Week 10- Almost Done

More on the character project progress! Last week I ended the blog with the finished orthographic of my characters and over the weekend I began to model my fire character in 3D. I found that diving straight into 3d without at least some plan as to how I was going to build this character was a big mistake. especially considering how long it had been since I modelled a human. Se my initial 3d model was bad, to the point of it being terrifying. So I scrapped it and started again taking my time with the topology and overall form of the character.

yerch

With my second attempt there weren't as many hiccups though the face took forever to make, this is something I should practise more as its a recurring problem for me. In the middle of the I went in for review of my progress which went very well. By this time I had a finished 3d model and ideas for the colour pallet of my character.

The feedback from this session was very helpful, all I really needed to do was to go back and make my model look more like my 2d orthographic, as I'd slipped slightly in the torso proportions, I also remade the hair which I found was annoyingly difficult to model and unwrap, as cool as it looked. By the end of the week I had a 3d model that I was happy with.

After I finished my 3D model I rigged it into a pose and turbo smoothed it temporarily.This allowed me to bake out some ambient occlusion shadows. With a render of my characters ambient shadows I could quickly test out my colour pallets on my model, and decide which one I wanted to develop,

Colour pallets with AO overlay

True colours

I ended up going with the second colour pallet shown as it had some of the traditional colours of fire, with a slight purple tint that made it a little more appealing than the other pallets. This tint was something I noticed when looking at volcanoes. The gas and light produced by lava would react with the rest of the environment and mix into a lovely purple/pink smoke.

via

From there I started painting over my render, finishing off the week with a complete concept that I can take into texturing next week.