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.
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.
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