Personally, I found this assignment to be very enjoyable and it really helped me grasp 3D modelling. I am aware that I have made several mistakes throughout my process, however I now acknowledge those mistakes and can definitely do better next time I am assigned with a project like this one.

One of my biggest issue’s was not merging my pieces together. Instead of merging the head with the body, I kept it seperate in fear that I would perhaps need to alter the head or neck somehow, however I now acknowledge that even if this was the case, I could have just seperated the parts if the situation truly called for it. I also think I need to do a bit more research in regards to marking seams as this part still confused me a little since I thought I had marked seams in much more convenient areas, however it turned out to be the complete opposite. For future reference, I will be watching more tutorials regarding unwrapping and marking seams, since I feel like this specific aspect is what makes my model much more lacking.

In terms of the research that we had to do around Genndy Tartakovsky, I didn’t particularly struggle with this. I enjoy doing crucial research prior to starting my assignments and it was quite interesting to study his style. Whilst researching Tartakovsky and his designs was fairly easy, I definitely found that it was not so easy to replicate his art style. Tartakovsky’s style is very animated and dramatic and so I had to venture a little outside of my comfort zone to try and achieve this look. Admittedly, my final design definitely doesn’t look absolutely true and perfect to Tartakovsky’s style, however I believe that it does follow his more cute characters closely enough and I can envision a character like mine existing within the universe of Hotel Transylvania.

My favourite part of this project was actually making the model. It has honestly given me a lot of enjoyment in working with 3D software. Before this, I had been weary that I would just detest 3D work since I had struggled with our previous assignment with grasping the ropes of 3D work, however this assignment has definitely sparked a love and enjoyment for 3D modelling. Of course, my model wasn’t perfect. I should have merged the model and connected edge seams, however I didn’t quite take this into account back then in fear of something going wrong. Despite this, I am still quite proud of the final outcome of my model, and although it is definitely flawed, I personally am quite proud of how she looks considering that this is my first time trying to create a character using 3D software.

In conclusion, I can acknowledge that my model most certainly had several flaws, however I also acknowledge that this is all still very new to me and I am still trying to adjust to the software. Ultimately, I do think I could’ve put in a few more hours to refine some mistakes, however even with that I do think my final model still looks quite nice and does follow the reference design.

When it came to designing a character for this assignment, I took my inspiration from Tartakovsky’s Hotel Transylvania since we would be modelling our characters in 3D. Admittedly, I did struggle with trying to stick with this art style as it is rather drastically different than my own usual art style.

Before creating any designs, I already had a rough idea of what I was aiming for. I wanted to create a plant monster mainly based off of carnivorous plants. I used the venus flytrap as the main inspiration throughout my designs, and although I am aware that venus flytrap’s are very commonly used in media throughout several different characters, the overall shape and size of the plant does lend itself to interesting character designs.

The very first concept that I created is most definitely my least favourite. At this point I was just sketching randomly off of the top of my head and I do think the basis and general concept for this design is definitely quite good in theory, however my execution for the design definitely did not go well. The idea was to create a woman that emerged from a venus flytrap and that she would have plant like qualities, however this did not turn out as good as I would have hoped and I feel like the design was a bit bland. Perhaps in the future I may be able to revamp and reuse this design, however I definitely did not want to use it for this project as it did not match the style I was going for at all.

My second concept was definitely a little closer to what I was hoping for, however it was still not quite there. Changing up the idea, I did a basic sketch of a character who’s eyes were covered by the heads of venus flytraps, and this would also naturally flow into the character’s hair. Once again, I do believe the vision was absolutely there, however my execution on this simply did not prevail. Although it was just a sketch, it still felt too basic for what I was hoping to achieve.

By my third concept, I began to make quicker progress towards my final design. Differently from my other concepts, this character took the form of a much smaller individual with large bug like eyes and a much more child like appearance. Whilst I do still believe that this design was alright and would’ve translated well into a 3D character in this setting, I do think I completely missed my initial idea of creating a monster based on the venus flytrap, rather this character did turn out to look a lot more like a bug, and whilst that is not a necessity within this assignment I personally still wanted to create a character following that idea.

My next concept is what led me towards my final design. It still remained quite basic, however it was much more effective than the other designs in my opinion. The character has tufts on her face to resemble the teeth of a venus flytrap as well as having two large buns in her hair that are also shaped like the plant and a large skirt shaped similarly to a venus flytrap as well. This design was almost perfect to what I had envisioned for my final design and with some criticism, I followed through with it.

My final design was almost like a mixture of the last two concepts. It definitely resembles my final concept a lot more, however I took heavy inspiration from the idea of a much smaller and cutesy character. I gave the character large bug like eyes, but I didn’t shade them entirely as I didn’t want the character to look too much like an insect. I kept many of the components from my final concept and simply translated them onto a much smaller character with a much more cartoony style. I am quite proud of my final design and I believe it still follows Tartakovsky’s style, especially the smaller and more cute characters that typically have a larger head with a smaller body.

For this assignment, we were tasked with researching the creations and art style of Genndy Tartakovsky. Tartakovsky is a well renowned animator, writer, producer and director, famously known for creating iconic shows such as dexter’s laboratory, samurai Jack, and most famously Hotel Transylvania.

Tartakovsky’s style revolves around expressive faces. For many of his character designs and concepts, the viewer can learn a lot from a character merely by their design and the way the character presents themselves. Tartakovsky allows a character’s personality to emerge through their silhouette, proportions, and facial expressions.

