The evolution of Fudge

So far I think doing this character is the success of this project for me...I was worried I couldn't model fast enough and I managed to finish this dude in a night...so about 5 hours on and off. I had a few issues in the topology trying to get rid of triangles and the mouth issue again...but this time I even sorted it out myself.

One thing that keeps getting mentioned is the fact that for animating purposes that the short stumpy characters I have designed will be very difficult...which is something I will need to consider in the future, but in my mind I didn't have these characters walking naturally. I envision both Bailey and Fudge to be running so fast that they almost only take a few steps and jump. She's not much older than 5 or 6 and has been asked to battle these alien eggs...she is pumped with adrenalin and fear so she runs around crazy!!!




Darren had a look at all our work today and he just mentioned that I could lose some geometry at the back of the character and if it triangulates out in spots its ok in necessary cases. He also explained how to define where you should put your geometry for elbow bends etc. Because he has suck chunky arms...I need to space my geometry out alot more, general rule is to space it out left and right to create a square with the thickness of the arm! I also need to add geometry in the ears for rigging.

From the occulsion renders I realised taht there is some funny stuff happening around the tail which shouldn't be so Ill be going back in to fix that up.

UPDATE ON BAILEY

Bailey is now completed and in full technicolour...yay! Texturing is a biatch when you only get one lesson on it...I don't know what was not sinking in...but it took a week and a half of trial and error and then finally after a few pointers repeatedly from Chris and Andrew...and I don't know what happened...but the penny finally dropped...and this is what i have...

UV Map of Face UV Map of Body

Painted Texture in Photoshop Face Body

Final Render in Maya

My Conclusion

Im rather happy with it considering the time frame I had to actually paint it due to taking so long to get the map layed out. The issue was that I had duplicate faces in the piggy tales, which was really bizarre cause i had used the clean up function and then Chris also did it himself and it still happened...must have just been some weird bug in maya. The second issue was me just not understanding what the aim was for the mapping. The third issue was it was realised that nobody had modelled the egg yet and so I had opted to do it seeing as I was the only one who had completed my designated modelling thus far...

EXTRA MODELLING UPDATE

The Alien Egg

Bailey, her weapon the Sickle and Fudge her sidekick dog.

The egg was pretty easy to model up but the friggin texturing for it wasn't so easy...to get something that wasn't going to clash with the rest of our scene was tricky. From the orginal concept designs and colour pallette that Leon mocked up I initally loved the green spotted one which is why ive done that for now...however the purple may have to be the next choice. Our scene is going to be very saturated with colour, like a very intense cartoon world!! So there a very lush greens, vibrant reds, penetrating purples and sky blues...very eye candy. So the egg is the villian we want him to look mean...but to get a colour that doesn't clash or doesn't meld too much with the background will be tricky. But this is what we've decided on thus far.

3d Assets Update

The following images are renders of the 3d assets we have in our game design so far.

I distorted the shape of the barn because I thought the initial one looked too symetrical. The same goes for the tractor. I added the gripping claws and the dosage gun infront because part of our game concept is to capture and heal the animals!

Modelling has finally come to an end

We met on Wednesday over the easter break and had an awesome session as you can see by Leons pig getting finished. Leon seen an image in a 3Dworld mag where the character was all white in a white environment...and so we wanted to duplicate hence all the white renders! We think it looks sexy...hehehe.

Although we had planned to hopefully have started texture mapping, which we didn't get to, it was a very informative meeting. And I could not thank my lucky stars enough to have have Chris and Leon as group mates. Between them I learnt so much today...Chris inspired me to go home and play endlessly with things with Maya which he was doing during our meeting, and by doing so we figured out ways to do our texture mapping, and ways that won't work.

It was also decided that Chris would take over on the level design. He had finished his chicken model and almost his main character, and I suppose he feels more confident doing that where Leon and I can paint the textures etc !

My MODELS

Above you can see Bailey, her weapon the sickle and her sidekick dog Fudge. It took me a couple of weeks to complete Bailey with the minimum time I have, but I finished Fudge in one night unaided! So I was very happy, cause I was getting concerned that I couldn't model as fast as Chris! ;)

For Bailey we decided as a group that we would leave her as was in the image...but the more I thought about it, the more I really was not happy with her mouth or the geometry in the face in general. As you can see from the geometry below there alot of triangles and her mouth just doesn't look right...she looks like she has a hard membrane like a fish under the skin for a mouth. So I consulted my good friend Andrew Martin who is currently working on a short 3D animated film called Gus. This is his website http://www.andrew-martin.com/

He took literally not even 5 minutes and she then looked beautiful...I was depressed that I couldn't figure it out....but mah...Ill get over it. Andrew pointed out that you need to think of the muscles on a human body and how they run and work. The lines of the topology in the face should generally run in line with those muscles, and in the picture above i had the running against the natural flow of the muscle, hence the awkward moving lips!!!

