Creating the Props

 22-29/10/21 - Week 3/4

At this point in the project, all I have left to finish off is the props, this includes for the clothing and also for the small scene that I want to place my character in. This is what I have in mind for the scene:

I'm hoping that this will add a bit more story and fill out my character a bit more. It's only a few things too so I thought to quickly finish these to have an overall more impressive, finished example of my work.

I first wanted to get the character herself finished off sculpt wise ready for retop as I was aware of the quickly approaching first batch of feedback. To make the belt buckle, hook and straps for the waders I first started in 3dsmax. I feel a lot more comfortable in max to create good looking hard surface as I find z modeler a bit finicky sometimes, so to be quick I didn't want to start testing out my skills with this.

Here is what I made in max, as you can see these are quite hightop as I wanted to get some nice and smooth edges and some detail in for the sculpt, I then want to go back and create a low top for these as this just makes more sense and is easier for me to work out, as they are quite simple I don't think the retop would take particularly long either. These were just created in a simple process and then given more topology and smoothed out with turbosmooth.

Once imported into zbrush I placed them in the correct position and slightly adjusted them to fit the sculpt. Overall, I think these look how I wanted them to and really have filled out the sculpt a lot more, its much more alike to the concept so I'm pretty pleased to see the sculpt in a much more finished state.

As for the ropes and netting this was a bit more complicated since its quite a difficult thing to try to create. For the netting around the waist, I was at first thinking about trying to create the cris-cross pattern onto the netting in 3dsmax by using a method I found in a tutorial but after assessing how complicated it was I have instead decided to make my own texture in designer and place it onto the mesh. I am hoping I will still be able to get results that I am happy with this way.

Following the method I had in my head, I first started in Zbrush and sculpted in the shape I want for the netting. Initially I was going to use just one subtool for this but after thinking about it a little more I decided it would look better if I demonstrated that there was more than one net there since you will be able to see through them. This will hopefully fill the space a bit more and make it look more realistic.

For the ropes, I also did these in Zbrush by using another tool that creates a curve topology, so this was a bit more simple. I also used the move brush to manipulate the shape to exactly what I wanted.

Moving back into Max, I first started by adding the buoys onto the ropes for the finishing touch. At this point, I also need to bring up some of the obvious cuts I have made from the initial design due to time reasons. I have decided not to add the ropes around the arm as not only did I make an error with spacing here so it would be really hard to add in, I don't think it adds an awful lot to the design and I think it is still successful with or without this piece. I have also not done the smaller pieces that were hanging from the belt, again I don't think the design suffers too badly without these pieces and due to time in general it makes sense to leave this out. Ideally, I would have liked my character to include all of these smaller details and I perhaps will try to include them in the future, but for now I believe they are reasonable sacrifices.

Next, I focused on the scene I sketched out earlier and created the low poly for the barrel and planks in Max. I then took these into Zbrush and worked into them to create the high poly, here I also created the fish sculpt that I would use to duplicate into the scene. I did end up changing the shape of the planks overall to be a bit more appealing but other than that this was rather simple.

I also quickly duplicated the fish into the barrel so it can be made into an alpha and retopped both the solo fish and the ones in the barrel to get ready for the retop in general. I plan to arrange the fishes in unreal as this makes a bit more sense to me.

In terms of progress, I am a bit behind at the moment. Referring back to my plan, at the moment I should have finished all of my props last week though I have only just finished. I am hoping to catch up and get as much retopping as I can done for hand in on Friday as I feel it is a good point to get feedback at as sometimes I do struggle with my retopping. If I do have to continue retopping into Week 5 it is not too much of a problem as I have only assigned myself the unwrap for that week as I have to go somewhere where I won't be able to complete much work. I can push the unwrap a bit further into the next week and just work at it slowly over the period of time I am sculpting the next project.

Hopefully, I can get as much done as I can and it won't cause too many issues.

Sculpting the Clothing

 18-21/10/21 - Week 3

This week is mainly about finishing my sculpt so I can move on next week. Obviously, the next thing I needed to tackle was the clothing. I haven't tried to do stylised clothing before so I had to find some reference for the type of style I was going for.

