Nia, Boatswain & Blue - Rigging and Skinning

 18-22/04/22 - Week 15

This week I managed to rig all 3 characters. Unfortunately, I fell ill with covid at the end of last week so it did effect me this week and slowed me down. Thankfully, rigging and skinning didn't take as long as I thought it would for each character, so it balanced itself out time wise.

I first started with Nia, this was probably the easiest of the 3 to rig since she has a much more basic design that is tight fit. However, I did come across some issues one of them being my lack of thought into what to delete from each character - wasted tris - which ended up effecting me for another character as well. I think overall something that has effected me in all my projects is lack of forethinking which is where things like wasted planes really show up and make me use more of my time trying to fix these problems.

In the end it wasn't too problematic and I managed to get through rigging this character with relative ease by using a couple of extreme poses to try to get the best rigging I could. I then roughly put her into the position in the concept to get an idea of if my rigging was going correctly and where to adjust. In the end I ended up with the pose below:

Next, I started on the boatswain. He didn't really have much of a problem with planes that I didn't delete since the base of his character is probably even simpler than Nia's. I used the same process mentioned to work through the skinning process. Though what did trip me up was the belts and also the sagging on the pants. The belts took a while to get through and I ended up changing where they were rigged too a couple times but in the end I managed to get it looking decent. I also used a prop bone for the first time on the guns which was interesting but made things a lot easier for the guns that I planned to move with the hands. The trousers where a bit of an issue and I was trying to balance things between the thigh bones and the pelvis but eventually I got the hang of how weighted it should be to each of these parts.

This was the pose that I've settled with for the moment:

Finally, I moved on to Blue. As expected, this did take me the longest as she is the most complex. This is also where the problem about faces that I didn't think to delete became problematic as things like the neck had two layers that was really hard to access, and trying to see through the mesh when there is so much going on is really difficult. This also happened with the skirt and the shorts even though I couldn't really delete anything here to help cope with this anyway.

I added ponytail bones here, I ended up using 7 on each side as my previous project I tried to minimise on the bones and it created a very clunky look. I then also added extra bones for the wings which I also haven't included before but these were very simple to deal with and made skinning the wings very easy. Lastly, I also included a prop bone for the bells since they are attached to the hand.

I struggled with the skirt and parts hanging from the body a little bit since I wasn't sure where I wanted to rig it too but in the end I settled with mainly the pelvis, but had to do some small adjustments on the parts that touched the body. I also had to mess around with the bodice too as I had a very similar problem. 

Here's her pose:

Overall, I'm really happy with the rigs that I managed to create this week and I think it's going to be a good base for my animations next week, though obviously its pretty easy to adjust if I need to.

My plan for next week is pretty similar to this weeks, around 1.5 days per character for both morph targets and animation which I plan to do all by hand. I haven't animated before so it'll be interesting but hopefully I'll get a good result.

Nia, Boatswain & Blue - Engine

 13-15/04/22 - Week 14

To finish this week off, I have just been in engine and creating some basic lighting setups and also some plinths for a couple of my characters.

I didn't tweak Nia's lighting all that much but I did add a small base for her to stand on and some of the feathers. I decided to approach these plinths by mirroring what's in the concepts or something of the like, so Nia's was quite simple. I still want to add the crows in which I unfortunately didn't manage to make progress on this week.

As for the boatswain, I'm still considering my options with the plinth as he doesn't have one in the concept, though he does have a graphic behind him and a shadow in front - so I am hoping to have something of the like in this presentation. As for lighting, I wanted to keep it quite simplistic and not too colourful alike the concept. Looking at this screenshot now I am thinking it may benefit from a stronger rim light possibly on both sides, so perhaps I need to stray a bit from the original concept here for presentation purposes.

