Character modelling

For the crew project the third years gave me the opportunity to have a go at character modelling. I found this challenging but fun and I think I enjoy box modelling. From this task I learnt how to create human eyes, an overall character shape, how helpful edge loops are at defining areas of a character, how to join limbs onto the main body and much more. Before modelling this character I used a tutorial on pluralsight by Justin Marshall to learn the basics of creating a character in maya which was a little space man. I found this tutorial really helpful as I could understand how a character was built up from just cubes.

I followed this turnaround that another member of Dino Diner designed. I think my model came pretty close to the design however I need to finish sculpting this character in mudbox which is something I am currently working on.

I think I have improved from my modelling in semester one when I had only just begun modelling props. I made a couple of mistakes with edges and edge loops when I began as I deleted a lot of them which meant it wouldn't be possible to add textures later on. I had a second attempt at modelling the same chopping boards which were much better meshes. 

We also had a tutorial held by the third years to learn about how to model and the best ways to go about modelling. In this tutorial we modeled a torch which I'm quite happy with as it helped me to understand modelling a bit better.

Another try at renderman!

I spoke to my tutor to see where I was going wrong with my render settings - why it was taking so long to render, why there was so much noise and why I couldn't export the render without the image turning dark and horrible. 

I found out the render was taking too long because I used maya fluids to create fog in the scene instead of Renderman fog which I need to look into and if this doesn't work another method of adding fog to create the spotlight would be in after effects. I also learnt that the noise appears in the render because the sampling settings tab under the render settings need to be increased to improve it's quality. And finally the one button I missed was "Burn In Mapping On Save" which allowed me to render out the file as a jpeg with the same level of quality the IT file showed after rendering! 

There is still some noise but I'm so happy it worked! Next step is to create a wooden floor!

Life drawing

Todays life drawing session was an interesting challenge. We had to draw different sections of the model on a full size of A3 paper and put it all together at the end. As you can see my drawings didn't match up very well! I found it tricky to keep the shapes in proportion whilst also resisting the temptation to add detail of the rest of the body. It was great to have a go at this task as it gave me a chance to get out of my comfort zone of drawing a full figure and focussing on separate areas. 

My second attempt turned out a lot better as there were fewer separations however still not quite accurate and the shape of the head is slightly elongated and far too small. I think a bit more practise on focussing on body parts will help me to improve this - especially hands and feet.

Rough pre-production work

We were given three scripts to choose from and we were set the task of designing some characters and/or concepts for them. This project was only a week long so we had to come up with rough ideas quite quickly which I found quite fun as the short amount of time forced me to work quicker than I normally would. I began with some character designing which I found quite difficult so I attempted to design some props from the script. This project made me realise I was stronger at designing props and concepts for the script rather than characters however I should still push myself to improve my character designing skills. 

Lighting and render tests

These were the first spotlight tests I tried for our Eco brief idea using Rendermans disk lights. I used three different Renderman materials; glass, metal and diffuse to see which would be most preferred on our robot character. The intensity on the first render wasn't bright enough so I increased the intensity and exposure but the edge of the spotlight on the ground was too harsh. To fix this I adjusted the softness of the cone angle. I wasn't happy with the colour of the light or the fact that the cone of light wasn't visible.

I enabled colour temperature and changed it to make the lights warmer and I watched some tutorials on volumetric and atmospheric lighting to find out which would be the best method of making the cone of light visible. I thought fog would work best so I watched some tutorials on how to make this work. I decided on using fog however when rendered the objects barely showed up so I decreased the density which worked really well. However the second image doesn't show the render very well. When it was rendered the image showed up really well but the export didn't show it as it looked in the render. I think I'll have a go at rendering it again and exporting as different file types to see if that shows it better.

When rendered out again and exported as a png this is how it looks:

Still not the same as how the render looks and the background is no longer black which means I
would have to add a wall.
It look right when exported as a tiff however I cannot upload the tiff file as it's not won't allow me to but here is a screenshot of how the tiff saved in comparison to how it should look.

(screenshot of tiff)

(screenshot of render)

There is also too much noise in the picture, I had a look at the "denoise" setting but it didn't work so I'll need to have a look at the settings to try and clear it up better. 

Getting back into life drawing

Yesterdays life drawing session began with one minute sketches to get back into drawing quickly and capturing the overall shape and movement or line of action.

We then overlapped our drawings of the model in different positions as though the drawings were keyframes in an animation. I found this a bit confusing as the lines were all one colour and began to blend into one another but I tried my best to separate the drawings so that the motion was visible.

These were a couple of experimental ways of life drawing. First using the negative space which I found incredibly difficult as I kept wanting to add detail to the shape. It helped me to see how the space around the model is also important - this is a good exercise to practice drawing overall shapes of a model or character. 

The second on was drawn using cubes but I think I added too much detail and drew too many cubes. I think fewer cubes to get the pose drawn in would have worked better. 

We had a go at drawing the model using curved lines to show the shape and pose of the character to see how the body curves and how lines flow across the body where different areas connect.

The last three drawings we drew were on black paper using white chalk. I found these fun as we could focus on the lighting in the room and how it shone differently on different areas of the body.

Boxes for your monsters

Monsterbox is one of my favourite 3D animated shorts which was created for an end of studies project directed by Ludovic Gavillet, Derya Kocaurlu, Lucas Hudson and Colin Jean-Saunier. I love the style of this animation. The lighting has been really well done as it creates a beautiful, radiant atmosphere which matches the garden centre type setting and the sweet storyline of a young girl who wants to buy houses for her pet monsters. The simply blocky shapes for the old mans hair match the overall style well but also differ from the younger character who has a leafy mane which matches the wilderness that surrounds the characters during the majority of the film. The distinctiveness of the individual characters and objects works well to give them unique appearances whilst also corresponding a similar theme overall.