This assignment was challenging but I enjoyed learning how to model a character. I enjoyed looking into Genndy Tartakovsky as his work was something I grew up watching. He has a very distinct and unique style, but it differs between the shows he has done and due to this I felt I struggled to stylise my own design. After researching more into Genndy I did see one thing he keeps consistent throughout, and that is big shapes and out of proportion styles. I tried to adapt my own designs to reflect this.

I found the modelling of the character body easy to do as I followed the class tutorials and tweaked them to suit the style of my character. The issues started when I began to create the clothing. The first issue I came across was that the duplicated torso I was using for the coat was also duplicating the mirror from the torso which I didn’t really want, however I was able to work with this and just continue on with the rest of the model. The next issue was when I started to seam and UV map, when selecting the edges for creating seams it was looping through a lot of the model and I didn’t want that as I was only wanting to mark seams on a selected section of a body part. My way around this was to select each edge individually, which ended up being very time consuming! Once I was happy with each components UV map, I started the process of getting each one into Substance and texturing it. I started with the moth body but found that when I had the texture applied and imported it back into blender that it was covering the whole model and not that specific part.  I continued with joining all the parts together, bar the prop and importing it into Substance Painter as a whole model UV map. After texturing in Substance I baked them and found that there was an issue with overlapping vertex/facing issues on the models wings. I ended up having to message into our discord to see if I could get some assistance in resolving this and managed to get a response that was accurate and therefore allowed me to get this issue resolved. I found that the finalising stages of this model where the most challenging but it seemed to stem from a lack of knowledge in the modelling stages that caused small mistakes within the model. I feel like this all comes down to a lack of knowledge and confidence in the software and as this was my first character model it was expected for it not to go smoothly. I feel like I need to spend more time on personal projects on Blender and watch Youtube tutorials to build up my confidence in using it.

Even with all these issues I’m happy with how the model turned out even with all the flaws it may have. I feel like this has been a big learning curve for me and that as time goes on I should grasp a better understanding of the software and start to become quicker in the processes, this will mean that I don’t get as stressed up to the deadline as all these issues have delayed getting the project complete in a comfortable timeframe.