Another key quality of Tartakovsky’s style is his use of dynamic and dramatic shapes and how they align with characters. A character that is composed with sharp and more angular shapes will appear to be more mysterious or dangerous, as opposed to a more round and stout character that will come off as approachable and friendly. Tartakovsky’s attention to the details of shape is very important to his style and allows viewers to immediately understand a character’s role and temperament from the character’s silhouette alone.

In Hotel Transylvania, colour is used quite particularly. Tartakovsky embraces a much more vibrant colour palette with these movies as influenced by the genre of the films to maintain a visibly light hearted and comedic atmosphere through just the characters colour palettes. He does stick with the iconic colour palette’s for all of the main characters [such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Werewolf], however despite the colours reflecting the classic horror colour palette’s, Tartakovsky makes the colours a lot more vibrant to sync with the designs of the characters and the setting of the film.

All of these elements combined is what makes Tartakovsky’s work so unique. His use of colour, shapes and dramatic expressions is very strategic and makes his designs stand out. Character’s are carefully designed to display that shapes and silhouette’s are arguably more effective than dialogue.

To model my character, I followed the tutorial videos that had been provided by my lecturer’s. Of course, I had to make several of my own altercations that didn’t quite follow the videos to better suit my design. Starting with the head of my character, I did have to alter the proportions quite drastically since my character has a much more animated face with a smaller mouth and much larger eyes, however this was simply enough to do after modelling a very basic human head and face. My character also has a few more specific details to her face such as the tufts that come out from her cheeks, and to achieve this I used cylinders and scaled the tip down to be much smaller, and also used the sculpting tool to adjust them better to fit the face.

The next thing I focused on was her hair. Initially, I was completely clueless on how to achieve the venus flytrap look for the buns in her hair whilst not making it look too messy, but I eventually found a solution by creating a uv sphere and using the knife tool to cut a sort of zizag shape out of the sphere too resemble the teeth of the plant, rather than doing this for the entire sphere, I simply used a mirror modifier to reflect the shape of the teeth. After finishing one uv sphere like this, I applied another mirror modifier around the head of the character so that it would align on her hair. For the bangs of her hair, I followed the same process with the tufts on her face of using cylinder’s and shaping them to fit her head better.

Her body wasn’t too difficult to model, however it definitely does look a lot drastically different in comparison to the basic human anatomy of the lecture tutorial videos. She has a much more thin body with very spindly arms and legs with large feet. When I was altering the body shape to follow my reference, I did initially worry that maybe her design was straying too far off of basic anatomy, however I continued to follow through and copy the design and it did ultimately work out in the end.  I personally think that her feet were the most difficult to model, however I loosely followed the tutorial for modelling hands and made altercations more specific for my character such as only using three faces for the toes and obviously didn’t extrude them as much since her toes aren’t incredibly long or anything.

When modelling her dress, I followed the same thing I did with the buns in her hair with using the knife tool on a uv sphere and then applying a mirror modifier to this. For the chest and back of her dress I used cylinder shapes and rescaled them to be much smaller, I then extruded the bottom of these to reach her dress. For the sides of her dress I Simply used a plane, used the knife tool to cut a curve in it, and then used sculpt mode to reshape it to fit better on her torso.

The next thing I got to was UV unwrapping my model. I first marked seams on each part in areas that I thought would be more appropriate due to being more hidden. Unfortunately I didn’t double check this with a checker texture, and now that I’m looking back on it I am aware that I absolutely should have done that. I also added a multiresolution modifier in order to add more details to my model with different sculpt tools. I used the bake tool and then saved images of my baked UV maps. I then exported my model into Substance painter with the baked UV maps and got to work on texturing my model. At this point I realised I should have used a texture checker on my UV unwraps first, since I may have marked my seams slightly wrong and lost some detail on my textures to them turning out quite blurry.

After I finished texturing my model in substance painter, I exported the textures and went back into Blender. I applied the textures and base colour through nodes and repeated this process for each part of my model since I hadn’t merged every single part of my model just yet, I now recognise this as another mistake however at this point I didn’t see anything wrong with not merging everything just yet.

Rigging my model was probably the most difficult part as I kept running into difficulties. I created my armature following the tutorial, however since my character doesn’t follow basic human anatomy, many parts did not work as I had hoped. For example, parts of the head and hair would often move with my characters arms and legs, and sometimes if I were to move the head armature, the hair wouldn’t move with the head of my character. I tried to fix this by applying more armature throughout the head, however I’m unsure if I wasn’t following correctly because this didn’t quite work for me. Instead, I used the weight paint mode and renamed all my bones to be easier to follow. I made sure that only parts relevant to the bone would move with that bone through this method. There was definitely still some much minor issues with rigging, but it wasn’t as major as the initial issue’s I had been having. Posing my character wasn’t too difficult since she does have fairly basic anatomy and the bones followed her anatomy quite well all things considered.

For her prop, I modelled a fairly basic closed umbrella for her to hold in the final pose. This was fairly easy to model using cylinders.

Exporting my model to sketchfab is where I had the most trouble. In the tutorial video, the entire character had already been merged before being textured in substance painter, however I did not do this with my model. And so when I imported my model with all the relevant textures into Sketchfab, I couldn’t select several normal maps or several roughness textures. I now acknowledge this as a pretty major mistake on my behalf that I did not notice until it was already way too late. Thankfully, Sketchfab was quite easy to work with aside from my issue with my UV’s all being seperate. I enjoyed working with the different lighting and shadows to make the presentation of my model look a lot nicer.