When we were off for Easter break, I was unable to work on the cute character assignment because I was busy finishing off my body mechanics and emotion animations for the other module and I took the week after that deadline off because I really needed a break from work.

During class we watched retopology exercise tutorial videos using the quad draw tool and followed along the exercise to learn to retopologise a sculpt in Maya. We were told to make sure the mesh overlaps with the model completely and if any parts don’t like say there’s an indent in the actual model you just add an edge loop in that area and make it overlap with the indented part. For things like eyes and mouth, we were told to add polygon faces in a circular motion around those areas as it’ll allow for proper deformation.

Some of us also had one to one tutorials with Michael O’Callaghan during this time including myself and I showed him what I had so far. He said to shrink the character before doing the dyntopo and added that it’s crucial to keep the head and face tufts, which were off to the side, aligned so that everything in the model is perfectly symmetrical so that the retopology wouldn’t mess up. For sculpting in general, he said that the main tools he uses are the grab tool (and their variants like the snake hook tool), clay strips tool and scrape tool (scrape tool to give certain areas hard edges by flattening the area and makes the shape more defined, such as hair on top of a head the top edges of the hair would have that defined edge).

Due to being so busy with the group animation assignment for the other module after finishing the previous assignment of body mechanics and emotion animations for that module, I didn’t have time to work on the cute character assignment. I’m hoping I’ll have time to work on it sometime soon so that the bulk of the basemesh is finished so I have less to do once my group animation assignment is finished.

References Of The Week

There are no references for this week because I didn’t work on the cute character assignment at all this week.