DMUGA Week 11 - Character hand in! (+ Post Mortem)

We come to an end in this tale of ups and downs, and we say hello to the good experience that comes with having dealt with a character project of this nature. It's obviously not all bad, I'd almost like to say I wished to have tried a more realistic instead of stylised approach, but would it really have been that much more beneficial? - Post mortem at the end of the blog...

Monday was a good day - enough said! In all seriousness though, it was useful because I got some greatly needed help from Steve for the proportions of the girl, they are subtle changes but do effect how you interpret the model. I also did a few tweaks here and there for the rigs of the characters.

Tuesday's life drawing went alright, which in fairness is better than how I usually think they go. I tried using a donkey again this week because I really do feel that I work better on them than an easel. We just focused on hands, feet, and the head like last week, and I ended up with a similar drawing as last week's too. This does show me however that I do seem to work better on a donkey and I really like the white highlight technique on the brown paper (This is now the standard so it's the last time you'll hear about me using a donkey by the way...).

Furthermore, I also used Tuesday to try and fix some problems with the rig for the girl, and clear up my files so that I can put them onto the K-drive ready for Wednesday. This time was also used to do some renders of my characters and organise the unreal/game engine scene, alongside putting together the asset document.

Wednesday involved clearing up all of my files, doing final renders, organising everything for the hand in, and doing some crude animations for the tutors to laugh at when they're marking:

Here's some more renders:

Post-Mortem

I now have actually modelled a child with decent proportions, and have learnt a great deal about a faster workflow when it comes to ideas/iterations. Given the original 3 week project deadline, I think I chose correctly to do stylised because it is a lot faster than spending hours on a realistic design, then either starting again or changing it greatly. Even though I didn't do as much as I could have with the simplistic approach, if I chose realism, I probably would have far less to show and it may have not even been good quality either.

In addition, I have 2 characters, both rigged to a certain extent, and look like they could belong together with dichotomous personalities... That was the brief. If I chose realism, I most likely would only have 1 character. I am combating my fear of Z-brush some more by also watching some tutorials online to help me get started with it so that I too can create high poly meshes to use for baking.

Conclusion:

Overall, the project was quite successful in my opinion because the brief was to create to design 2 dichotomous characters that could exist in the same world - any style applies, and that is what I have done. In addition, the design of my robot is quite strong and very recognisable just from the silhouette - it can easily be made into a symbol/logo:

Also, the visuals of the robot & girl from the size, colour and shape all imply certain characteristics which don't need to be explained for the audience to understand what their personalities are like (the robot is clearer than the girl).

Outline of processes:

In steps, my entire process was: Moodboards, word list, brainstorm, refined moodboard, colour palettes, silhouettes, sketches + development, feedback (Presentation), changed idea sketches & orthorgraphics, base models, colour experimentation, more refinement/finished ideas & models, 2nd feedback, changes, rigs, animations, engine.

Concepting: I actually didn't have a clear idea on what I wanted to do until I reached the silhouette stage, and even then, I didn't know what my characters were going to look like at all. The whole reason of doing the steps before the silhouettes were to hopefully find something which would inspire me - and I did. The image that triggered my idea was in my 2nd moodboard; it looked like a father and son robot, and I knew I wanted to make two characters which the audience can emotionally connect with.

My first idea for a robot was based off of the 'scale' page in which I changed the size/scale of the silhouettes and decided which relationship I wanted to follow. This was a large robot and a small girl - Robot keeps falling apart, and the girl puts him back together etc. However, after the feedback, it was clear that this idea was too comparable to the 'Iron Giant'. Therefore, I went for a different approach and pursued the idea of a small girl and an even smaller robot. This created an 'owner/pet' relationship.

Once I developed one of my silhouettes further, I produced the orthgraphics for him and begun modelling. After I made the base mesh, I decided they weren't dichotomous enough and tried to make the robot with a hint of evil/negativity. This made a whole new personality for him by which I then altered the mesh and pinged him back into Photoshop for colour development.

Alongside side this, I also developed the girl and modelled the base mesh. I then went through some more 2D development with her and colour exploration. The base mesh was refined, textured in a very basic fashion, then rigged.

