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.

Moving onto using sculpting to make a head was a big leap. To say the least, it was a rough process, but with the guides for the head I feel like I was able to make a decent human head. Learning this tough skill is key for furthering my character design for this assignment.

and here is how this rough and sharp model looks with a subdivision modifier to smooth it all out.

By this week I had been figuring out the character design I would be doing for my assignment. At first I looked to trying to use the mythical gorgon, Medusa as inspiration for my model, but I struggled a bit with that, then I looked to other mythological figures like Achilles, for example, but again it just did not strike a chord with me. But then I looked to designing a very exaggerated Minotaur character. This, I decided, would work the best as a model taking inspiration from Genndy Tartakovsky’s work. I was well familiar with his recent show, Primal, so wanted to go on the very exaggerated and overly muscular and massive hulking figures in that show. It also fit in with some of the bold shape language of Hotel Transilvania’s take on Frankenstein’s monster, and even a bit of the style of Tartakovsky’s cancelled adaptation of Popeye.

Here you can see my design process and learning to draw similar to Tartakovsky’s different shows and movies.

And then I blocked out my design in Blender, using lots of basic shapes to try and visualise the basic essence of the design in its shape language in a 3D space.

After this class and week I feel confident in my ability to make this character into a good model and utilise Tartakovsky’s style to its fullest.

This week I found the introduction to sculpting to be difficult at first, the only time I had previously used it was very brief when using it a small amount to texture my snowman in the first week and create a less perfect circle for the snow. Now, I followed the guide to make a rock, but decided to add some nice crystals in and added basic colour for fun.

At home I decided to experiment more and tried to block out making a character of mine. It did not turn out very well but it was fun to try.

Assignment 1, over the first 5 weeks in 3D Digital Literacy has gone very well, I feel like I have learnt a lot in these past three weeks about 3D modelling and getting used to blender and substance painter. I can see a huge improvement in my own modelling over this time, my knowledge of the software and how to use each tool. I have been confident enough to go out of my way to also complete some of the extra tasks of animating some of the models and I feel like I have been putting a lot of effort into some of the small details of my more recent models, like the sword and helmet.

This first assignment has really effectively pushed me to go out of my way to learn more about this software and different ways to get around problems in 3D modelling. Overall I am quite happy with what I have produced over these weeks for this assignment and I am excited to continue on into even more challenging models and learn more about 3D animation, rigging, texturing and more.

In my fifth week we were figuring out substance painter and had to model a helmet. After a while of deciding on one I chose Reinhardt from Overwatch. It took a lot of time to accurately model his helmet and a lot of different reference photos. The UV mapping and porting over to substance painter was just as tough. With all of the different intricate parts of this helmet I found there was a lot to split up for my UV map, but again, after a lot of work I managed to pull it all together in what I would consider an accurate recreation of the helmet.

Week 4 had us working on UV maps and using different 2d software to texture models. This did prove to be difficult, having to break the model apart in its UV mapping and piecing it back together proves to be a difficult task but I think it paid off and I got a really nice looking result out of it. I am also just really proud of my hidden sword staff thing.