Category: 3D Digital Literacy

This week has been a bit of a challenge in terms of working on this project; I finished the topology quite quickly, and actually found this therapeutic! This is the completed topo:

I thought it turned out pretty well, and there were not a lot of mistakes in terms of loose vertices! I managed to get them all sorted by merging the verts and had no issues in that respect.

I had some issues with the UV unwrap, this is the initial attempt that I had:

I struggled a lot with the backpack and the lantern, and I gave it a good try but I needed to ask for help – Henry was lovely enough to send me a tutorial video and sent me some suggestions. I watched and followed this, and studied the files that he sent me back to view all of the seams he made. UV unwrapping these has given me a huge amount of confidence with UV mapping now – I feel like I’m really starting to understand how it works. The border of lantern continued to give me issues, and Mike showed me that I should be dividing this up into smaller sections, and suggested I do the same with the staff body in order to get more resolution. These are the current UV maps after the assistance:

I split gus into two materials, his skin and then his clothing, just to try and get as much resolution as I could for each.

So, finally, after a bit of poking and prodding I got the UV’s finished and was able to bring the character into substance painter. I ended up having to pull in an old version of the hoodie, as I pulled the length of it down and hadn’t realised this would affect the way mesh baking would effect the model. I brought in the high poly models of the tail, ears and hands as they were slightly effected by some strange textures after baking. I conformed all of the corresponding parts of the low poly mesh to the high poly mesh and this seemed to work fine:

I’m overall pretty happy with how these are looking! There are certain parts with Gus’ mesh that I’m still on the fence about, and am going to ask for advice tomorrow in class!

I started by scaling up and ensuring that all of Gus’ props were the right size, by bringing Gus from Blender into Maya and importing his staff and backpack:

I began retopology on Gus’ model today: the process has been slow, and there have been a few mistakes here and there that I’ve had to go back on, but overall I’m pretty pleased with the progress so far; I’m a little worried about the ears, and that I might have done those wrong by not beginning in the centre, however I will find out more about that tomorrow:

I finished up the retopo on the face, and decided that I would just remodel the eyes in maya as they weren’t particularly complex:

I then began topoing the ears, which I will admit, have given me a little more trouble. I will ask for advice on going forward with these:

When I was going through the retopo of what I’ve achieved so far, I used this reference as a guide for how I should tackle the head, and will continue using this reference when retopo the body and clothing.

I spent today modelling some props, which will be put onto my character Gus, including his backpack and his staff with lantern:

I used the following standard lantern as my guide to modelling it:

I also loosely watched the following YouTube speed paints in order to try and get an idea of how I would model the backpack:

 

I made some more progress with Gus’ model today in my lunch hour, and in the evening:

I smoothed out his face, hands and fins; added creases on the clothing; and some socks peeking just above his boots! I think I’m quite close to being finished with this character, I want to get Henry’s feedback on the character to see if he thinks that I should make any more changes before I start retopologising the model in Maya.

In class we were taught retopolgy in Maya, this was my attempt – It’s definitely not perfect, I should have done a loop around the base of the ears to keep the faces looping better but I think it’s OK for a first try and I know how to better go about it with my own model now!

I made some further progress on my Gus model today, adding a pocket to his hoodie and making his boots come up a little higher on his legs – I want to start looking at modelling his staff and his back pack next, and getting a few ideas for how I will model the hill he will climb!