Getting things done

The group's target to get the exterior finished to render out is well under way. Myself and Anna have positioned the trees and stalls out side, as well as the big wheel and helter skelter, going through each shot tweaking them to frame the characters as best we could.

Environment Modeling

Here I modelled The stalls Anna drew up in her original concept work for the outside exterior. Here i positioned and re shaped the planks that Anna originally made for the windmill. I re UV mapped them and textured them. For the Cloth i created a plane and applied an Ncloth deformer to it. i anchored some of the planes verts to the four stall stilts, so when i animated the cloth they would not be effected, gaining the droop you see on the cloth. i painted an alpha map for the texture and worked away at the edges to get the weathered torn look i wanted the stalls to have.

Environment Modeling

Below are tree models i made for the exterior environment. i did the texturing in mud box with relative ease. The most challenging thing about making the trees was working out how to do the leaves. I experimented with making a small selection of leaves and making that into a brush, which i painted onto the tree, but it looked a bit stupid. I couldn't get a thick gathering of leaves, so we opted for the trees to be bear and more autumnal. to UV map them i cylindrical mapped the larger branches and the trunk, then automatically mapped the remaining smaller branches. This was done for each of the trees.

Cho Animation

Below is a walk cycle i did for Cho which shows off some of her character.

Cho Complete

Cho is now done! fully modelled and textured :) I put allot of hard work and time into this model, making the model as best i could. making sure all the geometry works with the proxy model for Dan and just something that i could be proud of. every part of this character was modeled and textured by myself.

Easter (not so) break - Modeling/Texturing Cho's Hair

Cho's hair needed to be done, not previously knowing how to model their hair Anna and Jake decided the best and most simple way was to model the hair as one simple block shaped appropriately, which would be taken into mud box and Zbrush to be further sculpted to get a better shape. Then to be re exported and modelled further in maya. Anna's hair looks really nice from what I've seen and the texturing looks nice also, however i went at it from a slightly different approach, i didn't use Zbrush to sculpt and i needed to pay more attention to the texturing of her hair because is was lighter, showing off the texture more. My 1st attempt to model Cho's hair was pretty bad, as you can see it looked like a sack on her head. this came from following the hair style in the original concept drawing, but it clearly was not going to work with the approach the group was going with for the hair styles of the girls.


I though about different styles i could give her, i really like Anna's bunches, the way they tail off to a point is the best way around the issue of not having a clump of hair, but that wouldn't suit Cho, nor did we want them to have the same hair. I came up with the short bob, which we all thought looked nice and suited the character, so i went about refining it and giving Cho a head band. I did all the shaping in maya, then exporting it into mud box to texture.


the fringe and side burns are two separate UV maps as they are both alpha maps. mud box has some good preset brushes which i used to paint the hair. starting with the fringe i just built up the texture in a series of layers, which i then exported into Photoshop and merged them into a single layer. for the alpha map i used the eraser tool in Photoshop to work away the blunt fringe, but it was looking lame. i looked at Anna's alpha and i saw that she might have done hers using the smudge tool. Using hers as a base, i used the warp tool to manipulate her alpha to loosely fit within my UV map for Cho's fringe. I then worked into it from there with a smudge tool until i got something that looked nice for Cho.


I went on to paint the main part of Cho's hair, going about it the same way i did with the fringe, working up layers to get a good texture using the mud box default brushes. As I painted it I made my brush strokes work with the flow of the geometry to get as natural a looking hair, in our stylized form, as possible. I lastly painted the alphas for the side burns, again using the smudge tool in Photoshop to get the wispy look i wanted.

Easter (not so) break - Texturing Cho continued

HEAD

I UV mapped Cho's head using a spherical map, then I tweaked the verts around her eyes, nostrils and mouth so there was no stretch when painting finer details on her skin, such as freckles. Having finalised the UVs I exported Cho's head as on obj into mud box and pained the Diffuse layer with relative ease as there was no problem with stretching textures. yay.


HANDS

When texturing the hands I did a previous test to see how well mud box would map a texture on the geometry when an automatic map was applied, given the random separation of the mesh it created a lot of seams. Mud box freaked out when I painted on the hand, showing lots of the fine transparent seams, particularly around the fingers. So, I planar mapped the palm, back hand, and cylindrical mapped the fingers. This worked out well when I painted the blemishes and freckles on because the texture had no noticeable seams this time round. When it came to painting the nail varnish on I initially attempted to paint the nails in mud box, but the colour kept bleeding over the edge of the nail as the fingers were not mapped for such close attention to detail. I had to planar map the nails individually and then painted the nails directly in Photoshop on the UV map, which worked out well. The texture around the wrist of her top, where you can see some white geomitry has been fixed. there have been a few instances like that occur throughout modeling Cho. To fix it i had to tweak the UVs in maya to make shure that the texture I painted was fully covering the UVs, this is where mudbox tends to not map everything 100% to the very edge of an objects geomitry.