Captain Final Thoughts

10/01/22 - Hand In

I have now completed the captain character project and here is my final thoughts and evaluation on the project as a whole.

This project started off well, I still like the idea I had and the design overall had strong shape and to me, clearly resembled a fisherwoman. I had some feedback over the project here and there and I became less confident in my design over time, some felt it didn't have enough research and thought behind this. The design wasn't really supposed to be the focus of my character and its definitely something I struggle with in general, this has only really told me that I should outsource designs for my FMP as it's not my strong point. I do feel that it lacks the sense of story that the brief required, and I should have perhaps tried to focus a bit more on this aspect and add some specific historic detail here and there.

The sculpt is definitely something I'm proud of. It was my second character sculpt and I can see the improvement and expansion of zbrush knowledge, I do want to challenge myself with adding more smaller details next time. As this was my first stylised sculpt, I had a lot to learn about stylised folds and hair specifically. I got feedback on this and it became apparent that I needed to have delved more into how to create these and research and gather much more reference on what sort of shape language I was going for. This resulted in me having to redo the folds a couple of times which lost me a lot of time, and in the end I still managed to lose a lot of the silhouette and charm of the original design from trying to revert back to a more realistic approach.

I also ended up having some problems with my retop, I tried to save as much as possible which wasn't helpful and I realise now where it would have been better for deformation and smoothing to implement more topology. Overall, the character is much more low poly than I would have liked and would have benefitted, especially in the final presentation from cleaner, more dense topology.

I'm quite pleased with the texturing as not only was I able to finish it to a reasonable time, I think it has the right sense of stylisation that I was going for in my project. Something I would have liked to improve is the eyes since I could have implemented more industry standard techniques and had multiple meshes coving the eyeball. This would have really improved the texturing and presentation for my character. I took a lot of care with the texturing and tried to research it as best as possible and I think this paid off, though there is still room to improve especially with the netting. The way I approached the netting makes the whole thing look quite armature and I think it brings the overall presentation down. If I were to do this again I would have instead tried to make it a mesh instead of a texture and added more layers in to make it seem more realistic.

The overall look of the character in its presented form is definitely an improvement to my first character in many ways, including lighting, pose and presentation of skill. I definitely enjoyed this more than my cart project so I would like to take characters forward into my FMP. I need to consider all the strengths I have here and improve on my weaknesses thoroughly to make sure I can display my skill and abilities.

I learnt a lot and sped up some of my skills massively, so though I am confident for those reasons, there is still a lot for me to learn and understand as I move onto the next set of projects.