mi5014tomberry

[mi5014tomberry]

Reflection

My modelling skills have improved dramatically during this module and my confidence has grown with them, I have made mistakes like forgetting to delete the history and breaking my model but these failures are crucial parts in perfecting this skill and I have countless mistakes waiting ahead of me which will further my understanding and hone these skills. I really like the style of the model and it came out just how I imagined it but there are a few things which I would do differently if I was to do this task again. I would certainly want to learn how to use alphas and create fur without having to spend hours moving 1000+ pieces of fur. I would also want to revisit the beard and add more texture to it so that it stands out more in the turnaround. I'm still happy with how it looks close up but from a distance it loses that detail and I would get around it by stylising it more like the Clash of Clans reference so that it felt more shapely and textured.

Going from concept to 3D turnaround is very satisfying to look back on and I'm proud of how things have turned out. Not only am I happy with the design of all 5 characters, I am happy that I also pushed myself to draw dynamic poses for all of the characters instead of a simple T-pose. If I had the luxury of infinite time then I would also have spent some time to develop the costume design further.

Parade Summary: My characters are attendees at Stockholm comic con, in the past a brawl broke out between the Swedes and the Cosplayers wearing costumes which bastardised and sometimes mocked Scandinavian culture (like the Swedish Chef). The townsfolk were sick of it and a snide remark became an all out fight. There were few serious injuries, the worst of which was a plastic arrow to the eye which was of course self inflicted. A truce was called and the two sides settled their dispute, it became a tradition to re-enact the battle on its anniversary every Comic Con parading through the streets outside the Stockholmsmässen finishing with a burning effigy of the battle.

My character is a coplayer dressed as Kratos (a Norse-mythology inspired character) taking a break from the exertion of the battle to stock up on Swedish meatballs.

[mi5014tomberry]

Final Turnaround

Here's the final render, I'm really happy with how the lighting texturing and colouring all worked together. It took 16-18 hours to render at 1080HD in Maya and I decided to render a JPEG sequence rather than an EXR sequence because I really like the dark void behind the character because it make it stand out. None of the detail is lost in the final turnaround in the black void and as it would've taken 36 hours to render as an EXR sequence and I don't have time to mess around in After Effects for ages aswell. I'm think the final render looks great because before this I didn't realise how much of an impact lighting made.

Here are the four test shots I took before fully rendering the full clip and I think they look really clean.

This was the original lighting I wanted to use for the turnaround but when I rotated the model it was overexposed as it got too close to the light. It would've been nice to use this lighting but spending more time editing the lighting meant that I manged to get some nice rim lighting behind the model and add some depth.

[mi5014tomberry]

Lighting

I looked at Gary's studio lighting setup and tried to make a lighting set of my own which would have the same impact.

I followed his tutorials above and played around with the colour, exposure, intensity and positioning until I found something which worked nicely for the turnaround.

Here's some of the alterations I made when figuring out the lighting, when I first did the lighting for the first character I thought it was amazing and then I watched Gary's video and realised how dull and dark it actually was.

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Topology

Here's a quick look at the geometry of all the shapes, I tried my best to keep the topology uniform and it didn't impact my texturing and colour so much that I noticed but it maybe could have cause issues with more complex textures.

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Colour + Texturing

Here's the fully coloured model in the viewport which looks alright but overall is very dark because of the bump maps that I applied to some of the surfaces.

This is how it look initially with just a simple light dome and Gary told me at this stage how I could go about UV mapping everything which and how I could go about adding the tattoo to the body.

The first image is the final texture that I used for the UV map of the body which for the most part is just block colour with the trouser colour and tattoo colour painted on top. I included the UV shell along with the texture on top of it to show how UV mapping works which seems like it is the same way that CS:GO does its skins which helped me to understand the process. At the bottom is each stage of drawing on the tattoo until I managed to get the tattoo to sit on the body nicely. You can see I tried roughly blocking out some highlights and shadows on some parts but it looked a little odd when I put it into Maya and I didn't have time to make nice UV maps for every shape on the model.

Here are some of the colouring tests with a little bit of lighting to see how it effected the model. It was looking very plastic early on because I needed to change some of the texturing settings, primarily the roughness in the specular settings so that it didn't look like a plastic figurine.

