Week 10: 'Tis The Season!

Slowly Finishing Up!

Christmas is coming up! - And with that the first term is slowly coming to an end. The third week of the character project has just finished and as it stands I have now got a complete model that needs to be unwrapped and textured. Thankfully we received an extension for the project last week so that now I will have time to finish off and wrap up this project in the upcoming week. Enough of me talking, here is some pictures:

Value Studies

I had wrapped up my last post by saying I would be doing colour and value studies during this week so that is the first thing I started doing during the week. I didn't want to use complete white or complete black for my value, but I really liked how the wings of my angel character looked when they were completely white so I stuck to that. I also noticed that a darker value on the dress gives a lot more contrast to the whole figure.

For the demon character I noticed quickly that I had to have a clear difference in the values for the legs and upper body and also make sure the values for the upper body and head were the same, so I ended up tweaking around the value of the tail and soon found my favourite. However I still wasn't quite sure which values to go for on my angel character so I picked 2 and paired them up together with the demon to make my final decision:

Value Pairs

After I had picked my values I then went onto doing some colour studies:

Colour Studies

I wasn't particularly keen on my results. I tried to stay away from the cliché red demon, I really did, however I just didn't think any of the other ones really worked. So in the end I decided to stay with the cliché and made a matching white angel. Like I said, I am not particularly keen on what I have got out of this, but I did try hard, so here's my final:

Final Dichotomy Characters

I then had a quick think and decided I would model the angel, so I quickly drew up some orthographics to help me model:

Angel Orthographics

After that I went straight into modelling, which wasn't too hard, however I encountered a few problems:

The first problem I encountered was the bottom of the dress. I'd end up having to model overlayed fabric, which wasn't quite easy to get my head around at first. Eventually I decided that I will use mostly normal maps to solve that problem.

My second problem was how much detail I wanted to have in my model. I wanted for it to be rather low poly and when it came to modelling the wings I simplified them a bit to not push my limit to far. 

My final problem was the hair. I wasn't quite sure how I would model it and eventually decided to just make a basic head model and then stick the hair on top which I would create by edge modelling. The final result, coming in at just under 2000 tris, wasn't too bad so I stuck with it:

Angel Model

As you can see, I simplified the dress quite a bit. The head is also quite flat, but that is because I intended for the facial features to be simply painted on, as it has been done in Wind Waker as well.

Last Week of Term

So here we are, it's the final week of term before Christmas holidays! I'm never really overly excited about Christmas, but it's definitely a nice time and for my a definite well-deserved rest. I was originally planning on staying in Leicester over Christmas, however eventually I decided that I'd go up for a few days to visit my brother instead. I will be sure to keep this blog updated over Christmas though~