Month: February 2023

Hi-Poly and Low-Poly

Coming into this project, I had made the mistake of creating my hi-poly model, before my low poly model, making it harder for me to show my process and flow in this assignment. I tried to rectify it by unsubdividing my model, but to very little success.

A massive difference was made with this as well, considering my unsubdivided at best was around 1,300 faces, whereas my new low-poly model is around 400-500 faces, which is much more efficient and detail can be added easily by use of loop-cuts.

Clothing – Quite Problematic

First of all, I have absolutely no clue how clothing works in blender or maya, it is something I have never really worked with, besides when I used to rig characters in college, and whilst I understand how to weight them (only in blender) I have absolutely no idea on how to actually make them. In this project, specifically Grub’s design, this is going to cause a big chunk of problems (unless I sculpt).

However, I could sculpt, but at the same time, I am not sure how I can achieve this, and make it look realistic with physics and all, so im trying to go with the route of clothing simulation, before apply a modifier, to varying degrees of success. My first attempt was atrocious:

However, my second attempt went much better, but there still were some problems with it:

There are still some problems, but I am looking to fix these as I go along with the project, as the rigging and texturing stage of this I feel wont be as bad for me as I have experience in both of these skills. One more thing to note, Grub’s trousers are part of the body, as I want to texture straight onto it and use normals there.

UV Mapping!

I have previous experience in UV Mapping, but never thought of the idea of optimising my UV Maps. However, considering most of my model is mirrored, it makes a lot more sense to map the island to the same so that my textures display perfectly on both sides. However, I will show an example of the current state of my UV maps (as of 6th March 2023).

However, there is much work for me to do on these, and was the result of me just marking some seams and doing a regular unwrap, I need to optimise this.

Current State of Grub!

I felt like I didn’t make enough progress, but the next stages of this project are resurrecting old knowledge, I will ask others for assistance on how to work with clothing, and I do want to do some sculpting. Also I thought the weekend was a day longer than it was, e.g. on Sunday I thought it was Saturday, whoops!

Art Styles, what do they mean?

Before getting into the process of trying to create base models of my character, I need to consider what an art style actually means and refers to, as to just creating something similar, in order for me to be fully immersed in my project in order to produce the best final model possible. In my case, I really have to consider the 3D style of a Skylander: how is it rendered? does it have highlights? is it lowpoly? what is its color scheme? does it make use of normal textures? what should the quality of my textures be?

Many different factors need to be considered so that I can understand exactly how I want to do things with this project and plan accordingly to different problems I may encounter.

In this example, I can see that it makes use of shadows & highlights, looks somewhat low-poly (excluding head and hands). It doesn’t appear to make use of normal textures or mapping, all of it looks modelled and sculpted, but still follows the cartoonish approach, I note this style due to the large hands, small general body, as well as squished face proportions, whilst also being wide and covers enough of the face to give space for more detail. However, there being no outlines can make it hard to skew my point, but at the same time, it is no where near realism

Maya v. Blender

When it comes to deciding what im going to model my base in, I have to look at the 2 main contenders for modelling, and factor in benefits and cons. For example, I have much more experience in blender than I do Maya, but Maya has better UV mapping for example, however, I personally dislike its keybinds and shortcuts as they aren’t as user friendly, when compared to blender’s shortcuts. On top of this, I find the UI of Maya to be hard to read and figure out, resulting in the general experience of me using it for this project to be quite unsatisfactory. In this case, I am going to use blender purely for the workflow speed, I need to dabble in Maya in my spare time.

Colours & Silhouettes!

Before modelling, I needed to come up with my colour palette for Grub and also define its silhouette to see if the design is recognisable just from its silhouette, this in turn makes a good unique character as it can be defined based on its unique features.

Modelling time!

Now its time to model Grub, woohoo! First things was the basic head shape, I started by creating a cube, and adding a subdivision surface modifier on it, and upscaling viewport to 4. Why this over a regular UV Sphere? Mainly due to topology reasons, when it comes to sculpting later on, it is much easier with a subdivided cube, as all of the topology is square, where the top of a UV sphere has triangles, causing complications in sculpting.

When creating the body, I also made use of a cube to start it off, I also worked with the mirror modifier on, so that my character would be exactly the same on both sides, something which my drawing unfortunately didn’t do, and did cause some delay in my workflow, but not massively. A main struggle im looking at is how im going to get clothing working, possibly soft-bodies to vertex groups. For now, here is my progress on Grub (as of 26.2.23).

Texture Practice

In a short lecture from this week, there was a crash course on texture making, specifically in photoshop as supposed to substance painter, which was quite refreshing, as i used to texture make mainly in college before coming to UAL. Here are the results from that workshop! (note textures are in 128×128)

For now, that concludes week 2! Next week I’ll focus on making sure my base model is fully established, and that I can go into sculpting and starting to texture some parts of the model!

A new project begins!

A new semester, a new project! Currently, I am tasked with creating an original 3D character, with some guidelines I need to follow in terms of 3D style, character class and also an emote, which I will most likely animate after I finish modelling!

Research!

Before getting into the design process, I need to concept and think about possible reference for my concept. For this project, there is a specific set of themes of which I need to follow for my 3D Character:

I have decided to pick the Skylander’s IP, with a Happy Wave emote, and the Royalty/leader class. Following this decision, came the brainstorming and sketching process for my character!

Sketches!

With my character concept, I really wanted to push the idea of having my character have really un-natural proportions, and really want to push that idea, as I feel it can be used to make a really unique idea, as well as push the limits of my rigging capabilities. At the same time, it fits really well with the Skylanders theme. I picked Royalty as my class as I would like to see what a unique character or figure would look like but with traditional royalty design.