Dundee 2112

New Semester...

This semester we get to create our own brief to work on.

It was suggested that we try to work on improving something that we're not so confident with.

So this semester I will be trying to improve my concept design skills - something that will be very important if I want to become a concept artist

Final 360 Views

The final 3d model turnarounds. I'm very happy with the results, I think the hand painted textures work well with the model and I'm pleased with the way that both versions of the model have the same overall feeling with only a few slight design differences in the textures and quality. I had planned on making a normal map for the character but I felt like it might take away from the look the hand painted textures have achieved. If I was to use a normal map it would need to be very subtle and I don't think the it would be worth wasting the texture space on it

Texturing

When doing the texturing I decided to hand paint everything in photoshop. This gives the character a unified style and allowed me to compensate for the lack of detail in the actual model. I tried to keep the textures the same style across both the characters body and the jewellery. The main challenge I found was trying to make sure that the characters were painted in the right places of the uv map. I wanted the character to be muscular but not overly so, which meant spending a lot of time trying to get the muscle definition right. I also created an opacity mask for the feathers

3D Models

The final 3d models. I tried to make sure all the faces on the low poly model all contributed to the silhouette and shape in some way, otherwise there was no point in them being there. Overall I'm pretty pleased with how the model has turned out. I like the slightly exaggerated shapes of of the characters body and I think they will look good with more stylised and hand painted textures rather than using photos.

With the high poly model I wanted to try and keep it very similar to the low poly one. using the extra faces to smooth out the harsh edges and make the model a bit more realistic. The jewellery and mask were given some detail to give them some depth and solidity as well as making the details clearer. I'm happy with how the overall feeling of the character has stayed the same, while certain areas have been enhanced. I would like to have done more with the jewellery to give it an extra bit of polish but time was running low and I need to move onto texturing this

Uv Mapping

UV mapping the low poly model

(Not showing up for some reason….)

After this I started on the high poly model, using the low poly one as a base. This made the UV mapping a lot quicker and easier as I already had the base model to start from.

Low Poly Modelling

Beginning to model my character in maya I found these orthographic drawings of the ideal male proportions from Andrew Loomis. 

My plan was to model the characters body to these proportions and and then add the characters clothing and jewellery later

Using a render of the 3d I was able to quickly create an orthographic view of my character to draw the final costume designs onto. And then these would be used to model the characters clothing to scale

I then painted a final version in photoshop to use as a guide when creating my characters textures later. At this point I also decided to give the character a mask. These were commonly used in Mayan culture when they went into battle. Wether this was to scare their enemies or as part of some ritual isn't known for sure but I thought they were very cool looking, and it would let me delete some of the polygons on the characters face to try and cut down on some of the tris in my model.

I made two versions of the character with different collared paint and jewellery to find out which would work best. The blue one felt the most heroic in my opinion so I'm going to go with that. Plus, although I like the green paint I think it could make he character look a bit less human