Assignment 2 had been a very rocky road, especially since I did go a little bit over the deadline admittedly because of multiple different problems with the process of making this model. I found I am much better at the earlier stages of modelling, most of the main parts of blender have been great, but when I get past UV mapping everything seemed to fall apart at every stage, either because of things that I just did not know how to get around because the problems I ran into were not covered in the classes or videos, probably because of how out there my design was.

I’ve mainly learnt over this assignment how to get around certain issues when they are not directly covered or taught, I have mainly learnt how to get on with my work and not rely too much on guides and tutorials, It has been a very tough process but it definitely has successfully pushed me out of my comfort zone plenty of times and pushed me to make a model I’m happy with with a lot of independency in the making.

With this last week finishing up my assignment model was tough with plenty of different problems I kept running into.

By this stage I had finished my anatomy on my model, but was yet to join the body parts together, I decided on a huge hammer for the prop and had finished the clothes.

Here is after sculpting, Where I got to define the nicer detailing on the muscles, scars and more. I joined the whole body together and would now have to fix the UV mapping. I found this part pretty easy to understand, but it just was a slow, long process. I really enjoyed this stage in modelling.

Here is after I had ported my model into substance painter and textured it. I found this to probably be the toughest stage of the process with how many issues I ran into with the software.

and finally here is my model applied to an armature and posed with his prop. I had problems with blender’s automatic weighting not working with the details of my model so I had to go in and manually change the weights of the model to fit the armature.

I found using the skeleton and armature mechanics in blender to be awkward and tough to perfect, but once I understood the different tools to make it easier, it really did become a very simple process and was quite fun to pose this model around and see what I could do with it. I do definitely feel comfortable in my ability to use armature to pose my model when I get to that stage for my assignment model. Which speaking of, the model has been coming along very nicely

I have been messing around with the torso, legs and arms for a bit now, I will admit I did stray off the path of the tutorials a bit making these parts, which I think will maybe make some steps later difficult, but I will try and circle back a bit more and bring my progress more in line with how it is supposed to look for the more necessary steps at least. However, at least with the arms, I do think the process I took could have been better, but I did go out and try to understand how an exaggerated, muscly arm would look, this is what I came up with.

Its absolutely not perfect or accurate, But it was a nice experiment none the less to understand exaggerated human anatomy some more.

The side view was tough to perfect, especially with the quite unrealistic style of animal-like, digitigrade legs. The way they ended up looking definitely accentuates the slouch that this character gives and almost pushes even further how top heavy he is, like his arms and head lower and drag, like gravity is having a huge push down on his body at all times. I quite like how this aspect of the design worked out so far!

This week, after learning more about normal maps with the elephant exercise, I went and worked more on my assignment model, now taking it to the next stage, using the previous guides to begin the finished model after the basic blocked out version from before.

Here I have segmented off the face into the different regions like how it is done in the tutorials previously and how I did with the other head model from before.