I needed to create a UV map for the eye and this time I didn't have Gary to help me with the creation of the shells so I had to figure out how to create the seams and shells, luckily I was just working with a sphere most of which couldn't be seen so I figured it out quite quickly. I wanted to make an eye like the one above for my character as I had in mind toy story characters for the type of character I was making. Without realising it, the style of character I was going for was similar to the Clash of Clans style especially when I was making the hair and if I had this reference whilst I was modelling I might've been able to improve the hair model.

The top left is the texture I used for the final model which took a lot of layer masking of multiple shaded layer to figure out but the glint in the eye was really off-putting when I put it into Maya so I took it out and this worked much better because I could just turn the roughness to 0 on the sphere and it picked up it own highlights which looked much better.

Once I had all of the block colours laid out I was happy with how it looked but it needed a little more to make the character less flat so I used just the Normal maps that i downloaded from Ambient CG to add a bit of texture to all the different materials: fabric, leather, metal, plastic and rubber. You can see it the most on the scooter plastic which added some scratches which were picked up nicely by the lighting.

[mi5014tomberry]

Full Model

Here's the finished model before I went into texturing and colouring and I'm really happy with how it turned out. I learnt a lot through this process and feel much more confident going into the future.

Multiple angles of model.

Here's the model against the turnaround drawings and the main thing that stands out is that its missing the basket with food. I did actually model it but I thought it was a bit too distracting and blocked off the view of quite a lot of the little details I worked on so I left them out of the final render.

[mi5014tomberry]

Scooter

The scooter was pretty simple to make and the handlebars were the only annoying part of the process because I had to find a shape which worked with the positioning, angle and gap I left for the hand and fingers to grip them.

[mi5014tomberry]

Fur Coat

This was by far the most time consuming part of the process because I wanted to give the fur some texture and I didn't quite know how to go about it. I wanted it to have the same rounded blockiness of the beard and started of with much bigger strands of fur but it just looked really tacky and bloated.

I found a few videos to figure out an easier way to make the fur and this video looks great but it just looks too realistic for the type of style I was going for with this character.

The fur in the first video is exactly the sort of thing I wanted for my character but I haven't used zbrush before and didn't have the time to learn another new piece of software and quickly apply it to my model. Similarly using alphas (if that's a feature in Maya) sound like another great feature I should use in future but similarly I just didn't have the time to invest into learning these techniques but I will do so in future.

I also had a look at this video to see how they made hair to see if the techniques were applicable to the process of making fur. I didn't end up following this video for the most part however using the soft select tool did work well for changing the direction of the fur if I pointed it too high.

Despite not using the techniques from the previous two fur videos, I learnt that they used a library of different fur pieces to vary the look of the fur and make it look natural in a group. I made the piece on the far left first and messed around with the shape to create a few different pieces. It took a long time to get the amount I needed to cover the whole back and I think there were around 1300 - 1600 pieces in the end. In the video you can see I managed to make a few little clusters of fur which worked a couple time but each piece of the cluster always need some adjusting. If I do this in future I'll probably take the time to learn how to use alphas as it seems like it could really speed up the process.

[mi5014tomberry]

Clothing Accessories

Here the modelling process of a few different accessories like the shoes, skirt-thing, body armour pads, buckles and belt changes.

[mi5014tomberry]

Clothing Error

I made a start on the little details of the face with a lot of extrusions and reshaping but I didn't realise that you needed to delete the history of your shapes before you close the project. I learnt this the hard way and lost hours of progress on the jacket and beard, luckily the glasses, eyebrows and belt weren't too difficult to fix because it was only the mirrored half of the shape that broke so I could just delete that half and mirror it again and delete the history.

[mi5014tomberry]

Body Sculpting

Here's a step by step look at the modelling process for the body, it took a few days to get everything figured out because I hadn't done ears, arms and legs before and connecting them to the torso and head was a faff. I followed a mixture of the techniques I learnt from the previous exercises modelling a face and Baymax however I had to take a different approach to sculpting to the body than I used for Baymax because the geometry of the head would be much more complex and I thought it would be easier to connect each limb and head to the torso once I have modelled them individually.

