The Radiantly Mad King - Week 6

The Minstrel
This week I moved on to the outer layers of the characters. At this point my goal is just to achieve clean base meshes with good topology and minimized separations so that they are better prepared for sculpting and texturing later on. I spent a lot of time finishing up the body base mesh for the steward which I didn't finish last week before moving on to her outfit. I tweaked the face nearly to death trying to get different proportions and styles and decided to shrink the chin of my original design because it just wasn't working out in 3D.

 I gathered most of my sketches together so that  I could look at all of them while I modeled. Before I imported them to maya I lined them up about as much as they could be. This allowed me to slide the plane around and choose which image to use.

 There are a few details that need to be modeled straight on to the outfit like the strings of her shirt and bracers. At times I tried to experiment with the topology to include various extra lines but in most cases I found it was much safer and easier to create the lines during the sculpting process (the V shaped line up her chest, for example). Here's the outfit as far as I've gotten so far.

Something I really struggled with (for some reason) was modeling the braided hair. I know the simple ways to model it, using just two pieces offset from each other in a line (ZBrush Hair Example) but I wanted to try to actually model the braids flowing through more accurately. I had a lot of reference images to go by and drew out the shape of the hair from three angles before I started. Right now I still only have a base mesh to go by for its shape but it's getting there.

I also quickly drew up a design for her shoes based on what I felt was a stylized shoe shape (clogs). I added the little feather shapes just for style.

Just a sketch for eye edge flow.

A final thing to mention in terms of progress on this project is that I've begun organizing my files a lot more. I now include the week number in my naming convention so I don't have to compare my various back up files so much and I keep much cleaner folders to sort through maya projects, digital sketches, references, and various other things. Visually I also organize my pictures (the important ones) using document styles. All of my renderings have been on the same lighting rig which is now exported into a separate project so I can continue using it that way; my entire design document had its own paper background; and my original sketch collections and renders had the ticket border which I'm still using on anything worth framing.

The Radiantly Mad King - Week 5

The Wheel Turns

This week is the first week of production! Appropriately, it's also the week I chose to drop my laptop off a table, damaging the mac partition and sending it to the shop for a while. Fortunately, this entire project has been backed up in several locations and I wasn't set back at all. Unfortunately a separate project was lost and I had to make up that work using time set aside for my thesis (not an excuse though). For the moment I'm stuck working in the labs where I can only harness the power of one screen at a time (I can't start watching the rigging and displacement videos while I model in other words).

Though it wasn't intended for use in this project, I sculpted the head of an old man similar to what I needed for the Steward using Mudbox's default head. It turned out surprisingly nice considering I haven't used Mudbox in half a year and was using my laptop's trackpad in the middle of class. This is the only thing I can think of that I might have lost that was part of this project.

For this week I intended to have the base meshes of both the Minstrel's and the Steward's bodies and heads completed and the meshes UVed.


The Steward
Anyway, I managed to get the base mesh completely done for the body and head of the Steward as well as some new side image planes to help with the modeling. I found that the thing that took me longest was trying to make my edge flow mimic the musculature (which I now know decently!). Along with the amount of time I put into this and the time I put into modeling similarly unnecessary features on my Rhino for my high poly modeling class, I've realized that the base mesh no longer needs to represent such details. Instead, I should be modeling extremely simple base meshes and using normal and displacement mapping for all the details (not just the fine ones). A good example is this project by Selwy in which a single base mesh was sculpted into more accurate representations of the characters and then taken to an insane level of detail without worrying about getting really any specific details in the mesh.
http://www.selwy.com/2008/male-01/

Here's what I ended up with for the Steward. I'll be taking this and sculpting and texturing it next quarter along with his outfit which I'll model in the coming weeks. For the heck of it I gave him a simple eye rig so he can look at the camera.

The Minstrel

The Minstrel was a bit harder because her face was simplified even more so that it would be stylized. In drawing it simpler, I used harder lines with larger empty planes in between. The 3D style I'm going for, though, ends up having rounded but heavy contours and lines. Whereas the Steward has wrinkles and the King has a big jaw, the Minstrel's face is relatively smooth. I took some extra time thinking about the planes of the face when drawing up the image planes for her. I didn't finish the mesh but I got decently far in it. I'm going to try to finish it later today so that it's out of the way. I was in the middle of redoing the nose when I stopped to render these out.

The Radiantly Mad King - Week 4

Design Document and Presentation

This week I spent a lot of time putting together the design document and presentation for our pitch following the completion of the pre-production phase. In addition to that, I did more designs for the guard, the queen, and a bit for the steward. These are all compiled nicely into the custom made design document pages that I'll post here.

As usual, I put a lot of time into the project but wasn't necessarily that efficient with it. I've been doing a poor job of knowing when to call it quits for the night and the effectiveness of my work falls off around 3 o'clock in the morning. Anyway, here's my time:

1:00 - Listing characters by importance. Listing assets needed for them and the environment. Listing materials. Describing the stage.

1:00 - Armor design, research, and drawing techniques.

2:30 - Sketching the guard posed and with his latest armor.

1:00 - Adding to the character card sketches (the guard's armor and fixed arm proportions)

0:30 - Fixing the king on the character card sketches.

1:00 - Reading the "Dynamic Figure Drawing" book.

1:00 - Creating color swatches for most of the characters on the character card sheet.

0:30 - Character design research.

1:30 - Buying nice clothes for the presentation.

8:00 - Compiling everything into a design document. Being generally slow about it.

2:00 - Coming up with a presentation in the wee hours of the morning.

0:30 - Updating blog.