Fixing the ghost

 

This week I continued working on the ghost and made some fixes based on the feedback I got during our weekly presentation.

During our presentation I was given some constructive criticisms for my ghost model. I was told it did not look scary enough, that I should refine the mouth more and  that I should remove the eyes and just leave holes. After this we as a group talked about how else we could make the ghost scarier. We decided to remove the horns, remove the lower jaw, hollow out the skull and make the cloak bigger and longer. Throughout the week I got to work on making these changes.

I started by removing the horns, eye balls and lower jaw. I also angled the eyes better so they seemed more angry. Next I had to hollow out the inside of the skull. I deleted all the faces on the bottom then created a jagged, broken bone look along the bottom of the skull. I then just created the topology for the inside of the skull. This was quite difficult and took me awhile as there were a lot of faces to work with and I had to connect them all up at the top. Now the skull had a thickness and no bottom. Finally I altered the tongue so it was longer and curved more. This meant I had to change the teeth too as the tongue now poked through them. So I angled them farther forward and was even able to make them slightly longer.

 

 

After showing this to the group, they agreed this was looking far scarier, so I moved on to the clock. This time I imported the Unreal mannequin into the scene and used it to get a scale reference for how big the ghost should be. The main change I made to the cloak was adding an extra bit to it, so it looked like it was actually wrapped around the ghost. All I did was copy and paste the bottom half of the cloak, then angled it slightly, and attached it to the back. After some sculpting this is what it looked like in the end.

 

 

I showed this to my group for feedback and they all thought this was looking far better. I made some last adjustments to it and finally I was finished with the modelling of the ghost. After UV mapping it I was finally I was able to start texturing.

I brought the model into Substance painter and began playing around with some textures. I found the process more challenging than I thought it would be as I was trying to simultaneously the make the ghost the right colour of blue, emissive and give it the right amount of transparency. Each of these things seemed to influence the other making it very hard to find the right balance. Below shows my first attempts.

 

None of these looked right and I was starting to struggle. I also tried giving the ghost marks on the cloak to make it less plain. But in this attempt I found the ghost wasn’t transparent enough or emissive.

 

Eventually I saw that giving the skull and cloak the same amount of transparency, made it very difficult to see the face. So I went back to Maya and made the hands and skull a different material.  Now in Substance painter I was able to make them slightly less transparent than the cloak, making it easier to see the face. Now I had this fixed but I was still struggling to make it emissive. I found it was because of the dark blue colour that stopped this from happing. I told the the group of the problems i was having and suggested we will have to make the ghost a brighter colour if we want it to be emissive. After they agreed I went back I made it a lighter blue. This allowed me to finally make it emissive enough to my liking and I was finally happy with the model. Below shows the final outcome of the ghost.

 

I exported the textures and gave over all the files to Archie as they were going to rig and animate it. This was definitely the hardest model I have had to make for this project so far but I am very pleased with its final look.