I first started with the full length waders, I really wanted to get across the type of material and the structure of the folds so I was collecting a lot of reference but at the same time trying to get the style I was aiming for. It was a very convoluted process but eventually I found a way to create the folds I was seeing in my references, this was by using a couple of brushes from the Orb brush set pack that I installed;

You can find them here:

https://orb.gumroad.com/l/nOkHw

Full credits to Michael Vincente:

https://www.artstation.com/artist/orb

I mainly used the slash to create the indent or sharp, triangular points you can see on the references. I then blended these out a bit and was using pinch to refine and define. This was my first attempt:

At first I was pretty pleased with how this was looking and I assumed I was on the right path but after getting some feedback I found that I had actually gone too far with the folds and they were both too much and had a focal point to her crotch area which was not what I was going for. Looking at references for longer and toning down my approach a lot I ended up with a much better version.

This is much more refined and has the stylistic values that I was trying to get, I am much happier with this version and am really glad I followed the feedback here. The only issue was that this took me a whole day to deal with and create, the lack of experience with clothing and stylisation in general was really slowing me down here.

I then began to block out some more of the clothing.

Working into this was also quite confusing as again I fell back into wanting it to convey the material so much and this needing to be somewhat realistic which obviously is missing the point of stylisation in general. I was unable to get feedback during the main bulk of rendering out the clothing and this meant that my results were far from the quality of the waders.

As you can see, the issues that appeared with the waders in the first place was echoed in the rest of the clothing here which wasn't good as once I got feedback I had to readjust everything which used up time and also told me that I had wasted time in adding so many folds.

The main issues are the lack of silhouette, the folds don't play into it and it had also changed from my original design which was pointed out in my feedback and was really helpful as I think the changes I have made from this screenshot has really improved a lot of things. Another main issue was the lack of resemblance to most stylised pieces which really throws the whole design off as the more semi-realistic folds doesn't match the stylised nature of the face and hair. The only thing I was happy with here was the fish hat...

Here is my improves design, there is still some things I would change and to me personally the type of material isn't conveyed well enough but I think I am missing the visuals of how it will look when textured as the roughness will tell a lot more. Overall, the silhouette is much more true to the original concept and I am much happier with the way that the clothing fits on the character and adds to it a lot better.

I think I still have a bit of refining to do but I need to move on to adding the props in now as its very important that next week I have enough time to low poly my character as I have a feeling it may be difficult and I struggled with creating clean topology last year. This part of the project in general was rather frustrating and I wish that I hadn't had wasted so much time on figuring out the looks of the folds as I would have been able to have more time for my prop creation and wouldn't have had to rush some parts at all. 

Creating a New Plan

 16/10/21

Today, I wanted to just make a bit more of a better, more detailed plan as I've started to feel a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of finishing both of these projects in the next couple of months. My initial plan wasn't as in depth enough for me to understand where I am properly in the scheme of this project so I have made a couple of better devices to help myself keep track of everything.

Here is the method I decided to use for tracking both the projects overall. At the top it tracks the weeks and down the side it tracks the tasks I need to do, the coloured squares in the middle is when, ideally I want to finish the tasks by to hopefully have my projects completed in time. I have already started to fill this out with what I have already completed, I feel I am somewhat on track so far which I didn't think so this has helped me to feel a bit calmer about things.

I did have to shift some things about from my initial plan as I think zbrush has been taking me a bit longer than I thought so I want to give myself an extra week for modelling than I had done. This meant that I have extended the amount of weeks that I am going to do this to up until the hand in, hopefully I am able to work consistently over Christmas.

I also created a more in depth Trello board to help myself break down the tasks here and see them in a more manageable and detailed way - I can also include specific blog tasks I need to do and also other things such as research or traditional work.

I am hoping with these two planning devices I can have much more steady and informed progress, in comparison to my previous planning its much more in depth and hopefully helpful for me.

Sculpting the Hair

 11-13/10/21 - Week 2

To start off this week I mainly focused on sculpting the hair. To start off I made my base hair mesh much more comprehendible and accurate to what I wanted, I felt this would help me to get better looking hair.

I then wanted to do a bit of research on stylised hair since I felt my approach last year turned out looking not as good as I wanted it to. I found that most stylised artist use a brush that created geometry that was shaped like hair - more thin towards the end and had the gravity of the hair being attached to the head. These are used much like the curvetube brush that is already in zbrush but the aspect of the tapered brush makes it much easier and quicker to create a hair-like effect.

