The Boatswain - Retop

21-24/02/22 - Week 7

This week I retopped my second character, this did end up taking longer than I'd planned so I am now behind by a couple of days so I will have to overstretch my retop plan.

I took a very similar method as my previous character, starting with a very low top base then adding onto this using turbosmooth. I managed to create the body and face rather quickly but the amount of small details and different pieces did slow me down a lot so I ended up getting to the guns a lot later than I would have wanted. I do think that the retop in comparison to the previous character is stronger, though I have been given some feedback to emphasise the sharp edges more using more loops in that area, so I will be adding this in before texturing.

The guns were much harder to retop and I struggled a lot with the amount of topology to add in and where specifically this should go. Looking at these now they definitely just need more loops added into them and this should even out the topology and give a better, more clean look overall. They are very low at the moment and I don't necessarily need that since the character ended up being a reasonable tri count, I can definitely afford to add some more in to tidy everything up.

To me, it was quite surprising how long this took in comparison to the previous character, but this has taught me that I need to be much more realistic, to combat this I have decided to cut into the time I need for my hair cards and try to catch up with retopping my next character and tweaking this one, I have given myself a week for the 3rd character so I am really hoping this is enough as this is all my spare time. As a stretch goal I could hopefully unwrap but if not I can cut into my texturing time.

Heres the edited plan for the next week:

Nia - Retop

 16-18/02/22 - Week 6

Trying to catch up from the beginning of the week, I got right into retop. I mostly mirrored what I was doing last term - I am again using max as I feel that I am more well versed in the program and have much more control over it than retopping in zbrush or maya. My budget is up to 70k tris, though my character is semi-stylised so I think somewhere around 40-50k is more reasonable if I feel the need to go up that high.

I first started with a very low poly version of my retop, with minimal poly usage. This was so I can get the correct animation loops and basic shape down without having to be very precise and manage more than I could handle.

I then used turbosmooth to add more polys and used conform to morph the polys onto the surface. I first started with the face then moved onto the rest of the body. I also didn't retop the hair here as I do still plan to have hair cards for at least this character. I then moved on to the body which included the same method of keeping it low at first, I extruded areas for the arms and legs, still considering animation loops, and used swift loops to place the polys mostly evenly. I think I have made a couple mistakes looking back on this retop as I feel there is a few too many loops around the arms in comparison to the legs and rest of body, but this can be fixed by removing or adding loops depending on what I choose to do.

I wanted to spend a couple days on this character then move on to unwrapping but this didn't really work out with my plan as I ended up using all three days for retopping. Once I noticed this I decided that I will be leaving the unwrapping for when I can do it, if that means that it will be before texturing that will be fine as I should be able to manage giving up a couple hours to sort out unwrap.

I think I have started to improve my understanding of unwrapping and I can see a difference in the quality between my previous project and this one as I have allowed myself to not be as stingy with tri count. Even after finishing retopping the whole body I have found that I'm on around 20-30k tris which I think is very reasonable. The way I have approached this - using turbosmooth also allows for wiggle room.

This is my plan for next week, I've removed unwrapping from the workload so hopefully a couple days for the next character will be enough since I have warmed up on retopping.

I've then left the second half of the week to the third character, as there is a lot more to think about with this one.

Soft Blue - Sculpt Pt.2

 14-15/02/22 - Week 6

To finish off the sculpt for my 3rd project I just had to add in the final details which I did over 2 days due to some technical faults at uni and stressful circumstances that ended up meaning I wasn't able to get as much done as I thought I would be able to on the Monday.

I was only able to add in the petals around the head on Monday and start the bonnet, the petals weren't too difficult to get in and I just plan for these to be planes. I did have to make some slight adjustments around the hair since the length of the petals in the concept don't match up with where the hair falls, to work around this I just made it so the hair goes down  through the petals whilst still trying to keep the original curve.

I then just moved on to the final details such as the bells and ribbons on the legs and hands, then finally the golden leg details and the petals around the ankles.

Unfortunately I did lose a day basically so it will make it a bit more of a push to get all three characters retopped and unwrapped by next Friday. I will have to try my hardest and create a work around if this is not possible, but for the mean time here is my plan for next week:

I plan to start again with Nia and get them done in the order I modelled them.

Friday will hopefully be the day I unwrap.

Soft Blue - Sculpt Pt.1

 04-11/02/22 - Week 5

Last Friday I started my 3rd and final sculpt, this is my character that will be the most stylised out of the 3 and features less realistic proportion, the style itself is very smooth and rather cute so it will be an interesting contrast from my previous sculpt. I started by collecting some style reference and also sketching out a rough estimate of what the front and side views would look like. For my style reference for this project I was looking at recent disney/pixar films as this has the very soft look with large eyes and a small nose being one of the main features.

I also came up with a very rough version of the face which obviously had a lot of issues, but it was mainly a way to get a basic map for myself so I could improve and find the mistakes on Monday. 

