Chloe Snowden's Animation Blog

Reflective Summary.

For this assignment we were to create a character or creature and then we were to model this character in either Blender or Zbrush. 

Our assignment was to create a story with how the character was designed.  How it was posed, the environment and where the character was placed.  The environment was to be done in Unreal Engine.

I decided to use Blender to create my character because I was unable to access ZBrush.  However, I was happy to use Blender as I am more familiar with the programme having used it for previous work.

When researching for the project I decided to  look up a few types of deers. I decide to  base my character design on a European Fallow Deer. I chose the Fallow Deer because of their fur marks.  

Originally, I had wanted to have her wear a mask based on a Chinese Water Deer, but decided against this idea when I came to modelling.  I felt sticking to the Fallow deer was the way to go.

I also looked at Fauns.  I liked the idea of a mythical creature. Deltarune’s Noelle and CS Lewis’ Mr Tummnus were my main inspirations for creating this character. I also got a lot of inspiration from the game Sky: Children of the Light.

Wax Deer character profile

The profile for my character is a humanoid deer made from wax that lives in a forest. The wax deer is a friendly creature who helps the lost navigate through the forest. The Wax Deer is only seen at night and when she appears the night sky has a pinkish hue to it.

Methodology

Below is how I went about creating the character.

I was careful about making sure the retopology had loops. This would help when it came to posing the character. I was determined to have the retopology look clean and easy to read. I was able to do this by going into sculpt mode and using the smooth brush set to surface I was able to clean the retolopgy thought out my model.

I found character creation, model and sculpting much easier this time around.  I was able to draw from last year’s work and experience which really helped with this assignment.  I think over all, my retopology skills and understanding is much better than last year.  I was able to model the hair and eyelashes which would have been beyond my scope last year.

I was extra careful when it came to weight painting my character for this assignment.  The last time I had to model a character, I hadn’t done much weight painting.  I didn’t know what it was or understood how it worked but  I spent some time over the summer months practicing modelling, retopology, UV, substance texturing, rigging and weight painting  for a couple of characters. This greatly helped my understanding of how the pipeline works and helped me gain better skills for this assignment.

I found the retopology class exercises very helpful when it came to doing my retopology for my character. This was particularly beneficial when it comes to posing the character as it really helped me to understand how to pose better.

In UE I tried to give the sky a purple/pink hue to better match with my character’s profile  as well as adding in some pink flowers.

If I were to do this assignment again there are a few changes I would make.

I would try experimenting in unreal Engine more and try to better convey a story with my final render. I would also try to add more textures to the ground to give the scene more depth and try to have decals in my UE scene as I didn’t find a way to have them in my final scene.  If I had been able to do that,  it would have made the story richer. If doing this again,  I would also try to give the whole scene a pinkish hue which could be done by editing the Lights or editing the final render in photoshop.

I would also make sure my UV for Texturing were all correct  before proceeding and make sure the seems didn’t disappear on me. I would also plan out the clothing design and creation better in blender.  I think the cape could have been done better especially as I found in difficult to model and I had to redo it.  I still wasn’t overly happy with the end result of the cape.

I would also take time to properly understand UDIMS so I could get the benefit of higher detail in my final render.

Overall,  I did best on the retopology for this assignment and I think I had a pretty good understanding of how to rig and weight paint my character.

Reseach

 

 

 

I wanted my scene to be set at night but I couldn’t change the light setting, I had to deleted the sky light and add a new one and then I was able to chance the scene form day time to night time.

 

I downloaded some trees and also manually added in some trees close to where I wanted my character to be.  I used a brush to paint in the background trees.

I also added in a moon and textured it with a moon texture I found online.  I set the material to emissive colour and not a base colour to give it a bit of a glow.

 

I had a bit of difficulty when trying to add in my character into the scene. I soon realised it was because I forgot to apply the armature.  Once I added the armature, it went into the scene without a problem. The inside of the dress and cape were invisible at first, but this was easily fixed by added a solidify modifier.  After that,  all I needed to do was to add in the textures.

Unreal started to crash and I couldn’t launch the software I ended up fixing this by opening the project in my finder.

I didn’t like the textures I used for the ground so I replaced them with ones I download on Unreal’s marketplace. I think these look much better.

I also went back and added in some flowers, grass and logs to give more character to the scene.

When I was editing some of the images I realised they had a preview water mark on them.   This was because of the light settings. I just needed to make sure the lights were set to moveable instead of static or stationary and the issue was solved.

 

These are the final renders of my character.  The top row are ones just done int UE and the bottom row are ones I edited in photoshop.

 

All the assets I downloaded from the Unreal Engine marketplace.

 

I made sure to import the normal map I created for my character.  When it came to baking the textures I turned off the normal maps where I already had the ones I had created so they didn’t get replaced by accident .

Fortunately, for me, Substance has a wax texture build into it which I used for my model.

I tried to rebake the textures to get rid of the zipper marker on the hair however, the baked texture turn out looking weird and highlighted the seems I made on the character.  I had to go back and correct this mistake. In the end I couldn’t fix the zipper marking on the hair.  Thankfully, the way in which my character is posed, disguises this.  It won’t be visible in the final render.

I later found out the zipper mark was due to an error in the hair seems.   Somehow they got altered throughout the project and I was unaware when this happened so it became too late to fix this error.  However, as I now know what went wrong, I can ensure it does not happen again.

I used the above clip for references.

I used the above clip to help me  clean out the topology for my character model.

For re-topology I made the colours different so I could correctly see what I was doing.

I used a plain mesh to create the dress and the ribbons around the legs with the shrink-wrap modifier. This meant I didn’t have to re-topologise the dress. I did have to re-topologise the eyelashes and the cape.

I used curves for the hair so I didn’t have to re-topologise this.

I took an image of a deer’s nose and tried to turn it into a brush to give a little bit of texture to my character’s nose. I masked out the nose and inverted the mask so I could make sure I didn’t add the brush to areas I didn’t want it.

I then created a fur brush texture for the fur on her chest.

It took me 3 tries to get the brush to work on the dress mesh in the way I wanted to look. I was trying to create a melted wax look.

I baked normal maps of the dress and her body so I could add these into substance.

 

 

Using the above sketches I blocked out the character using the default meshes.

I found it difficult to make the eye correctly sit in the eye socket. I also found modelling the hands a challenge, but in the end I think they turned out well.

I wanted the eyes to have more depth to them so I pushed the centre vertex and added a edge loop to create this eye shape.

The eyelashes were sculpted using sphere meshes.

I had a balance issues with the weight of the character and how she should stand which I tried to fix.

To help with how the character should stand I looked at Mr Tummus from Narnia.

 

 

When I came to modelling the hair I originally sculpted it using a sphere mesh and used the hook brush to get the shape I wanted but I couldn’t get it quite right.

In the end I ended up using curves to model the hair this give the hair more depth and volume.