I used a couple of tutorials to work this out and ended up using this brush: https://academy.artheroes.co/imm-brush-for-stylized-hair?fbclid=IwAR3ixwYVenxh4vHiuJyM4LIRBJe32NYJPbjIi-Sxxj5g9tZGUixWULrU4Jo

Full credit goes to Art Heros and the creator of the brush who I was unable to find the source of though the tutorial was created by Marlon R. Nuñez so it's possible it's his brush.

I started to add in the hair strands, at first I found this a bit fiddly but eventually I managed to work out how to make things smooth and cover more of the area. I also used the move tool to manipulate some of the strand more to get it too look more how I wanted it to.

The hair ended up taking me much longer than I thought and the process was overall rather long winded. I think I am happy with the outcome, I think it looks stylised enough and enough like my design and draw over for me to be happy with. I want to get a bit of feedback on this however as I'm not sure if the hair is a bit too thick and needs some more refinement - one way to add some more detail to it is obviously by adding some smaller strands. I am unsure of how to do this specifically as obviously this will be needed to be done with planes to not have a high poly count after retopping. I don't know whether this is a case of adding those in now or later on in the process and how to bake these so they look good. I feel that having some feedback and insight would be really helpful here.

Now the hair is done I need to swiftly move on to clothing which I am looking forward to though I know there is still a lot of work for me to do.

Character Base Sculpt

 07-08/10/21 - Week 1

As I've now finished the main design I have moved onto sculpting the base of the character. My plan was to sculpt the head and then move on to the body so I have a base for the clothing to go on top of.

This is my first time sculpting in this style so it was useful to have up my style ref board as well as some other references I found to stay consistent and not move in to a more semi-stylised approach.

This was how I blocked out the head. I used this method in my second year sculpt too, it involves using dynamesh to progressively add ploys to the head. You have to use your available polys to your advantage to have as strong base as possible. I was very happy with this base, using my face reference board for my character that I sketched out was extremely useful and influenced a lot of the style that I used for the face in general.

At this point in the sculpt, I had confirmed a lot of the placement and shape of the main features and I was still really happy with how it was looking - I was mainly using the move here to move the polys about rather than worrying about detail. I was surprised with how much I felt at ease with the stylistic approach and I feel that it gives a lot more freedom and creativity from a more realistic style.

From that point my process sped up quite a bit, as I had spent so long getting things in the right place I was able to up the poly count a lot and focus on getting the details and crisp edges in. This was something that I did struggle with a bit, obviously stylistic approaches tend to be very smooth and clear cut so I was trying to get everything to look as smooth as possible. I think there are still some areas here that I need to focus on to just make it as clean as possible.

By this point I had also added in some eyebrows and eyelashes, I'm not sure weather this approach is the best one since I just used some cylinders and used move to adjust them appropriately. I am thinking that these could be replaced with alphas if I see this is necessary or would improve the look of my sculpt.

Overall, I am happy with how this looks for the moment, the shape language, overall aesthetics and anatomy seem appropriate with the style and the character I am aiming to create.

Here is my current standpoint for my character sculpt. There is still a bit to do here in terms of the base such as the hands and I need to do a bit more on the arms and legs but obviously most of this won't be seen anyway as the majority of skin is covered up - it is more for reference as I am sculpting the clothing. There is definitely some improvement in terms of anatomy to do here, looking at this screenshot now, I can tell that the head is too big in context of the body and I think the wrists are too wide, the shoulders may need to come out a bit too but fixing the sizing on the head may fix this. I did a quick fix using photoshop to show what I mean here.

Making her head smaller would definitely make sense - here I have made it small enough to fit in line with the 7.5 heads tall rule. Making it smaller than this to be 8 heads would be an option for me as it is used for a powerful figure but considering that I want my character to be more of a young adult/teen I think 7.5 heads is appropriate.

I need to work out a way to move all of my assets together in zbrush to make this appropriate then this will be an easy fix.

I have also began to block out the hair, this was mainly a rough thing to get an idea of how things would look so I can begin to move on to this once I get more things figured out. The hair is a bit tricky for me and I want to get some advice and do some research on how to create good looking stylised hair. I struggled a lot with creating strands in my last project and because of the style of pigtails I've gone for, the strands, flyaways and sections of hair need to be communicated correctly.

Overall, I am happy with the progress I am making though I know that next week will be much harder as I will be approaching hair and clothing. Hopefully, to stay on track with my plan, I will manage to finish the whole or majority of the sculpt and can move on to low poly in week 3. I also want to try to create some props to go with this piece to help with the story telling, so I could perhaps start that next week too.

