Week 23; Keep Truckin' Along

Firstly, I'd like to address the well thought out title of this blog.

Okay, now to business.

This week we go straight into another project, and I do have to admit I'm still feeling the effects of the crunch time we had in the character project. Luckily though, we have a relatively straight forward project! This will be the first instalment of our Zombie Pick-up Truck final project.

We've been given 6k tris and three weeks to model and texture the exterior (and interior as a stretch goal) of a Toyota Hilux truck.

In all honesty, I think this actually too much time spent on this part of the project as we already have been provided with the blueprints of the truck and we can follow them quite strictly then when moving onto the interior (which I fully intend, given the time we have). Therefore I've made the decision, following an announcement of a talk coming up on normal maps by one of our third years, to fully PBR texture my truck.

So, what is PBR texturing? Well, PBR stands for Physically Based Rendering, in which the light directly and dynamically effects the textures of the model. This gives a somewhat realistic effect when done properly. So, how will I make these PBR textures? In preparation of this I've been following a series on youtube where (insert name) creates an asset for a level using a Photoshop plug-in – nDO – to create the nomal maps straight onto a photoshop document, wherein normally you'd have to create in 3DS Max or zBrush, a high-poly model and “bake” the information onto a low-poly model. I will be using these normals in conjunction with the normals that I'll get from a program called “Substance Designer” that I'll be using.

My ambition of using and learning a completely new program in 2 Weeks will be quite difficult to achieve but I'm up for the challenge and hopefully it'll make my model look quite pretty!

However, at the end of this week I've created fully the interior and exterior of the model and I'm ready to continue onto the texturing and unwrapping for next week.

Interior

Exterior

Until then!  

Post mortem

  So, as I've covered in previous blog posts, we had five weeks to complete the character project. Two weeks for concepting in which after the first we had feedback to improve on for our final concept to be approved. This was an individual project and we had two 1024x1024 texture sheets and a 6k tri limit. In hindsight, I'm quite happy with the whole process, the reasons I'll go over in the following paragraphs.

  What I think worked well:

  In all honesty I'm actually quite happy with the project overall. This is the first project I actually spent a considerable amount of time (2 weeks) concepting and managed to paint up a final concept of the model. I liked the overall aesthetic of the character, and how it turned out in the end. I'm particularly happy with the textures on the model, I think they have sufficient detail and readability and fit the project brief quite well.

  What didn't work well:

  My topology. I briefly covered this in my previous blog post but I got in a muddle with the topology of my model. I went against my own intuition and decided to model the folds into the model, which I am aware messed up the topology to make it hard to rig. I'm also not too keen on the pose I decided to model him in. I tried to get an elderly man ambiance for my character so I modelled him in a stoop, however he seems to come across more stunted than stooping. I also should have made it more obvious he was older with the use of greying hairs. I also should have allocated more time for texturing as towards the end of the project as I found that I had to rush the last refinements such as the shadows on the face.

  What I would do differently?:

  As I've said before, I would completely redo the topology of the model to fix the rig of the model and in turn the deformation of the model. I'd also fix the colour scheme of the model. In my opinion it has too much green for a fisherman which should have more of a blue tinge to the design in correlation to the theme of the sea. I would have spent more tris on the accessories and more time in texturing them as well as they come across rushed and also don't deform properly with the rest of the model.

  So, knowing all this now, I'll redo the character project but limit myself to around 2k tris. I may change the subject matter to what I want, reconcept over the summer or in downtime between projects and reflect on what I've learned and how long the new project has taken me.

Week 22; Coming to a close.

The Final week of Character project and along with getting feedback from my third year peers, brushing up textures and rigging, this week has been quite a busy one, unlike what I'd had expected.

So I spent the week brushing up on my textures after receiving some feedback from my third year mentor in which I was advised, for the face of the model, overlay a picture of my actual face then paint over onto the texture sheet. I also didn't have the correct shadows under the nose and the neck and forehead area so I had to change those as well. I was also informed that I should make the back of the poncho less detailed in order to mask better the fact that the texture is mirrored. Also I cleaned up the hair and hair line of the model.

