction of buildings and details during the texturing stage.