My turnaround reference drawing didn't help me figure out how to model an ear so I spent some time looking at a few videos and finding reference images so that I could figure out the best way to go about it for this character. I thought the top video's ear was a little too cutesy for the character I wanted to make but it looks like a good option for simpler characters so I used a few tips from the other two videos to figure out my own instead.

I used these ear images as reference image planes within Maya so that I could sculpt using them as a baseline. I used the third image to figure out how an ear would connect to a fatter face - would it squish next to the skin/ would it come out at a different angle? Similarly I used the last image to figure out how the head, torso and arms all impact one another - do the arms squish into the belly or does the belly push the arms out/ how does the head connect to the torso if you can't see the neck?

The hands were another area which took a little bit of time to figure out because they were posed gripping onto handlebars. The first two images are examples that Gary quickly made to show me one way of going about the fingers and gave me a better understanding of how the geometry all connected. I thought that sculpting the fingers, thumb and hand separately would be a better way of approaching it because I wanted to get a clear hand shape defined so I went ahead my own way sculpting them individually in the last image.

[mi5014tomberry]

Character Turn-around

I've finished all of the turnarounds I need for the rendering to take place, there's a few inconsistencies between the designs like the horn missing or the fur on the chest not always going above the strap but I can pick and choose which things to tweak now that I have at the very least got all of the features and proportions lined up.

This was the first design of chubby Kratos and its a little different to the final turnarounds because drawing this sort of a character from a flat plane perspective like front or side on does tend to make certain characters look a little strange - like how the Simpsons always look really weird front on. I'm hoping I can get the final mode to look like this one in the end but we'll have to wait and see how things go.

This was the next step in the process and it was really difficult to maintain the rounded shape of the design from a such a flat perspective because there are a lot of extremities which make it look closer to being square like the pelt hanging from his bely and the shoulders jutting out but underneath all that it should hop[efully retain the roundedness.

This was probably the most difficult drawing to finish because I am working with both a pose and a body type which I have not drawn before which complicated things. It took a while to figure out the head placement because I wanted the character to have a double chin which almost melded it to the body and hunched shoulders and back fat which exaggerated the shape of the body but figuring out how to made it still look believable with the belly at the same time took a while. The arm fat was also something which took a while to figure out because arms are already annoying to draw and it was made doubly so when I tried to figure out how to make them look like bingo wings.

These are some of the images I used as reference primarily for the final drawing.

[mi5014tomberry]

Line-up and Poses

I tweaked a few things in the final designs in the previous post so that the group worked together as a group. I mainly had to exchange the green for a muted blue so that the contrast didn't set them apart. In this line-up I posed the majority of them so that they work within the imagined scene of a brawl at Comic-Con with four of them engaging in the fight/re-enactment and Kratos driving off to one of the food stalls at the side to fill up on snacks (I originally placed him off to the side but the image is large enough already so I just slotted him in next to the group). If I have the time I'll add some of the little Swedish cube characters wearing different pieces of Swedish paraphernalia - one dressed as a Viking, a group wearing Abba costumes, one dressed as Pewdiepie, some wearing Ikea merch/ furniture and maybe a showdown between the Swedish chef cosplayer and an actual Swedish chef.

I recorded a lacklustre drawing process video by trawling through all the different layers so you had a better idea of how things came together and I'm certain that all of the final designs are huge improvements of the pencil sketches. I'm a little bit picky about something with the final Kratos design because that's the one I'm moving forwards with and you can see that the shape of the body went through a few changes and ended up much more ball shaped than a few of the prior designs and can't quite decide if the frumpiness of some of the prior drawings could have worked better.

Aside from images I took myself, these are the additional references I found for:

Kratos

Swedish Chef

Karl/ Hiccup

Gimli

[mi5014tomberry]

Polished Character Poses

Here's the first possible design of my Parade Characters with a few of the textures I could use for the 3D render. I haven't played around with the idea of painted cardboard yet to make everything look cheaper but that's something which I could save for the 3D model itself. I want to make at least one person from each side because if I stick to the little boxy swede characters then they would be very easy to model and would prove to be a good stating point.

I finished off the Hiccup cosplayer which took a lot longer than I'd hoped to make, I think the pose complicated things but these poses should make the final character line-up look much better because I will have made a dynamic scene with the Swedes attacking the cosplayers. I'm holding back on shading until I've got the base colours sorted for each design which I will hopefully have figured out over the weekend.

