We started this second year, in my opinion, in a really enjoyable way, by creating a character that we loved, and that excited me to start thinking about how I would launch my character’s initial phases. I didn’t encounter any issues in the beginning of the project; perhaps it was because it was a little difficult to truly grasp my initial concepts!
My original idea was always to create a mystical character with a story and that was presented in great detail, so I started to write down any ideas that came to mind until I arrived at (Vick) Soul Amazônia. I started the research process through reading the module’s criteria and imagining ideas for what I was going to do, but not exactly what the character itself would be like. She was the role I got the chance to hone and practise a bit more in terms of sculpture, armature, weigh painting, texture, and a new platform. I really enjoyed working with her and didn’t have many issues. With this module I was able to practise and learn new commands that made me remember techniques, steps and made me think of quick but good solutions to improve the character. To make my character I chose to use the ‘Blender’ software because I knew a bit more about the process. I worked a lot with modelling and sculpting for the details. With sculpting I had some difficulties making some points of the face like the nose, mouth and eyes that didn’t turn out exactly as I had imagined, but with some videos and reference images I managed to improve the way it looked before. As for the petals, it took me a long time to sculpt them, so in order to improve them I modelled them, but that was also a problem and in order to solve the problem with the polygons on the petals I had to redo everything again. With the pose part and putting the skeleton on the character, I was a long way behind and to help me I had a lot of help not only from my tutor but also from classmates who helped me a lot in the process of importing the textures, weight painter and armature which were very complicated points that after the end of this project I have to practise more.
Everything has a positive and a negative side, so I learned a lot from this module. One thing I really enjoyed experimenting with was the Unreal Engine software, which I used for the first time. I admit that at first, I had to spend a lot of time opening and deleting files to get to the point where I had in my “Landscape,” because I was unable to import textures into it or figure out how to place elements in it. However, after the very informative class lessons, I was able to understand much more about how to make the most out of all the Unreal Engine tools. With all of the obstacles and disappointments experienced during the character creation process, I managed to recall certain processes that escaped my memory and discovered areas that need further practice to improve my sculpting, armature, and texture transfer skill.
In this module I had a lot of challenges and new lessons that I really enjoyed learning even though some of them were complicated, I had a lot of fun and this module helped me a lot to organise myself so that I didn’t fall behind in the processes, making me think of quick but direct solutions that would be good for the process and also learning the commands in blender and also learning how to use new software which was the most fun part of the whole process, if I had more time to work on my character I would have tried to improve the texture on it and also add another element with an (animal) but with a little time I tried to work as much as possible with the elements I had.