Senior Thesis II: Masks and Blocking

Probably the biggest accomplishment in the past week or so has been the modeling of Treville's masks. Smoothed, they look almost exactly the way I had drawn them in the concept art. I may bring them into Mudbox for some minor tweaks such as furrowing of brows and wrinkling of foreheads.

The overall blocking of the model is all but complete, with attention paid in particular to the frills in Treville's coat. Also, detailing of the head has progressed. I have created illusion detail (parts that are not connected to geometry but simply hover in place) which is easier than creating complex geometry and edge loops.

Senior Thesis II: Modeling Tweaks and Critique

Overall I've been fleshing out Treville's model to get him ready for texturing. Some minor tweaks, such as creating more detail in his feet and head have been the focus lately, along with creating his spikey frills. I'm also paying attention to the basic modeling of his masks, which I will then take into Mudbox to sculpt.The critique on Wednesday was very helpful in learning some of the aspects of the design I should be pushing. Shaun suggested that I increase the size of the masks to make them more recognizable, as well as suggesting I develop blend shapes for them, which is a very good idea. I also picked up some tips from Joel on a few ways to create Treville's massive feather, since Joel is working with a bird-like design in his project. For his method he combined hair cards and a small piece of geometry to create a feather, which looked very convincing, but he also suggested that I utilized Fur in order to create the desired volume for my feather.

Senior Thesis II: Treville

 

 For the beginning of the second half ofSenior Thesis, I've decided to shift my focus to my Persona character, Treville. I've been working in Sketchbook creating better poses and elaborating on his overall structure, which will help with the remaining modeling process. The three mask in particular need to be well polished, as they represent different personalities. Treville will rely heavily on texture mapping for his clothing, so I've been working with his color palette and researching textures. I also recently found a very good example of an industry standard character model online, in the form of Gabriel Belmont from Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Seeing how the character is constructed, from the idea of many separate pieces of geometry to the mapping of textures, blew my research wide open. This inspires me to be less apprehensive about splitting my models up into pieces. These concepts will definitely transfer into my current and future modeling procedures.

Senior Thesis I: Textures and UVs

Reorganizing UVs and creating UV sets have been the main focus this week, as the process of creating textures has proved difficult with previous UV layouts. The textures for clothing is being worked on now, and some of the more subtle details (lacing, stitches, etc.) are being replicated I have found some tutorials on combining UV sets with a Layered Texture, which may prove to be a far more streamlined approach than creating many seperate shading networks. I am also learning to use  UV Linking from the Relationship Editor, which conveniently connects UV sets with the textures that they are associated with. This has definitely made the concept of sets much more understandable and workable.

Senior Thesis: Texturing and UV Sets

Work this week mainly focused on creating textures for clothing and hair using Photoshop. Creating something usable has been difficult, as I my knowledge of PS is limited, which will have to be fixed. It was also suggested that I redo some portions of the UVs on the model and assign them to different UV sets. This has been useful in isolating sections of texturing and has given me a change to re-map UVs in a more thoughtful, industry standard way. This has been a good learning process to see what is commonly done and what proves to be most effective in the modeling field.

Senior Thesis I: More UVs and Textures

UVs are looking pretty good this week, after hours of work planar mapping each part of the body. Some minor overlapping requires some tweaking, but overall the UV layout is where I want it to be. I've been blocking out some of the basic colors and textures this week, and I've been looking into jean textures for his pants. Detailing is also important to get down, since even with the simplistic textures and mapping seen of Persona character models, details like stitching and other clothing elements are clearly visible. Nailing down these small nuts and bolts will really help make the model pop, and add some complexity to an otherwise fairly simple design.

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Senior Thesis I: More UVs and Hair Modeling

 

Wow.

Hell of a different one tutortial can make. After seeing that the single piece mesh for the hair was becoming really poly heavy, hard to model and just not accurate, I decided to scrap the idea. It is a  few hours wasted, but the alternative is proving to be much more promising. After watching a Lynda tutorial on modeling hair with NURBS curves and extruding along them, it appeared in my opinion to produce a much more accurate result. I set about making a duplicate of D'artagnan's body and smoothing it, which would make the drawn curves hug the contours of his head more precisely. After hours of sculpting and deforming, the new hair looks much closer to what the character looks like. Also despite the exaggerated, cartoony look of the strands, the potential final results will probably be more similar to the style of Persona's modeled hair, which was very simple.

The UV layout process also continues to be a hurdle. Initially the Auto Unwrap UVs Tool that comes with Maya's Bonus Tools seemed very useful, and after watching its tutorial of the AREA I used it successfully in other projects.

Here's an example of some of the testing I did with the tool. It is an upper leg piece from another project, which unwrapped quite nicely and allowed me to sculpt in Mudbox.

