Week 10- Polish Week

This week was dedicated mostly to writing an essay about my 3 previous projects, though I did manage to spend some time polishing the outcomes of my leyendecker Vikings and Nano Pirates:

Vikings:
Responding to feedback that I received on this project I focused on the render quality of my characters, looking into the lighting of Leyendecker and putting those into my finals.I was told that "particularly in the case of Hel, there are parts of the character where the edges feel flat rather than turning away, they lose their volume. The rule "Value change equals form change" should help you here. As a form turns away from a viewer, that face will be picking up either more light or shadow than before."

It was also noted that Hel was the only character with the leyndecker look With this in mind I produced some thumbnails in Leyendecker's style putting my other characters in that style. Unfortunately I only had the time to finish Hel's Promo Image:

Nano-Pirates:
For my Nano Pirates I improved my carpenter design, as it was the weakest design of my pirates. I also produced a Promotional image for my Captain character, then put some more development into my Sailing Master's Character sheet.

Promo Image Thumbnails

Week 9- Wilderness Warrior Hand in

Name: Sarah Wright
P Number: 1322992x
Email: sarah.wright7@email.dmu.ac.uk
Project Title: GP- Highly Stylized Character Project

Overview:
To create a miniature character based on the given concept for a mobile game. Use the concept as a guide and include all the key features. Textures are to be hand-painted and your model will be diffuse-only, through use of a sculpting program to accentuate the volume of diffuse shapes is completely acceptable.

The process for this included:

• Evaluating and editing the existing concept.
• Exploring colour pallets.
• Sculpting a base model.
• Retopologizing and modeling from the base sculpt.
• unwrapping, texturing and rendering the model ready for presentation.

Concept Art:

Sculpting and Retopology:

Textures:

final texture with alpha masks

Mount textures

Sketchfab Viewer:

Wilderness Warrior: Scout by Sarah Wright on Sketchfab

Beauty Shots:

Evaluation Q&A

Q: How well did I manage my time?
Looking back on my time sheet I was pretty much spot on with my management. I finished a little bit earlier than expected so I had more time to put into setting up a scene.

Q: Did my end result represent what I wanted for this project?
This project went significantly better than I expected. Since this was my first time using sculpting for a project I was not entirely sure how this would turn out, and things weren't looking great at the retopology stage. It was only when I baked down my sculpt and put on the base textures that things started to come to life and I could visualize how this model would look in the end.

Q: Strengths I found during this project:
Hand painted texturing is a strength of mine and I feel like I showed it well in this project, as well as being able to quickly evaluate and edit a concept into something new. I think it would be fun to go all out with details on this model, but as it is supposed to be made for a mobile game I can get away with the details as they are. My presentation has improved to the point that I feel my beauty shots are portfolio ready.

Q: Weaknesses I found during this project:
Retopologizing my sculpt proved difficult when it came to areas like the hands and hair. and my unwrapping needs some work in a few places like the snail shell hair and slingshot, which made texturing difficult despite using a vertex painting programme.

Q. What stressed me out the most during this project?
Retopology and hitting the tri budget took a lot more time and energy that I originally anticipated.. Most auto retopology programmes that are used to quickly lay down topology on sculpts aren't effective on such a low poly model so everything needed to be connected manually with the exception of the hands, which were retopologized in zremesher and cut down in 3ds max.

Conclusion:
Overall this project turned out great and i'm extremely happy with my results, to point where I can can see myself making a series of wilderness warriors in my spare time.

Week 8- Texturing!

At the end of last week I was given some feedback on the hair of my character, mainly the fact that the hair that she had would not fit under her the helmet in the concept. Since I had completely forgotten about the helmet I decided to sculpt that in as soon as possible, before I continued with my retopology. Luckily I could do this with a few adjustments, rather than having to completely redesign the hair. Here is the finished sculpt:

From here I continued with retopolgy, using 3D cioat for the body and face, then 3ds Max for the simpler accesories. Zremesher was also used for the hands and hair. The whole retoplgy proces took longer than I expected, mainly becasue of the low poly nature of this model. Auto retoplogy tools weren't an option for this model as they deal with much higher budgets than the one set for this project. I also ran into a glitch with 3d coat where I could not import objects I retoplogised in 3dsmax into 3D coat. so there was a lot of back and forth between programmes and time spent trying to fix this.

With the model complete I unwrapped it using 3ds Max and 3d Coat

From here I baked an AO and normal map (to use outside this project) from my sculpt to my low poly mesh in xNormal. As this was my first time using this programme there were a few mishaps, but I ended up with some good bakes that I could use for the basis of my texturing.

Baked maps

Starting texture

Following Feedback I smoothed out my model as well near the waist and under the chin, and then continued with my texturing. I wanted to add more character to the face so I added a few details. I also played around with having a slight expression on the face, (as well as a neutral look) since all of my current character models lack expression.

Here is my model at the end of the week:

.
At the end of this week I did complete my goals of:

• Finish retopologizing my model
• Unwrap model ready for texturing
• Be well on my way with texturing.

Though I chose not to Sculpt in extra details to bake down into the base mesh as I felt that I could paint these in fine.

My goals for next week are:

• Fully finish the texturing of my model.
• Have the model rigged to a pose and rendered for presentation.
• Stretch goal: Have an expression sheet for the character.