so i am writing 2 blogs in 1 this week because i have had some horrible eye issues that accompanied my constant use of the PC, nothing too major, just some drought and irritation, i had to let my eyes rest for some time so i wasn't able to put in a lot of work for the blogs. anyway, this blog will be covering the 2 weeks spent on modelling the character and managing our environment.
throughout week 8, my teammate and i focused mainly on populating our scene more and making the hotel look more believable, so what we did is we shared the assets and the scene in our google drive, and borrowed each other's scenes to populate faster. i managed to make some more plant combinations that can go in the scene, so i imported them and did my thing. we had a meeting with our professor and he asked us to replace the proxies in the animatic with the finalised assets to see how everything goes, so our modeling was halted until then.
we split our work evenly and decided to each take care of the scenes we are responsible for, it took us a couple of days, as the proxies don't match the size of the finalised models, so we had to re-shoot all of the shots. given the size of the environment, it took a while to get around the place and position everything correctly because the lag was unbelievable, the scene consists of 2.5 million polys, so it is a very heavy scene, so what we decided to do next time is to delete everything that is outside of the camera's FOV to reduce the load of the file.
during week 9, we had a meeting with our instructor and he asked us to start working on the characters, as the animatic won't take as much time to complete in comparison with them, so we paused the animatic and environment and got started on our characters. the way i work with characters is, i separate everything that isn't part of the actual body, so the petals, roots and the bud on the character's arm is all separate.
even the head is separated, because as we were taught back in T2, the face has a lot more loops than the body, so i modelled it separately and attached it to the body later on, here is how the character looked during the start of week 9, and here is an update of how he looks now
there is still a lot of work to do in terms of modelling, the petals on his arm have to be fixed to look more organic, of course the textures will play a major role in this character, but the basic shape has to be there first. the more challenging thing in this character has been his face, as his nose is a bit different than what i've been used to
here is a 3/4 and side view of the face-
his nose has a Greek style to it, it was a challenge to place his eyes in a decent spot because i had to avoid it looking alien. i referenced a couple of Greek sculptures for this character and i found one that stuck the most, a young Greek hero/deity called Antinous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinous_Mondragone i found this guy while searching for face references and i stuck with him.
his nose closely resembles the one i was going for, although the one i wanted with flatter, but i wanted my character to resemble a Greek statue, as the headdress he is wearing gives that vibe off.
i also chopped off his arm to stick with the statue-esque vibes.
I am still to finalise the character, as there is still a lot of fixes to be done, even though they weren't pointed out by my instructor. i haven't done much research apart from the reference images for the character, everything is going smoothly, and until i come across a bump in the road, i will be saving my references until then.