Modelling: From the orthographics I made in Photoshop, I modelled both characters and altered them in 3D to my best judgement (e.g. proportions). There was only one small problem when I started modelling and that was to make the robot's 'fin-like' arms run seamlessly from the front of the face to the side. This was a good modelling challenge and was overcome through looking at the topology of a dolphin's fins. I made the base mesh very fast in around 1 day (including unwrapping), which was a very good choice to make because it meant I could iterate and develop the mesh further into the 'evil' robot character.

The girl was also modelled rather fast, and there weren't many note-worthy challenges when modelling the girl as her geometry is very simple, but I did have a problem with the ears, lips, and hands. The ears and hands were made separately and I had to attach them which created a couple of triangles, and the lips were just very hard to get the form of. The part that took the longest unsurprisingly was the face - I took a very long time to get round to developing her face in 2D and therefore delayed the modelling in 3D durastically.

Unwrapping: The initial mesh I made for the non-evil robot (Blue), was very difficult because It took me an entire day of fiddling around and yielded no results. It wasn't that I couldn't unwrap the mesh, it was that the UV'S were so organic and curvy that I couldn't fit everything on the texture sheet without having a fairly large amount of what looked like 'wasted space'.

Therefore, I was actually very happy to change the idea to the 'evil' robot because by adding in the spikes, it broke up the unwrap for me and altered the shapes enough for me to get a very tight unwrap.

Unwrapping the girl was very straight forward and I didn't come across any problems.

Texturing: The textures for the robot were supposed to be rather 'clean' ones, as if the robot was just new out of the factory. After doing the colour development, I already knew what the base colours were going to be and I worked from there. I didn't want it to be just plain, so I did add some variation to the colours, but not too much. My Photoshop file is very organised and each different texture can be found in their separate folders. I tested the textures in Marmoset and adjusted them to my needs before putting it into the game engine.

The texturing for the girl were simple base colours as they were done rather late, and I know that there isn't enough detail in them.

Rigging: Initially, I found it a little bit confusing to rig my robot character because I couldn't actually move the leg bones away from the pelvis and inside the robots' legs, but I realised this doesn't actually matter because it could all be done when it came to weighting them. It took me a few tries to get it to a decent stage, and now there isn't large, noticeable problems when animating. The biggest issue is most definitely moving the arms as the shoulder clips into the head if the arm moves across the body.

There was also a big issue with the shoulders on the girl character, and on the dress because the legs clip right through it. This was better than what I previously had so I had to accept that I couldn't change it.

Engine: The process for the engine was simply importing the meshes/textures in, creating the materials, and setting up some basic lighting. One problem I did find however is that the robot's eye didn't show up in a lot of renders, but that was because the way I made him was that there is a glass material in front of the eye with refraction included - this meant it pretty much disappeared from acute camera angles.

How I could improve:

-I can definitely say that in order to improve my work, I need to do more colour exploration. Even though I did quite a few for the robot, I don't feel as though I utilised my colour palettes from early on in the project. I picked some images that had colour palettes I liked, but I didn't use them as best I could have.

-My first improvement links with this one because I feel as though I didn't do enough detail. Despite them being stylised and simple, I think I over simplified it by not adding any details on the girls dress for example - it is too plain. I think that my ideas could both be further developed by adding in details like pockets on the dress, a zip, a pattern, shoe laces, fur on the top part of the boots etc. The robot could do with more details, but only subtle ones because the design is supposed to be simplistic and easy to read anyway, so not much more needs to be included.

-In terms of the whole workflow, it felt good, however, I think that I didn't explore other ideas which immediately limited me to just robots and/or humans. This was because in order to stay on schedule, I had to settle on an idea and get to the orthographics as fast as I could, ready for feedback in our presentation. This was made worse by the fact I wasn't sure on what I wanted to do by the Tuesday evening on the week of our presentation for Thursday morning.

This isn't too much of a problem as the time was very limited, but it does expose me in the sense that I didn't explore my other ideas.

-Decide on specific materials for the elements because this will help me when it comes to the values + texturing stage. This will make sure that I don't end up with a 'block' and not know what materials to make different parts look like and thus, wasting time. I have done this in past projects, and I kind of did it in this one when it came to the robot, but I ended up going on a tangent a bit in the texturing and ended up with undesirable results. It is very evident to see this for the girl though because it literally is almost just a flat colour and no "feel or smell" sense added to it.