Soft Blue - Final Review

06/05/22 - Week 17

Now that I have finished my projects I will review them over and see where I went wrong, could have improved or what I am pleased with and proud of. 

This is the third and final character I created for my FMP. This character was supposed to be the most stylised which is not something I've tried too much with 3D in general. I mainly chose this concept as the other two were more fitting what I'd set out to find, and this one was much more to my own stylistic interest and aesthetic. I did find that some people were more against this concept and artist than the previous two but I was very inspired and excited by this concept specifically. I think because of this I am a bit bias towards it.

Concept by bergamotik 1137:

This was probably the hardest of the 3 sculpts, purely because there was so much to tackle overall. I also tried much harder to perfect the sculpt especially in the face. Spending some extra time on this character was really beneficial as personally I think that the sculpt turned out the best and most accurate to the concept. I still think there is areas that could be refined but I did end up having to move on, one of these reasons being the sculpted hair which I am probably the least happy with as I wanted it to look more like the concept, which is much thinner and natural looking. I used the same method from first term which I'm not too happy with in general so hopefully once I learn a bit more about sculpted hair I can improve on my methods. For speed purposes, I think it works.

As for retopping, I think this character is retopped best on the body but this also was the highest poly character mainly because of the wings. Looking back on this project now I am a bit confused why I chose to make the wings not planes. I understand that on the concept it sort of has this effect but I don't think it was worth all the effort I went through to make the wings look right when I could have just baked on the details. The wings have a lot of tris to them to make them look smooth, so overall they are just a bit wasteful. Originally I also wanted to try to make a shader for the wings which would have been much easier and acheiveable with a plane rather than an object with thickness. It also provides some obstruction to the clothing and causes clipping sometimes as it needs so much space that wasn't really achievable with the way the character design is. This is probably the only major thing I would change about this project. Apart from that and a few more loops around the crotch area, I think the retop is to the best of my abilities.

I think texturing for this character is the best out of the 3 too, I really paid attention to the style of the artist and tried to replicate that in my texturing. Eventually I got the hang of this and it ended up making my work give the stylised look it needs. This particularly succeeds in the face where there was a lot of colour variation in the concept and I had fun hand painting all of this in. This brings me to hand painting which is not something I have really explored before, but doing some of this in painter was really fun and it makes me want to perhaps learn 3dcoat or understand hand painting more and maybe try to further this skill. I'm super happy with the texturing on this character overall.

Rigging and skinning took a bit longer for this project, as again there was just a lot to deal with and decide what was going where to make it look the best that it could. I also made the same mistake as the first character with not thinking carefully about what topology to delete and ended up having to use some more time with having to deal with planes that weren't easily accessible as you couldn't see them. I ended up also having to revise the retop a couple times whilst animating as the pose was quite hunched over and it meant that I had some problems in the waist area since there was a lot going on there. The animation in the end I think is the best out of the 3 and I think it really brings the character to life, it looks the most natural and professional as I didn't have the restriction of keeping the character on the ground. I used unreal to get round the issue of not being able to move the pelvis, so she moved up and down like she was floating.

 When lighting this character I didn't want to have too many harsh lights as I wanted to replicate the softness of the concept which I think I managed to achieve by creating a more consistent, ambient light coloured light. I also chose to create the plinth from a different concept from the same artist which I think works very well for the presentation overall.

Overall, apart from some structural issues, I really like this character and I think it's the best out of the three. I'm unsure if this is purely because the aesthetic is much more me or if it is because in the end this is the character that I kept visiting last, meaning that I was building skill with each process and this would always be the best result. I planned more time for this character as I went along as I found that it was taking me a while to tackle all the individual parts which I'm glad I realised and deciding to replan around this character is probably what caused it not to fail as I think if I had any less time on anything it would look rushed. With more time I would love to have tried to improve the wings and some issues I can see such as sizing differences in the petals and the way the petals work overall, but I think with the time we were given I'm really pleased with this character.

This concludes my third and final FMP character project.