Week 30- Character Resubmision Post-mortem

Dichotomous Duo Fire Character Resubmission-Post Mortem Q&A

Q: Did my end result represent what I wanted for this project?
Definitely! Before I started this project I outlined a few goals. The first was the bare minimum requirement set with my feedback. The facial topology of my original mesh was screwed up, now it's all fixed.

Checking back to my own evaluations I made at the beginning of my re-submission process I found that I've completely fixed almost all of the issues I had with the original design.

Original Model Evaluation

Minimal Paint over

Re-submission Evaluation

Q: Strengths I found during this project
-I've improved a lot with my texturing and I'm slowly getting better with my 3D modelling.

Q: Weaknesses I found during this project
-At the beginning of the project I fell into the trap of trying to drastically redesign my character. This set me back a couple of days.
-Modeling the hair still gave me problems the second time round.

Q. What stressed me out the most during this project?

-I didn't  stress that much actually, I finished the project in good time. There was some stress since I had to neglect 3 other projects to get this done, without those I would have been fine.
- I did want to improve my model using Zbrush by sculpting the hair and sash but I couldn't figure out the program in time to use it effectively.

Q: What did you learn?
-I learnt a cool Texture trick with normal maps. rather than overall a fabric texture on the diffuse like I did originally I transferred this texture straight to the normal maps.

10 top 3D texturing tips-José Alves da Silva

- I dabbled a bit in Marmoset Tool bag to produce the renders for my character; so I now know the     basic interface, and how to set up 3 point lighting.
- Learnt how to produce a basic flip-book animation in unreal 4
- Dabbled in Fresnel materials

Q: Things I'd do differently if I were to do this project again
-I don't plan on doing this project again.
-To add to this however I'd create a small environment to house this character, since I played around with the idea of placing her above a lava pool.

Overall this project went extremely well, and I've come out with a character that I'm proud to put in my portfolio.

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.

Week 28- Lots of little changes

Still working on my character project, which on one hand is looking really good, but on the other it's taking a lot longer than I anticipated. Something I wouldn't normally mind, but I have 3 other projects to complete in the next few weeks so I'm going to have a very packed month of work ahead of me. I've had to put Off the Map on hold this Easter to get my character project going and I have a presentation and essay to plan for.

The week started with making some final changes to my model, outlined in last weeks blog post, changes that I happy to say have all been made.

I  tried a few experiments with my character mainly in adding details and messing with the hair. I attempted creating space between the hair via alphas to make the hair look more flame like, but it needs refining if I'm going to use this idea in the final texturing, as right now it looks a little sloppy.

Alpha map Test 1

Aplha map test 2

Iv'e added fabric patterns to the trims of my model which worked fairly well. One of my main aims in the resubmission was to add patterns to the fabric as I found it was lacking in detail the first time round. I painted in some cracks on the skin of my model as well as repainting the legs and hands, to give more of a volcanic feel to the design.

Honestly have no idea whether I'm going to get any of my other 3 projects done in time at the quality that I want them to be. Regardless the work that I've done so far is shaping up to be really good, and I'm proud of how much I've improved my character, just through lots of small tweaks.

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.

Week 26: Easter Planning

This posts going to be a quick update.I started this week by writing down everything that needs to done. This is more or less my to do list from now till April 24th (the deadline for my work):

 As you can see there's a lot of work to do

Here's a  summary of what I've completed this week:

For Off The Map
Finished  my 3d flower models, unwrapped and completed the lightmaps for all models

For the Character Project
Evaluated my fire characters design:

Currently working on the paint-overs for my fire character:

Week 25 Part 2: Feedback and a Plan of Action

So on top of the regular off the map work Week 25 was also a week of feedback.  I received my first formal feedback of the year, then had my work review by Jolyon Webb,  an Art director for Natural Motions Games and a previous teacher on the course.