However, the nature of the tool I found to be somewhat limiting as well. When used on a seamless mesh which will have multiple shells, such as D'artagnan's, it seem that you have to create all of the shell borders all at once. Using the tool on an isolated section of the mesh produced favorable results, but when attempting to crerate another shell with the tool, the previously shell would either revert or become distorted. Even going through the process of laying out borders for the entire mesh produced questionable results, as many of the shells produced were very stretched and distorted compared to shells unwrapped individually.

With these things in mind, I will research if there are ways to protect individual shells by baking or other means. In the meantime I will focus on the more important UV shells that need to be created, namely the clothing sections. The planar and auto mapping system proved mostly effective previously,  and I have been working towards stitching UVs together.

Senior Thesis I: Modeling and UVs

I've run into a few hurdles this week due to some modeling problems and overall process development. I discovered some non-manifold geometry on D'artagnan's foot, which probably resulted from the continuous duplication, mirroring, and merging process while modeling. This week I also worked towards finishing his hair mesh, which proved difficult due to the way I had originally modeled it. The grooves designed are intended to create more randomness in his hair, though at the same time this makes it tricky to extrude across these grooves. Combining some vertices helped fix some problems, though now I must be aware of non-quad based geometry during the smoothing and texturing phases.

Speaking of texturing, this process will be becoming the focal point of the coming weeks. At first I contemplated sending the basic mesh to Mudbox to begin creating more detail, but going back to the character designs in the Persona series, the models are less complex than that. It appears that the designers mostly relied on texture mapping to create the details of clothing and other features, which leads me to believe that the models for this project should follow the same course, at least for now. Figuring out the process (creating the best base model, laying out UVs, and creating texture maps) is probably the most important breakthough of the week, and will definitely make things easier. Sean has also pointed me towards the Bonus Tool in Maya, along with Lynda videos available to help with the UV process. The Auto Unwrap UVs Tool alone is a godsend, making cutting up different parts of the mesh into UV patches much more intuitive and simple. The new tools combined witha greater understanding of how to unwrap UVs with undoubedly speed up the texturing phase.

Senior Thesis I: Sketching, Modeling, and Design Doc

This week's focus was primarily on the creation of a design document for this project, as well as preparing a presentation for class. Writing the design doc brings up a number of questions about what I am attempting to do, and is encouraging me to fleshes out some of the narrative concepts and logistics behind the project. I've been withholding information on the project's story up until now because of the limited scope of this project, the modeling of characters. It didn't seem right to introduce an elaborate plot when only a few assets and characters would actually be shown. In hindsight, this may have been counter-productive and may have left some of my audience in the dark. Hopefully the design document will be a step in remedying this.

On the production side of things, I have done more posing sketches for D'artagnan, and am working towards finishing his model. Sketching has really been a great help for visualizing his look and traits, and has just in general been a joy to do. The designing and drawing process has always been what I am most proficient at and enjoy the most in any project, definitely provides insight on the possible career paths I can take in the future. As for modeling, I am experimenting with creating modeled hair as a separate object, and I believe that it is leading towards good results. In regards to the model's application in a game engine some time in the future, I still have to research what are the best ways to go about modeling, ie. if a character MUST be a single mesh object or if some separate parts are allowable.

Senior Thesis I: Modeling

A lot of progress this week, in particular with Treville's modeling.

 The blocking process has quickly been overtaken by more concrete modeling. I'm still experimenting with more efficient was of displaying detail. The giant feather on his head, created as a polygonal object, is somewhat affective, though is very high poly. I am most likely going to be using normal mapping in its place to keep the poly count as small as possible  The image on the right is a feather texture I'm working on. The masks for his face is from another human model, and are more for placeholding purposes currently. Each mask will have a different face, in reference to classic theater masks.

 Some basic modeling of D'artagnan's clothing has done. I'm also researching jeans and shirt textures to eliminate some of the need for modeling. On Sean Foster's advice, I've also begun sketching more of his facial expressions and will be working on body poses. Sean's suggestion of drawing on top of existing character sheets was very helpful in blocking out general facial structure, and I've found many examples of concept art from Persona 4 and anime sources, shown at the bottom to help with the process. Through the facial sketching and texture map mapping I am learning to use Autodesk Sketchbook, which is a program similar to Photoshop.

Senior Thesis I: D'artagnan & Treville

I have chosen the 2 character I will be modeling: D'artagnan, the comedian and his Persona, Treville. I have begun modeling D'artz, focusing on the basic placement of clothing and some facial features, including the eyes and ears. I also gathered reference images of other famous comics, such as Dane Cook and George Carlin, to mirror their expressive features.

 I have also started the basic blocking process on Treville, the captain of the musketeers from Alexander Dumas' The Three Musketeers. I've gathered resources including historical and fantastic versions of the musketeers. I'm also referencing classic theater masks in his design, as he can switch between three.