Week 29- Character Project Resubmision

I Started off this week by continuing with some Off the Map work. I wanted to start texturing some of my flower assets to get back into the swing of working on this project.  

Current flower models

However I figured out that I should commit this week to my character project and upcoming presentation, so these took a back seat.

On Thursday I gave a presentation as part of my course. This needed to be in the Pecha Kucha format (10 slides and 18 seconds per slide), resulting in a  3 minutes long presentation. I struggled a little with this trying, mainly with finding a topic to talk on, something that I was confident I could explore in 3 minutes, as most of my ideas would have ran over the time. I also didn't want to pick an artist or game to base it on, because I didn't just want to fan girl over someones work for 3 minutes.

I looked into TED Talks, specifically the talks that ran for around 3 minutes, to inspire myself and get an idea of how other people before me have handled limited time on presentations. I found that many of them presented in a narrative style, and that the speakers were telling a short story in one way or another. So I decided to base my presentation, rather than on information and facts, on a subject that I could present to the audience like a story. In the end I decided to present the life lesson that I've followed throughout my time at university, and the reason behind this blogs name.

The short version of this story, is that everyone has a rock in their life, the rock representing the part of yourself that doesn't want to put in the work to progress. Everyone needs to push their personal rock with them through life to progress anywhere.  The rock is pushed through our lives as we constantly push ourselves. For this presentation, since it's a personal story to me I made the choice to illustrate the slides, which definitely made this whole experience more rewarding for myself, and my audience.

My favorite slide about becoming strong enough to just pick up your rock and power through

Along with presentations this has been a character project week, I've finalized the model, textures and rigged my character to a pose.

Albedo Map

Normal Map

Character Rigged to the final pose

From here I brought my model into Unreal Engine 4 to test out materials. Something that I felt was missing was a glow to my character. Since her design is based around volcanoes I wanted parts of her to seem like she's radiating heat. So far I'd done this by adding emissive textures to the the hair and extremities of my model and by also painting orange glows where subsurface scattering would be on a human but that still wasn't enough.Whilst talking about this to my friend James Broderick (Link to his art blog)  he taught me how to add Fresnel to my character's materials in Ue4 to give it that glow. I then masked it so this glow was only present on the skin, and blocked by clothes.

Fresnel Effect in view port

As a final addition to my Ue4 file I painted  a small flip book sequence for the fire my character generates.

2x2 Sprite sheet

The last time I attempted my character I didn't have enough time to properly render it out, so this time round I dabbled in Marmoset Toolbag, set up a basic scene for my character and made a Character Sheet.

Final Renders

Comparison Shot

With this I finish my Character Project  re-submission. This project has gone so much better than previous and I'm super happy with how the final model has come out.