Week 1: "Pancakey Hands"

The first two blogs were more of a warm up to this year’s blogging, Easing me into the uncomfortable notion of writing about my day to day and publishing it publicly, something I have never been particularly comfortable with. Both writing and talking about myself. But enough of my whining, what have I been doing this week? Well to put this blurg into a little more context I will be writing at least one blog a week based around my current state of progress on my uni work. This will include problems, fixes, progress and learning stuff. That kind of thing.

(Original concept)

I have decided as stated in my last blog I will be going with the partially stylised character project, “The Aviator”. So what is this Aviator brief I hear you scream? Well I have to create a partially stylised female aviator based around a predetermined concept. I have 3 weeks, 7,000 tri’s, a 1024x1024px Diffuse map and nothing else. No gloss, specular, roughness, metalness and no normal. So my immediate and impulsive reaction was. NO NORMALS!? How will get any details into this model at all? So after consulting a tutor and having a bit of a think I managed to get an idea of what it is I need to do to overcome said problem.

(Reference Board)

I spent most of Monday planning, referencing, redesigning and determining an effective workflow to help side step the Technical limitations. My workflow is currently based around high to low poly plan with polypainting for texturing. This is pretty much the same as my usual flow except with some slight adaptations. So I spent the first week planning, designing and creating a high poly model in zbrush which will serve as the base of character. In the second week I will then adapt that to stylisation of my choice, mostly likely a kind of dishonoured paintly feel. Utilising zbrush’s awesome poly painting feature I will do almost the entirety of my texturing in there. Then towards the end of the second week I will retop, unwrap and bake down. In theory I will have it in a semi-complete state by the beginning of the third week. That will then give me time to refine the textures on the low poly and even rig and pose.

(Advanced mood/style board)

I will also be baking down a normal, why? So I can then use 1 of the channels in combination with an Ambient Occlusion bake to create fake lighting within my diffuse. In theory this should all work pretty much perfectly, but as my experience in this kind of project is limited I will have to be prepared to adapt and change accordingly. But for now everything is running smoothly.

(Progress on high poly sculpt)

On Friday I received some feedback from my assigned tutor, it was mostly based around anatomical inconstancies, pancakey hands and wrong footing. Other than that everything seems to be going ok. All of the issues were fixed pretty much immediately, but will require some refining in the later stages. In the week coming I will be focusing on completion of the high poly sculpt, finalising any design decisions, polypainting and the creation of my low poly. Any more would be bonus but I feel like I have a solidly packed week ahead.

This is my final outcome of the week, I am fairly pleased with progress but is definitely far to realistic for this brief. Next week I will be jazzing it up, until then.