Week 12 - 14: So This Is Christmas!

Enjoying The Holidays

Hey, just thought I'd update my blog quickly. The Christmas holidays are on-going and I am thoroughly enjoying getting a bit of a break. I spent a couple of days up north to celebrate Christmas with my brother and his fiancé and it was pretty good. Apart from that not much is happening. I am playing a couple of games and I recently have got myself hooked on the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series. Definitely a great series of games and I can only recommend it. It shows how much of an impact a good story can have on a game!

At the same time I am participating in the SkySaga: Infinite Isles alpha test. I can definitely see how the game has potential to be a great hit and I enjoy providing feedback to the devs to help improve it. At the moment there isn't too much content in the game, but it is constantly being updated, with a massive amount of new content added recently with the start of the second alpha test. I can't wait to see what they will add next. I might eventually post a little review about it here.

Concerning work I am not doing as good. I guess I just need to have a bit of a break, so right now I am not working on anything. I am however slowly easing my way into it again to prepare myself for the upcoming term. I have learned a lot over the past term and I hope that I will be able to use it in the next few projects.

Until then - Merry Christmas and a happy new year!~

Week 11: Too Late For Regrets (Dichotomous Characters Post-Mortem)

(Not So) Well-Defining Textures

I finished off my last blog post with a screenshot of my model and just for completion's sake, I will post another screenshot of the model with textures. I used the ink 'n paint material in 3ds max to give the whole model a cell-shaded look and while this was already quite hard to get right, it wasn't the biggest problem that I had with my textures:

Textured Angel Character

The main reason I think that my textures have failed is because I simply overestimated the power of normal maps. I relied on adding quite a lot of detail into the mesh by using normal maps, however I couldn't exactly get it to work as well as I had intended. Together with the stress I had from running closer and closer to the deadline I just had to draw a line and ultimately was forced to hand in my work as it was: "Done, but not polished."

The project is over and while I am definitely glad that it is done, I wish I could've gone back in time to start over! There was quite a few things that I could've done better.

What Went Wrong?

So, where exactly did I fail? As much as I hate to admit it, I think I definitely spend way too much time concepting (once again), however this was not fully intended by me. I had quite a lot of struggles coming up with an idea and after 2 failed attempts I finally managed to get at least something, yet I still think that while my concept wasn't too bad, it's nowhere near as strong as it could've been.

The idea was quite cliché and my failed attempt at making it more unique when doing my colour studies didn't help. I really tried hard for the demon character but when it came to the angel character I kind of had lost a bit of motivation and instead of actually doing it, just resorted to going through various colours in my head. It became clear to me that I thought, that my darker value on the dress would not work, as I couldn't think of any colour that an angel's dress could have, however I think I should've definitely just tried it out, just to be certain.

Since I spent a lot of time concepting, my time for creating the model was very limited. The whole model was done in less than a week and it definitely shows. I intended for it to be quite low poly, however I ended up with just under 2000 tris, which while compared to modern game characters seems not too high, it would've been easy for me to achieve a tri count of less than 1000.

I had managed to waste quite a lot of polys and comparing my model to my original concept, shows that I have lost quite a bit of roundness. The model looks a lot more edgy and overall the silhouette doesn't quite match up. If I were to do my model again I would focus a lot more on roundness and putting tris where they are actually needed, but I would also try and add in a bit more detail to make the model look a bit more like the original concept.

Looking Ahead!

Like the title says: "It's too late for regrets now." The project deadline has passed and I need to look into positively into the future. Christmas is coming up and I will be getting my well-deserved rest, but once I am back I will aim to put more effort into creating my models in future project. Hopefully I will be able to produce some great work.

Stay tuned~

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~