From Week 3-4 I was away on a family holiday, however I’ll still be writing my blog in order for the sake of tidiness. :O)
After returning from my holiday, I realised I had some work to catch up on, specifically some class work and the homework from Week 3, a Zubat from Pokémon! Seeing this pop up on Blackboard had me pretty excited as I’d consider myself a Pokémon fan, especially the earlier games from which Zubat originates from. When I was a child, around 10-13, I used to emulate the older Gameboy Advance games like Fire Red, Leaf Green, Soul Silver and Heart Gold and eventually I bought a vintage Gameboy Colour with a Pokémon Red cartridge so I could physically own one of the older games. Since then I’ve casually kept up with Pokémon and sustained a love for it so being able to model something I’m a fan of for homework of all things made it an incredibly fun task, one that I ended up taking full advantage of which I hope is reflected in my final product(s). Although I found it difficult to start with a sphere as opposed to a subdivided cube, I mostly followed the tutorial when modelling my Zubat, only making small changes here and there. For the teeth and the wings, I ended up using a subdivided cube instead of what Mike used in the video as, although his method is completely viable, I felt I’d be able to do things faster with my own method, especially for the wings. Also, unlike the Snowman and the Tie Interceptor, I decided to give Zubat a very simple rig so he can move his ears, wings, legs, body and head independently instead of being restricted by the parenting method of rigging. I also added a shape key for his mouth to close slightly but I didn’t end up using it in the final animation as I felt it looked a little weird and wasn’t necessary for the animation I wanted to do.
I was originally going to have a render/animation of a flock of Zubat inside a cave only for a flashlight to shine up on them and aggravate them into flying at the camera, however I had a last minute idea that took priority for nostalgia reasons alone. As I mentioned earlier, I was a huge fan of Pokémon as a kid and loved the old GBA remakes of the original games and, taking inspiration from those games, I decided to recreate the battle background from Fire Red and animate Zubat as the “wild encounter”. Zubat himself was pretty easy as his animation is quite literally just him hovering up and down with his wings flapping over and over, however if I wanted to make the background look authentic I’d need to make some assets myself. Using Clip Studio Paint, I drew out some textures to recreate the little ring of grass surrounding the sprite of the wild Pokémon and made a gradient that perfectly replicates the one from Fire Red to use as a background. I was originally gonna use it as an HDRI but opted to use it as an emissive spherical dome texture as I wanted to be able to manipulate the position and size of the background to keep it as close to the original as possible. With some simple lighting, composition effects taken from my older projects and careful camera co-ordination, I was able to put together animation that I feel captures the feel of those old games pretty well. I also made a lower poly version of the model and using those some composition and geometry effects from said older projects (Drips PSX EFX!!) which I based directly off one of Zubat’s oldest sprites.
Since I was so excited to do Zubat, I ended up doing the classwork after the homework. I had to model both a milkshake and a flower vase, both of which I didn’t have too much trouble with! The milkshake was good practise in general but I felt the flower vase was overall more enjoyable because it was simple to model the pot and the stem of the flower but also challenging enough to model the flower and it’s leaves, making for a fun learning experience. Although I don’t think I’ll be modelling too many flowers in the future, it was a fun exercise that I ended up making a pretty cute render for, yet again using cycles to keep consistent with the rest of my class work renders!