Now the rigging part didn't go so well.

Due to the way that I had modelled my character (modelling in the folds) I now had to deal with best the bad topology I had made. This in turn meant that the character did not deform correctly when put through animations and took a lot of fiddling around with the weight of bones to fix. For the most part I went through Mike Pickton's tutorial on rigging a character (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpU1yqsT8_A) and following his instruction step by step. Even though I did this I still had my fair share of problems that ensued.

However at the end of this week I'm happier at the knowledge I've gained and I now have a proper appreciation of why topology is so important!

The End Result:

We were also asked within our review to do a post-mortem of our character project. In the next blog post I'll discuss my end feeling with my project, how it went and what I've learned more in depth, until then!

Week 21 & action plan

Back in Week 20 we were asked to prepare the current stage of the character project we had reached at that current point in time. After submitting my screenshots of the model I had my review with Mike and Emma.

After about ten minutes with them I was tasked to come up with an action plan on the way I'm going to tackle the next part of the year in respect to what we'd discussed in the review.

One of the comments that was made was my seemingly lack of response to feedback which I admit is something not documented in my blog, so therefore I'm making a conscious effort to document it not only in my head but on my blog as well.

I also take too long on projects as I find myself not balancing my time with my personal work and development as well, so I'll need to compensate with the quality of my projects in order to develop further as an artist in my own respect as well.

Now I had misinterpreted the hand-in for what they wanted to look at for this review, I thought they just wanted to have a look at the point we had reached in the project so I had just saved out some jpeg screenshots of where I was at in 3DS Max. However I think from the feedback they wanted something more presentable than just a screenshot, therefore I need to be mindful of how my presentation will effect my grade.

I was also told to re-do the character project in my own time at around 2k tri limit, theoretically taking half the time of this one in which I'll understand better the processes I've been going through.

So to recap:

Commit positively and document feedback.

Be mindful of completing projects in sufficient time.

Pay attention to aesthetic quality of work and presentation.

Redo project with a 2k tri limit.

Complete a post-mortem of project afterwards.

In other news I've been modelling this past week and I've reached the end of my modelling. At the time of the review I had just completed the body, however now I'm about to complete the texturing phase of the project too.

The main problem I found was that in the 3 Weeks leading up and preparing us for the project, we had a week where we modeled folds, which I'm now aware that this is not a good idea. This reason being that it completely destroys the topology of the model and therefore will not deform correctly when rigging. However, ironically, I don't have enough time to redo my topology completely as I will then be behind for the rigging and texturing of the model.

For now I'll leave you with the screenshots of the model so far and next week I wont have too much to show as I'll mostly be rigging and tackling that!

Week 20; The Modelling of Me!

  The modelling of the head didn't go as smoothly as I'd of liked it. In fact, I spent the majority of the week modelling my head, which was a huge time sink. I think I personally invested too many tris and too much time in modelling my head and overlooked how many tris I'd need to model the rest of my body.

Breaking my face into Face Loops

Start of modelling the head using box modelling - Front View

Left View

  Never the less, after the final touch ups on my concept and researching facial topology I cracked on with modelling the head for my model. It was actually rather a simple process which I just found very time consuming as I wanted to get it near enough perfect since when you look at a character the first thing you notice is the face. After many cuts and swift loops later, I ended up with this at the end of the week:

  At the end of this week, after modelling most of the head I decided to do a quick paintover of the features to make myself look considerably older. I debated whether to model the creases in my forehead in for next week, but after consultation, decided it'd be better to conserve my tri count and add them in on my texture. 

  It's not perfect yet, but I'll keep on cracking on with it over the course of next week, and hopefully tomorrow I'll start modelling the body and the rest of the accessories!  

Paintover of head model