Cherub character assessment done!

Alright so if all is well, I have passed! I got all my stuff in time, now I just have to wait for my teacher to mark it off and give some feedback and hopefully finds something (anything) good. I’m terrible at characters as I’ve written before and I don’t enjoy them one bit. I’m kind of glad this is my first ever fully finish character, though It doesn’t make me that satisfied nor do I want to do it anytime soon again.

Sadly, I think at this point the Battlechess game has been scrapped (I don’t really care, I think 2 of my animations would of had to be redone) and at this point I really don’t want to redo anything.

Here is a turntable of my character, rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 2 Enjoy!

Texturing, rigging, skinning and animating!

Alright another short post!

So last time I posted I had done the model and that was about it, from that time I’ve manged to texture (not final) finish off rigging and skinned it via heatmap and have finished one of the 4 animations (fairly sure its 4 animations now). Here is what the model looks like rendered out (with default lighting).

 

 

 

 

I will upload the animations once they have been rendered out and finished. As I can’t seem to upload via Dropbox and I don’t want to upload my current work on my Youtube account just yet.

 

Charater Update 29-5-14

Alright so its been a while since my last post, I have been busy at working on the character and I also moved about 2 weeks and 2 days ago. So I don’t have everything at my new house, my desk at the moment is two of my old PC cases stacked on top of each other where my one of my screens sit and keyboard, the other screen and mouse are on the ground and my chair is a beanbag, its pretty uncomfortable and isn’t very good on my back at all. But I don’t have much of a choice, time is running out and this is the first week where I’m forcing myself to do work at home with my current workspace.

So I have fallen a fair way behind, but I’m slowly catching up at this point all I need to do is finish off the rig (rigged the wings and maybe eyes and mouth) paint weights so it deforms correctly and texture oh and also animate. I’m going to hopefully texture the character today (that’s at least the plan) and then finish off the rigging. I have had to take some shortcuts such as not model wings, just use planes as I only have 2 weeks or so to get everything done which I hope I do get in time. Also the game is going to be built in the fairly new Unreal Engine 4, which is pretty cool its a learning curve for everyone too so there is bound to be problems at the very last minute…Hopefully it all works out in the end.

Slow progress, but improvement

Alright so I’d say I really need to speed up things, I will need to be  at least be finished before Monday or at least start rigging on Monday. Just a short update, I have deleted the arms off and will remake the arms with the hand (at least that’s what  I am thinking) and then do a bit of sculpting on the fact here and there to make it more baby or at least human looking. I threw it into Zbrush to cut off the arms and then cleaned the mesh up. It was roughly in the 22K or so tri now at the moment its in the 15K tri count.

So now the mesh is really nice and clean and attractive to look at (well…for a baby sized like character with no facial features or arms). The nappy was also reworked so now acts/works how a nappy does, but will need some re-doing in Mudbox or Zbrush. I have created a hand, though its nothing too great..It may work and I may not really have time to get it 100% perfect. I’d really like to get to weight painting and rigging..then its onto the animation.

 

Cherub in the making

Alright so I struggle with making characters, I hate it so much to be honest. But it has to be done, so far Ive blocked out a rough model in Maya, then I was trying to match it up with ref images and shape it up nicely without the edge loops there to help.  So a friend smoothed it to me and then I understood and found it alot easier (I was doing it wrong, I didnt know). So I shaped it a little bit here and there, then I felt stuck again I wasn’t sure on where to move points and stuff (I just dont get it at all).

So I smoothed again, the way I saw it was at least I should have plenty of edge loops, maybe more then I need in areas. But the way I see it, its better to have too much then not enough (it can always get cleaned up afterwards). So then I threw it into Mudbox, I’m not quite ready for Zbrush just yet. I really wanted to make some sort of progress as this was all a really long drag and not feeling like I was getting anywhere. So now I’m at a stage where its still slow, I wish I was a little bit more ahead just to be safe but I’m at least getting somewhere (I at least think I am). Ive never really done a serious sculpt before just little bits here and there, so hopefully this turns out for the best.

Maya Mesh Model, 3960 tris.

I still am needing to model a head, hands and maybe some feet, though I think that might be sculpted if I can get it working.

 

 

 

 

Here I had just put the mesh into Mudbox and sculpted a nappy, it was pretty off I think I over smoothed. I had also grabbed a part of the model to make some very very basic shape of knees.

 

 

 

 

 

Here this was a few hours of just playing around, tweaking and messing around to try get the nappy some shape and hard edges to make it not look a part of the cherub itself. Ive also worked on giving the cherub character a chubby belly, some knees and at the moment I have been having trouble on working on the knees, feet and boob area.

Character Update

Alright I don’t really have much to say (seem to have died down and ran out of stuff to blog it appears). So I will keep it short.

So for the past week or so I worked on silhouettes, Outline and a Concept image for my character. I got the pawn piece and got a Cherub suggested to me by a fellow class friend and thought sure why not. I’ve roughly based it off a game I use to play when I was younger called Messiah which came out in 2000. Sadly its a buggy game, it crashes alot and sound stops working or music starts playing at the right and wrong times etc.  Bob is the player (who is a cherub) and you take over peoples bodies for protection and as a disuse to get into areas where you would normally get attacked or not allowed to be in.

 

 

 

 

Alright so here are my silhouettes some were drawn, others were  reference images made into silhouettes but then added on to make it my own idea and work. My outlines and work in progress of my colour concept.