For blue, I found a concept by the same artist that had a fairy-like feel and tried to take inspiration from the ground included there. I think this really ties in nicely with my character as its very foresty and I like how the colours don't take anything away from her. As for the lighting, I again realised it wasn't too contrast-y or had much colour in it at all. This makes me think with these two characters I will be using quite a bit of post process to play with the contrast and saturation to try to get the effect I want. Again, looking at this now it would definitely benefit from either a rim light or a visible main light source.

Moving on to next week, I need to start implementing the poses and animations for my characters so this will mean rigging. I am a bit concerned with rigging especially for Blue since she is quite complicated, so I have left the whole week for rigging. That means about 1.5 days per character.

Blue - Texturing

 04-12/04/22 - Week 13

This week I worked through my final character to try to finish the main textures for all 3 characters.

I planned a day to finish off some of the retopping and uv mapping that I had left to do for this character, but it ended up cutting into much of my time and I didn't finish getting everything ready until halfway through Tuesday losing a bit of time there. I wanted to really improve on what I was saying last week and really reflect the style of the concept into my texturing work.

I think I succeeded much better this week, I used the shadow and highlights much more efficiently from the concept for this character and also really tried to understand the shading techniques the artist uses. This was really beneficial, as I started to use the sketchy shading that the artist uses in my textures my model was looking accurate and also aesthetically pleasing. I did struggle a bit with keeping up with all the different layers I was using in painter and how this was effecting my roughness overall, but eventually I got a bit more used to it.

I also used a lot of metallic in my textures to make a shiny effect for things like the horns and hair which really helped the piece to come to life a bit more. This was supported by the highlights that produced a fake sheen that helped a lot with the material reads. I also think this technique sort of covered up the fact there was not much ware and tare where there usually would be, as the lines add a lot of texture to the piece without actually doing so.

In the end though, this method did take me a while as I was basically hand painting each asset and this character has a lot of assets so I ended up cutting into my time quite a lot and my plan ended up being thrown out the window as I had to continue texturing into the next week which was rather frustrating as I now won't have enough time to do certain things such as the crows for Nia, even so I do intend to find time for these.

Overall, a much more successful week or so, where I am a lot happier with the outcome of my texturing. I think if I get time I want to revisit the Boatswain and try to implement the skills that I built here to try to improve the textures there. I don't have too much of a plan for the next few days, I just want to get all 3 characters in engine properly and add some details such as the plinth or asset they will be standing on.

Boatswain - Texturing

 28-01/03-04/22 - Week 12

This week I have completed the textures for my second character.

For this one I took a bit of a different approach since the style of the concept is quite stylised and I wanted to show that more in my texturing. I tried to apply shadow and light in the areas that the concept does to try to improve the overall accuracy and likeness.

I ended up struggling with this quite a bit and had a lot of passes to get the effect I wanted, looking back on it now I just needed to go in strong from the start instead of trying to make it still look blended and soft which isn't really like the style I'm following at all. I think in the end I started to take a similar approach that I did to my previous character.

I also was struggling a bit with the amount of roughness variation and ware to add to my character, I struggle with this as a whole for stylised pieces as I find that dirt is usually either very obvious or not at all present and I found the latter in this concept even though in reality you could imagine that the clothing and accessories would be much more worn. I tried to get a good balance here but I think I have been thrown quite off path with this character, I could try to improve this but with the time left I need to first get the more major aspects out the way before going back over this for another pass.

Probably the part I am most happy with is the skin since I feel I managed to achieve a good roughness to produce a quite accurate look.

I did try to get a bit more dirt in on the guns and looked through a lot of reference for stylised weaponary and how they include ware, I found that most of it was placed in during sculpting, such as scratches, so I definitely will keep this in mind next time. I think I didn't really think about this as the weapons appear so clean on the concept. Adding a little bit of dulling on the barrel of the gun helped it look a bit more natural I feel.

I think texturing this character has really made me aware of the lack of likeness that I have achieved on this project, I don't think my sculpt is as strong as the other two and texturing has not helped this as much as I would have wanted, so I am overall a bit disappointed. 

My plan for next week is similar, just work through the week and get the textures done as I go: