Week 27- Getting There

At the beginning of the week I had a few quick paint-overs of the redesign of my character. I was feeling stuck with these so I asked for feedback on them.

Surprisingly the feedback was to stick with my original design. Which admittedly is a frustrating thing to hear, it makes me feel like I've just been wasting time.  It's something I get quite a bit recently, after I've been working on several iterations to improve my designs I'll be told to go back to the first one I started with. After taking a break from the project I reflected on the feedback I got and saw where people were coming from. It wasn't that my new designs weren't good (always my first thought), just that I really didn't need to do them, since my original design seemed to be enough. I  guess I get ahead of myself and got caught up with the idea of doing extra That I can self sabotage, when I just need stick with what I already have and bring that up a level. I can always improve and make more designs on a future project.

So I did a bare  minimum paint over, to get the most out of the least amount of changes to my original design. only changing the more important issues that bothered me when first evaluating this. 

paint over on the left, original on the right

The first thing was to in 3DS Max was to tweak the anatomy of my character I improved upon the hands and feet of my mesh, and remodelled the facial features of my character. Rather than push and pull my initial mesh I built the new and improved features outside of the model, then attached them onto my original model. The  resulting topology wasn't an issue as I ended up retopologizing the newly attached body parts in 3D coat.

Improved body parts

3D coat: My main focus of retopologizing was the face as this was a big issue highlighted in my feedback

Face Topology Reference

Current model with some final notes on tweaks to be made

My current to do list for the character project, I've decided to leave the ice character for another time. Green= Completed Yellow= In Progress

I should wrap up my model early next week and be well into texturing soon after.