DMUGA Week 23 - Reef Character!

Okay, so the past couple of weeks have been good and I wanted to continue this streak. I knew we had the reef project for visual design and was looking forward to it but still a bit nervous as to what I would come up with. I found the 'interesting character' a hard one specifically - getting to grips with what you need to go through until you end up with a 'final'. Having done two of these character projects I pretty much know what I need to work on to improve.

Monday - Visual Design

As already stated, this week's brief was to design a humanoid reef character. I was rather excited about this one because I find the species of fish & coral that you find in reefs quite interesting and think you could do a lot with it. We did something we don't normally do which was take an hour out of the morning session to literally just go and find some reference material. E.g. books, online, make mood boards. Many people opted for the mood boards & online images, and many also went to the library to find books - I was one of those. We came back and discussed some ideas in groups which was good since we got to bounce some ideas around in a quick time frame.
I made a couple of mood boards with the scanned images, plus some other ones using online reference. This gave me a good starting point for the project because from there I looked for a wide range of species in the habitat and picked out the ones which were most interesting. After some brainstorming, I came up with 6 different ideas and picked one to look into further which later became my final. Now, back to what I said I struggle with:
-Orthographic Views
-Drawing the subject from an interesting view point + in an environment
These things are what I think would make what I do so much better & faster. I spend a long time just trying to get it to look right from a certain view point, plus, I find it hard to physically draw the actual environment... Just another thing added to the list of 'practice over the summer'. Here's SOME parts of my process:

Species in reef habitat - Mindmap

Orthographic View

Tuesday - Game Production

Wow, am I glad that Steve went through the rigging process again. From the previous lesson I was uncertain on exactly how to do it, but I now know what to do. Most of today was literally fixing a few issues which had been lingering for around 10 days:
-Poly count on figure = too high by 150 tris, cut down to 50, then below budget
-Re-shaped the face a little bit - Proportions are better
-Modelled the hands around the sword & shield due to the 'bone budget' (Only 1 joint in the 3 fingers; hands are modelled already half closed)
-Re-made the dome on the front of the shield = was too high poly and it looked out of place

Other than these things, I also managed to get a bit of the rigging actually done that day, frustratingly trying to get the armour to move with the body in some sort of correct fashion - Still need to fix the shoulder and a bit on the thighs.
In addition to all of this, I got my sword and shield textured and for the first time ever, I painted them all myself using a tablet :) I am proud of what I have managed to produce up until this point, but I really need to texture the body ASAP!

Here's what he looks like so far:

Gladiator - Wireframe

Gladiator - Perspective view

NOTE: The tri count is far higher than 2500 because of the biped inside the model :)

Friday - Critical Studies

Friday was most certainly an interesting day indeed. The lecture was about working together in groups, what can cause disruptions, problems etc. Also, how to go about resolving these issues if one does occur. I love the idea of working the groups though (provided everyone pulls their weight), and think this is a great opportunity to get first hand experience of working in a group but on something for game production!

The seminar was what I considered to be like one of those 'team building' sessions. Although a bit abstract at first with the initial activity, it was rather fun and it did help to relax us all a bit and talk to each other in the following exercises as opposed to what may usually happen when you're in a group with people you don't really know... Silence. After these team-building activities, we were given a very condensed personality test which defined you as 1 of 5 categories: - Driver - Navigator - Co-ordinator - Observer - Mechanic. Obviously these can interlink and you'll have traits in multiple categories, but my strongest one was 'Navigator', which to be fair, is mostly true. I think this is my natural one, but as I am adaptable, if I need to change roles then I don't think that's too much of a problem.

Overall, an alright week. I wish that I could have done more on my gladiator as the deadline in coming up soon and I still need to fix a couple of issues, and texture the whole body!...