The Radiantly Mad King - Week 9

The First Final Stretch

We're down to one more week for the first half of the time allotted to our senior thesis projects and we'll soon know whether we'll be working on them over break (hint: yes).

The Sad Turtle

The biggest product of this past week's labors is the Sad Turtle. Because I'm getting really into the sculpting through Zbrush workflow lately I decided to skip the modeling stage entirely by using zspheres instead. It went much quicker, though I have to learn to keep the detail simple at this stage rather than taking it as far as before it is even in geometry.
My first sketch using zspheres was based on my drawing of the sad turtle and ended up having distorted proportions and didn't really look right. I focused most of my time on getting the shell to be the right shape and the holes in it to be placed correctly.
After the zspheres comes the base sculpting. At the moment I like to resist the urge to raise the division level high because I know it's more important for me to focus on getting the base form right. After some experimentation, I decided to make the head of the turtle match a photo as closely as I could (at this low level). I knew that it would be much easier to pull the geometry around and stylize the turtle after I made it look like a turtle. In the end I got the form looking the way I wanted.
The final step was to retopologize which was done in ZBrush. While I like the simplicity of being able to do this straight from ZBrush, I wish it had a slightly improved interface for selecting and merging points. I kept missing points that were nearly on top of each other but not merged.

The Antique Bird Cage

I did most of the model for this last week but, looking back at it, hated the geometry of a lot of it. I cleaned up and remodeled most of it, making my proportions a bit better. I modeled the door flat and then bent it to match the curve of the cage. I plan to do the lower level of metal filigree as texture maps with alpha channels.

For some reason Maya also kept deleting my mesh as I was undoing, forcing me to do pieces all over again.

The Radiantly Mad King - Week 8, 7

The Minstrel and The Steward

In the past two weeks I finished up both the Minstrel and Steward base meshes. Both of them are almost entirely one piece all the way from their shoes to their heads and hands. The only things that are separate are things like the laces on the minstrel's bracers. After a few more failed attempts at modeling braids, I realized that the best way to do it was just to sculpt them and retopo over them, so I took a cylinder into mudbox and sculpted some nice looking braids.

The Lute and the Birdcage

I started and mostly finished these two assets this week I put a bit too much detail into the lute for what I need but I was having fun with it (when's the next time I'll model a lute?).

Other

For whatever reason, I designed unique shoes for the other two characters as well.

Up Next

In the last few weeks, I will need to finish up the cage, model the turtle, make some quick scrolls to stick in the steward's belt, and model the stage itself.