Andrew also suggested for animating purposes that it may be best if I model the complete head and use only a poly plane as the fringe which then can move...by modelling the forehead and remainder of the eye area, it will also enable me to get rid of some of the messy triangles and stuff that are there...and also because the way its modelled now, may lead to some weird deforming when animated. So Ill give it a go and see if I can keep the poly count low but wont spend too much time as we really need to start the texturing. If I can do her easy enough it will just be a bonus. But otherwise, with her new lip job, Bailey is ready for texturing along with Fudgey and her sexy sickle.

NotES on My MODELS

I am modelling them with the idea to keep the poly count low but also give it enough geometry in the right places, as I really want them to be rigged basically to be put in poses for our final submission. So I am aware that I could loose a few triangles to get my count even lower, but I think its good practice also to see how low you can keep the poly count when modelling for rigging.

My Pig Model

Sasha, Chris and I did a big days work on our Farmergeddon project! I finished my crazy pig model with a lot of help from Chris. Sasha finished her Farmer model, Yahoo! Chris worked on his Farmer character, tree models and an extention for the barn. Its great to see it finally coming together.
Here are some rendered images.

Crazy Pig

My crazy pig model so far. I started with a polygon privative and extruded the legs and arms.

Target for next meeting.

Hello! Ya I do agree we are a fair bit infront of other groups. Taking into consideration that we have quite a lot of modeling to do. Regarding your model Sasha, if you want to retain the cutting of her Overall, you still can. I am really experimenting into the technique of transfering the information of a hi res poly model to the low res one. I have attached some pictures of the testing i have done. We do not have to apply it to all our models, but we could state that it is a technique that we have explored in the course of our project. By our next meeting, I hope we can sit down and refine each other finished models, at the same time work on our texturing. Happy Easter!

Level Modelling quick Mock up!

At our meeting on Monday the 2nd of April we had some time to kill so Chris decided we should mock up how we would do the level design. I am going to start from scratch again cause the hemisphere is a little annoying due to the scale of it. When you want to look in side you keep cutting into other things. And I just can't work in wire view all the time it does my head in..hahaha!

I really like the idea of how Chris did the panels around the inside of the hemisphere. I was thinking I would just do a whole bunch of planes by duplicating the last one. We also mucked around with the soft modification tool to pull up the ground...all though its a bit too realistic...im thinking more shards of earth.

But this gives us an idea of how the level will be set out.

Modelling in Week 3&4

Well here is some screen captures of my character NO NAME yet...hehe...so open to suggestions...I have been thinking that it should be a short name thats cute but tough...

As you can see I started to model the detail of space between the body and the overalls. I have decided to leave this out for now to keep the poly count low. I will re-assess this once i have completed the model to see if we can afford the polys or discuss whether we should just do kick ass textures!

To start this model I started with a poly cube. I had decided that I would model the hand seperatly and sew it on. When I did initially I had sewn it on backwards...yes...I am blonde. But when I unattached it to switch it around I had this problem where all the faces became unattached as you can see in image below.

I merged all the vertices but some wouldn't and I had to use the merge edge tool to recitfy which took me a bit of time...but in the end it was all stuck back together!!!

And now the latest shot of my girl is...those of you with weak stomachs please be aware that the following image doesn't include a nose...ta dah...

So here she is no nose or eyes. The topology needs to be looked at on the front too as it isn't flowing too much. That can be the goal to finish her by this weekend.

Oh the blue is on the front as I was having difficulty ascertaining what the front and back was.

TIME BUDGETING

We are into week three of the project almost starting week four and I hope by our next meeting on the 11th of April to have the level design and both this girl and her sidekick Fudge to be finished and have some roughs of the kind of textures I'd like.

Chris has been awesome and finished all his modelling bar his Character. I think he was having issues with his head, but today's class should help us all with that actually, cause I was having difficulty on how to add the nose for my character.

HOW DO I THINK WE'RE GOING?

Well going off the word around campus, I think we're ahead of most other groups. Majority of the others I talk to haven't started yet mainly due to disagreements on how the game should look etc. So I am extremly thankful that i have 2 great guys Im working with...we're still able to air our differences, but in the end we see why it would be better Chris or Leons or my way whomever we choose...and hence we have already almost completed modelling, where Darren suggested we should have it completed by next week...well we're there!!! We could start texturing, so it was a little frustrating that we didn't get into materials or texturing in todays class...but Chris has a fair bit of knowledge and some awesome dvd's where we may be able to nut it out anyways!

So thanks Guys! Your the greatest!

Same time at the Library ?

Hello..Are we meeting at the same time tomorrow? 9am ? We can go to the library. I will bring my lap top and we can bring our working files together to have a look. Sounds good?