I worked on these issues at the beginning of the week, figuring out the correct proportions of the face and where I was originally going wrong such as the nose and overall face shape. I used the same method as the last project, slowly working on it and comparing it directly with the reference in the same angle. Eventually I came to something much more resembling of the original concept and so I continued on to finish the face area, added in the horns and the details on the face.

On Tuesday I managed to finish the whole body as I wanted to in my plan, I again tried to make this closely resemble the concept's style but I did end up struggling a bit with the proportions as the head is rather large for the body which was throwing me off. I ended on the below by the end of the day though eventually I did end up making the head larger and the neck longer to try to get it a bit closer to what I was seeing in the concept. Another part that I struggled with was the feet, I wanted them to be accurate to the concept as mentioned, which includes a very stylistic impression of the feet with only the big toe being separated. This meant that it was a bit harder to make it look right and take reference from my anatomical references since the concept had played with this so much. I think eventually I came to something that looks like the concept whilst also looking like a foot.

Over Wednesday and Thursday I moved on to the clothing and hair, I used the same brush from my professional brief to create the hair but tried to use it to match the concepts style by adding a bit more detail and layers. I also chose to sculpt the pigtails rather than create them with the brush as I felt it was quicker and resembled the hair's flow from the concept a lot better.

You can find the brush at this link: https://academy.artheroes.co/imm-brush-for-stylized-hair?fbclid=IwAR3ixwYVenxh4vHiuJyM4LIRBJe32NYJPbjIi-Sxxj5g9tZGUixWULrU4Jo

Credit to Art Heroes and Marlon R. Nuñez as the creators and distributors for this brush.

I wanted to try to add a lot more of a stylised feel to the clothing and I achieved this by making each clothing part out of several meshes to give it clean cut edges and more depth. I really like the way this impacted the clothing though it did mean things were a little more fiddly and time consuming.

On Friday I worked towards finishing the character, I added in the wings and some of the details such as the rope belt and parts coming out from the skirt. The wings were probably the trickiest to make, though I ended up approaching these by creating the shape form a mask on a plane and then using zmodeler to extrude this. I had to do this several times for each part of the wing and it did take a while to get it to look right though I think I have managed to come up with something that resembles the wings from the concept.

This is where I currently am with this project, I am hoping to manage to finish on Monday as my plan last week stated, I only have the very smallest details left to do. I am pretty happy with my progress this week and I feel that the quality of my work has improved and sped up so I am able to have a bit more time for quality control.

The Boatswain - Sculpt Pt.2

 31-03/02/22 - Week 4

This week was made up of finalising my second sculpt. I created weaponry for the first time and improved my belt making skills so I started off slow but managed to end when I wanted to for this week.

The begging of the week was spent firstly finishing off the shoes and jewellery so that the sculpt was ready for the guns and belts/straps. There wasn't much to this though it was good to finally have the main sculpt finished.

The guns proved a lot harder than I originally thought. I wasn't sure what was best to create my base in, Max or Zbrush. I am not the best with ZModeller so I thought that Max would be my best option. I am unsure whether this was the right option to take but I ended up slowly figuring out what was the best way to approach guns in Max. With some help from my classmates I decided on using a loft to create the base shape and then using turbosmooth to help with the rest. This took me a while to get the hang of and get the right topology/shapes in there. I also had to gather lots of reference of the types of guns portrayed and some of them were a lot more fantasy than I thought and some parts were very unrealistic. I went with trying to replicate the guns I could see in the concept since this was one of the main things I want to get right, correctly replicating concepts. So logically, my guns don't really make sense and trying to capture the shape intended was a bit difficult and confusing especially with the largest gun. I also decided to create 3 guns instead of 4 as the smallest one does have some differences but they are super minimal and to save time I will just make one of the other ones smaller to fit the concept.

I then followed this up with creating details in Zbrush which wasn't too difficult though sometimes hard to get the program to understand the topology I was trying to go for which made subdiv a bit pixelated occasionally. By the time I had finished the guns I had taken up most of 3 days which was over my max limit that I wanted to go for, ideally I could have finished these quicker if I'd understood it from the get go.

I used up the last part of Wednesday and then the majority of Thursday to create and finish the belts and holsters. This was just time consuming as I am still not the best at more hard surface properties in Zbrush so getting the topology and shape right was again a problem. It was mainly a case of using the curve tool and adding in new tools to add on each part. I then used the rest of Thursday to polish the character off and make sure everything looked to a standard that I was mostly happy with for times sake.

Now I have finished this sculpt, I do have a bit less time for my third and final character which I am not too confident about since this is probably the most time consuming one since it is so intricate. Hopefully with my skill building in zbrush I will have sped up enough to get this finished on time, I am willing to give up at most 2 days the week after but I will need the majority of that time for retop and unwrapping.

Here is my plan: