Week 4: Wrestless Wild Woodland Wilderness Warrior

Onto the next project and I kind of messed up the entry on this one. I decided over the weekend that it would be best for me to do an environment in between characters and so on Monday I got to work on the behind the door project brief. This I struggled with it immensely on the first day, it’s essentially a completely open brief with very few limitations and I just could not get any ideas together I liked or felt enthusiastic about, so I did the next best thing. I Started a character project again. This time however I strayed even farther from my ultimate realism goal and picked the stylised character brief. My logic behind this is it gives me a chance to try something a bit different. Also I really want to get as many mistakes out before the realistic character brief and Christmas, helping me find flaws in my workflow and production.

Much like the previous project I am given a concept to work from but am free to adjust it, also like the previous I only have a 1024x1024px Diffuse only Texture. I am not over the moon about this but I will probably produce normals for this character anyway for personal work. I only have 4,000 tri’s plus another 2,000 for additional items. This isn’t a great deal when I struggled with the last project and that was 7,000 tri’s however it is a good test of efficiency and I will make the most of it.

After scraping pretty much the entirety of Monday I got straight to work making a quick block out on Tuesday. I used this block out to experiment with proportions, forms and additional items and weapons. I feel most comfortable doing design work in 3D at the moment and I am going to try and utilise that over the next year.

I decided when planning my project management and pipeline I would avoid using polypainting as it didn’t really come out as well as intended last time and took quite some time to bake out. I have planned to use this project as an introduction to substance painter. Saying that I still used polypainting to map out tones and get a feel for the kind of iconography and material break-up I want to later create. Again linking back to my design process of using 3D to quickly iterate and develop in real time.

Towards the end of the week I had everything ready for retoping and after a quick feedback session with both tutors and my peers I made some anatomical adjustments and reworked some designs. As this weekend is Halloween I am not even going to consider working then. But as I am on time I can hopeful start retopoligising next week Monday, maybe get that done in a day or two with the unwrapping and then hopefully get it all baked and ready for texturing towards the end of the week.

This project is a lot more compressed for time, partly because with the dioramas and hand in I was extremely short on time before, and partly because I want to spend some time out from uni doing other things. Brushing up on my 2D and traditional skills, some outdoorsy things and sculpting studies. So till next week’s update.