For the De Montfort review  I was assessed on the Container City Project and my Dichotomous Duo character project. For the Container City project I received a 55% mark and to be honest I'm not quite sure how to feel about that. In this project I had to do bits of everything to get a finished game level  out there by the deadline, rather than say focusing on one polished aspect, but it doesn't really seem like that's been reflected in my mark. I'm not 100% sure on how projects like these are marked, as engine work has only been introduced this year. However a large chunk of my time was spent building the level and getting it working in engine, but from the sounds of it I was marked mainly on the end assets that I produced, not any engine work. Either way I don't have  the opportunity to go back on this project, though I'm very much at a loss with how this turned out it's something I'll have to leave.

I was also reviewed on my character project. Being my favourite project of the year I'm glad that I got a decent mark for it overall, combined with my container city project I'm looking at a 2:2. for the year which is leaps away from my bare pass in first year, but still not where I want to be.The feedback I've been given was mostly about the technical aspects of my character model, The main issue that brought down my mark is the facial topology of my character which looking back at it now, is really terrible and doesn't make sense.

Yeruch....

If I can fix that up then I'm on track for the 2:2 but I asked what I could do to bring my grade up to a potential 2:1. The advice given was just to bring the texture up more, ad more details and really sharpen it up, so that's my aim over Easter. My only issue is trying not to completely redesign and redo my character as tempted as I am to do that, just because of the time constraints of this resubmission and the other projects I need to do over the Easter holidays.

What I'm currently working with

My second bout of feedback came mid week when Matt and Jolyon from natural motions visited to talk about the company and upcoming intern-ship opportunities. I showed him the work currently on my Art blog (http://sarahwrightworks.tumblr.com/) Which at the moment only shows the character based work that I've done ( This is a issue in itself as it's difficult to find a place for my other projects  as it they don't  fit with me wanting to be a character artist.)
Joylon focused mainly on my character project for the review.  I was told though my other sketches were ok and are a good thing to do in general, they're not what will get me hired, and make or break my portfolio, which makes sense. I'll keep sketching  but more with the mindset that those aren't the pieces that'll be judged at the end of the day (which means I can keep doing them purely for myself.)

 with my character project he recommended reworking my ice character as right now she looks like she's dressed for the cold, rather than being personified as ice, which I can see now. He also told me that I  need to put some finished projects up in my portfolio. I have a lot of work, but it's just not finished.  Getting some completed projects in there will show that  I can  commit to, and finish a project with consistency.I'd like to demonstrate that with my Dichotomous Duo character project, however with this comes a dilemma of whether I should push developing my Ice character, not just the fire character (really they should both be developed together to make sure they fit as a duo) For my resubmission hand in.

As a final note in my review, Jolyon pointed out the flat style I used for the profile of my Tumblr (and this blog) I suggested I do more of that.

This was surprising  because it is a simple style  and I guess the majority of feedback I've been getting this past year has been calling for more complicated things, not the simple stuff I do for fun. It was nice all the same to hear that someone does like that kind of thing though (besides myself of course =))

To wrap up this post and the week I made a quick action plan listing some of the tasks that I need to do to bring up my character project mark over Easter

Week 25 Part 1: Off the map Recap

 Now that The White rabbit is modeled, skinned and in game I've moved on to modelling my chosen assets for the underground and garden area of the game. I have a few Victorian clocks to model, the "Eat me" cake, and the majority of the super sized flowers that'll feature at the end of the level. Each of these comes with different challenges. The details on the Victorian clocks I've chosen to model will most likely need to be projection mapped onto  a low poly model, from a potentially sculpted high polygon model. Something which I have little experience in. The "Eat Me" cakes will need to be concepted before modelling. Finally the texture of the flowers may prove challenging, since they will be fairly close to the screen the textures need to be detailed and realistic to fit the style that were going for. this I can do to an extent, the big challenge is if I can get this effect with low polygon modelling and if I can push the textures of the flowers further, trying to get the subsurface scattering effect onto the flowers for example.

Example of subsurface Scattering

Here's what I have so far in terms of my assets:

Current Bluebell Model

Current Clock Models