Here is a quick drawover of some things that I wanted to get a bit more clear from my first ref:

Finishing the Design

 06/10/21 - Week 1

Today, I focused on getting the design of the captain finished. This is really important as I plan to try to get into Zbrush as quick as possible to create the best, cleanest outcome I can. There's still a lot I need to learn in Zbrush especially since I haven't modelled in this style before.

Here is my ref board for my Captain design. I haven't changed too much but I did end up making a couple changes to make the character more readable. I intended to try adding some colour today but I ended up finding this a lot more difficult than I expected so I have just added some values in for now. I found that the colour was making the character a lot less readable and I don't know how fix this at the moment. Overall, I think that the design for the character is super fun and I'm excited to start creating this in 3D. Hopefully my design is a bit different from others and has some uniqueness and intrigue to it. One thing I am still a bit worried about is the amount of story in my character, I am not too sure how far the brief wants me to take this and I am still thinking about more ways to add story to my design - I need to come up with a more solid backstory for my captain to be able to work on this.

To help myself with the sculpt I created a few different angles for the face. This was mainly to make things easier when thinking about style and how that would effect the face anatomy and looks especially when its not from front view. I also really wanted to get the fun, bright and bubbly look into my character, I struggled with this at first but by looking at different references of characters that have that attitude to them I noticed the pattern in large, rounded eyes and high, thin eyebrows. I am hoping this translates well when I begin my sculpt.

Tomorrow, I plan to start sculpting the face with these references I have drawn for myself. 

Project Start

 04-05/10/21 - Week 1

To start off this year, I focused on planning out firstly which briefs I wanted to take and then how to approach them from a realistic and, hopefully, reasonable pace. I decided to chose the Ubisoft 3D character project - The Captain, and the Playground art test - Fruit Cart. I felt that these played to some of my strengths but also gave me room to be a bit more creative and show off some of my skills.

Here is my very base plan, I need to flesh this out a bit more and add some pointers in for myself to avoid disaster later down the line. This base also doesn't include some of the weeks we have over Christmas before hand in. This is mainly because my resources at home are not as good as the ones I can access whilst I can be on campus, so I don't want to rely on this time period too much.

As I have chosen to take these projects one at a time, I picked the character brief to move on with first. I started by thinking about a theme I wanted to select, I wanted to do something to do with the sea but I was a bit put off choosing a more common theme of a pirate captain. Instead I chose a fishing captain which I thought was a really fun idea to design and flesh out,

Here is my first moodboard which mainly revolved around thinking about the outfit for the character, one of my main inspirations for this was May from Guilty Gear as I thought that she has a lot of the design aspects that I wanted to echo in my own work - such as the clarity of the ship and sea connection and also the oversized parts of the outfit.

I also wanted to include a logo somewhere on the design to refer back to story for the character and give it a bit more flesh and believability - to look more into this I found some interesting boat logos or fishing logos in general.

Lastly, I needed to look at the style that I wanted for the character. I initially was thinking semi-realism but I think I am going to go a bit more stylised for this project. I found some examples of the style I am thinking about and also noted down some of the aspects that I mainly wanted to take from this mood board. This is the smoothness of the face and body structure and the slight exaggeration of those features as well. I was also planning to have a few fantasy features on my character so I thought the slightly more stylised style would help.

From my moodboards I started getting into the design of my character, I wanted something fun, playful and had some storytelling elements. My main idea was the fish hat so I included that in all my sketches and eventually got to a design that I felt was what I had in my head. I didn't want to spend too long on the design since these projects are rather fast paced and I want to get the quality of the character in 3D the best that I possibly can instead of focusing on design itself.

I thought that the fish hat really helped to encourage the idea that she is a captain and I used the nets, ropes, buoys and waders along with a yellow coat that I found to really influence the fishing aspect of the design. Obviously, the rod also helps here but I wanted this for a more storytelling part as I feel it adds a lot more of the fun character I wanted to portray.

I think I will end up making a finalised design with possibly a few changes to get the silhouette a bit more clear and also work on colour so I can quickly move into zbrush.

Overall, I think I am making good progress currently. I am somewhat worried to move into 3D as I have not used zbrush in a while so it will be a test to see how much I remember and how quick I can get moving further into this project.