I finished off the Swedish Chef character based on the sketch I did previously. Out of all the characters, I wanted the strongest one to be the stupidest one hence why I've made the toddler wearing a Swedish Chef costume the only capable fighter in the bunch. Once I have sorted out the designs for all 5 cosplayers, I'm going to tweak the colour scheme of each drawing into one cohesive group so they are more identifiable as a unit.

Figuring out the right posing of this character took a long time to get right. It's somebody dressed as Gimli moving around with shoes stuck to their knees, it's another stupid idea but the thought of someone wriggling around on a silly battlefield with shoes strapped to their knees seemed about par for the course. The original drawing was very flat and statuesque so I posed him seconds after one of the swedish gremlins kicked him in the balls

This drawing really took a long time to figure out because of the detail in the costume, I wanted to find a way to add this costume without losing the roundness of the body and I think I've managed my goal of creating an almost spherical Kratos on a scooter. When I model this design I'll probably add some food in his basket at the front and some crumbs on his belly, there's some wiggle room for sure. I've also decided against making the Swedish characters unless I manage to get everything done early enough because these character designs took longer than I'd hoped.

[mi5014tomberry]

Initial Character Designs

I sketched out a few potential designs for the characters in my Comic-con brawl playing around with a few different characters and physical traits that would make interesting designs. I need to go ahead and push these designs a little bit more digitally to play around and find a style which works cohesively to tie the group together.

First up is fat Kratos, I based the design off of Boogie2988 because I thought the two together could make a fun character design. I want to tweak a few things in terms of proportion and size because right know he looks stronger than I had imagined. I need to make him more rotund starting with making the legs look stubbier like a babies legs. I could also put him in a rascal as a chariot to ride into battle, maybe decorated with cardboard boxes to look like a horse. I also might change the bushy beard to a neckbeard.

I started with a big fella so I wanted to try out a scrawny lanky guy to differentiate the group. I used Daxflame as the basis of this character design and there isn't much I think I need to change with this design, I think I'll try to conform the other to a similar style as this one with their own poses that match their physicality (or contradict them if its more interesting).

Here's a baby wearing a Swedish chef helmet, there's not much more to it. He wasn't really fitting into the ensemble but I still wanted to draw him so I'll see if I can find a way to fit them all together, maybe he can be in a sidecar attached to Kratos' rascal.

Here's a Hiccup design based on Karl Wheezer, I might try to dress him up as Astrid instead because at the moment its a bit of a boring design but that might be down to the pose I have here.

Here's someone cosplaying as Gimli with shoes on their knees, its really stupid but I liked imagining a stupid fight happening with this guy in the thick of it shuffling around on his knees.

I thought that designing the Swedes could be a little boring so I made some stupid little guys wearing Swedish stuff and added a little Pewdiepie driving a motorised clog. I like theses stupid little designs because if I made actual Swedish people I would either have to make normal looking people based on Stereotypes (Blonde Haired people charging into battle to the sounds of Abba's greatest hits) or just some Vikings. I could make some overly muscular Vikings fighting the convention-goers or I can say that's who my characters are fighting.

For the final render, I think I want to make Fat Kratos in a Rascal driving away from one of the Swedish Goblins.

[mi5014tomberry]

Head Modelling 2 - Class Exercise

Here's the final model with a few little tweaks, as a model matching the shape of the reference it does the job pretty well but I would definitely need to retopologise some areas to clean up the edge-flow.

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Head Modelling - Class Exercise

To practise more complex modelling in Maya we had to follow along with Gary's tutorials about how to model a head in Maya. I started this project three times; firstly with a cartoon reference side and front shot but the features didn't line up, secondly with Gary's images like in the tutorial however the lesson ended before I had time to progress so I started again using my own images.

I thought I lined up the features of the head well enough to model but I ran into some difficulties further down the line. I thought that as this bust was very angular it would make for much simpler modelling and when it came to modelling, focusing primarily on maintaining good edge flow, I realised that this bust uses a lot of irregular polygons including countless triangles and ngons and I think it would have been easier to model a regular rounded face as there is more freedom to create your own shapes.

I copied the model at each stage of the process to properly document how I progressed.