– Feedback on Staff –

The video feedback back from Henry settled a lot of issues I had throughout my assignment. He seemed happy with the design of my handle and the smaller details around the rings, however he explained to me to bake my orbs before uploading. Firstly to select my orbs, go to mesh display and soften edge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another improvement I can make is to follow the flow of the texture. Due to my UV’s being in the wrong directions, the grain of the wood then flowed in the wrong ways. To improve this I would need to use the checkerboard behind my UV’s or an imported image to align each section and to also use more reference images to understand how the grain of wood twists around corners and sharp edges.

The next main area of improvement is my UV mapping. The positive thing is that when my whole model is selected the UV maps work okay, however I’m now aware to use less UV’s and instead do as little UV’s but do them in larger chunks. One specific map that consisted of smaller faces needed to be stitched together by selecting the edges and stitching them and then selecting an edge that’s slightly hidden to unfold. I’ll remember for next time to keep it simple and bigger pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pictures below show Henry’s comment on bigger portions of my model for mapping and aligning up correctly for texturing.

The next suggestion for my model is the orb I placed at the bottom of the staff. I struggled to create the layered wood I wanted but it didn’t work out so I had to change last minute. However, Henry made the suggestion of creating a box and small planes throughout, as well as possibly adding a rope to hide any imperfections.

I only had two small changes to my blog which is to add in more research about modelling and sculpting, especially to assist in my assignment 2. The other change is to not focus all my research on staffs but to possibly research on canes and the textures within them which would’ve helped in the wood texturing.

The last main area of improvement is the texturing on my model. Before beginning I’ve noted that for my model I only used 1 texture which applied to the whole model, whereas I should’ve separated them.

I struggled with opening and working Substance Painter before but I’m going to try a older version so I can carry out what Henry suggested. Firstly I needed to separate my materials then selecting my orbs, right clicking and assign a new material as a lambert and renaming it. For the whole model I need to repeat this to be transferable to Substance Painter.

Finally, the last section was about my upload to Sketchfab. I had a lot of issues with this before but Henry was able to show me how to export and what settings to have it under.

The feedback I was given was a great confidence booster in what I have created so far and will definitely be a huge help in my cute character assignment.

My Cute Character

Ideas:

Some ideas I had for my model started with Aggretsuko, I love her unproportioned head and body but loved that her personality is shown through her appearence. Similar to this, I also liked the simplistic design of Gudetama and a mix between them could be a great idea. I also had an idea to do a dinosaur with bigger, more cartoon like eyes, and a small unproportioned body similar to Aggretsuko. I also loved the idea of a sitting duck, similar to the ugly ducking and its proportions but give a more cartoony feel to it. The last idea I had was to do multiple characters similar to the unnamed creatures in the movie Princess Mononoke.

 

However, the idea I like the most is definitely a duck.

Modelling:

Beginning my duck I began using the image above as a reference to proportions and ideas for designs.

The first basic model went well and using the grease pencil tool I drew on the shape of the neck I needed. From there I focused on connecting the neck to the body and using the multicut tool and merging. I repeated this for the head, then moved onto the few strands of hair from the top of the head, here I simply extruded the faces and used the bend feature, after that I used the merge vertices tool to connect it to the rest of the body.

From here I began fixing the hair into more spikes than straight cylinders. However, after fixing them I was becoming confused with the edge loops and the model became more an issue to fix than to proceed with, so I began a new model.

 

I began by making a new body, ensuring I kept to quads.

I used this tool below that allowed me to smooth my surface without changing the original shape which helped a lot as the smooth tool sometimes took too much away from my model.

After this I added on a sphere for the head and used the multicut tool to cut a hole for my model to merge to. From here I began the beak, beginning with two cylinders then changing to using a cube and the extrude tool to pull out faces, leaving a gap in-between. From here I created a plane to fill the gaps and merged the vertices together. The final step I used was to use the sculpting tools to build on the shape and create a more realistic beak.

After finishing the beak I added it to the head using the same multicut tool.

 

After adding the beak, I moved onto the wings. I used a square and the multicut tool I cut out a basic shape from my reference image and extruded the flat plane to create a 3D shape. I then tweaked the edge loops to go with the shape of the wing and added it to the model using the multitool.

Next was onto the webbed feet. My first initial thought was to use a cylinder and a square and connect in the middle but I found a website with some images of the edge loops and the shape I needed. Using these I created the feet below:

Following this I created the top part of the legs using a cylinder and sculpting tools, then combining these with the body. To create the legs I simply added 2 cylinders and extended to the feet.

 

Next was adding all of these to my model, however problems then occur attaching the wings as in the smooth preview it gave me unconnected squares randomly located around my model.

From here I began noticing issues with the model, such as when cleaning the model it would create more issues than solve them, and also the majority of the vertices weren’t connected.  and so it took me a substantial amount of time watching YouTube videos and re-watching videos from earlier in this semester.

Unfortunately, I didn’t finish my model due to running out of time. I am happy with the model itself so far it just took a long time to fix the n-gons and space out the edge loops evenly for sculpting. I did struggle with remembering everything from the beginning of the year and struggled to keep up with my own researching and learning. I felt the end of the semester was a lot to complete with the animated short and our modelling but over the summer I will improve this model further and progress more into my own learning.