SpaceAce_Art

She still looks like a PS2 character but her textures actually went on so nicely! I was just using Blender's default painting mode, which isn't nearly as comprehensive as something like Substance Painter, but for a first look she turned out great!

Her UVs are actually split over two UDIM tiles. I chose this over a standard single UV tile because she just has so many parts to her mesh and I wanted to make sure her body had enough space for detail. I may revisit this UV map later if I decide to reevaluate where her details are going.

Her eye UV is just a simple image texture I drew, but this may also be revisited because I want to experiment with making her eyes look more 3D and not just a flat projection onto a sphere.

The REALLY interesting thing I did with her textures was hand-paint her normals. I tried to do this a while back for another project, but I had other shader nodes utilising the normal map so it didn't end up working out.

However, Nimea's normals aren't tied to anything so it was full steam ahead with painting them! I haven't finished the map yet, but you can see the difference it makes especially around her legs. Her front legs have painted normals where her back legs don't.

This might take some practice, because I noticed some weird clashing in the normals where the UV seams are. This could probably be fixed by remaking her UVs to better hide the seams though.

(Shots 11-23)

(Shots 1 - 10)

Some recolored backgrounds for Part 2, encompassing shots 29-34. In addition to being recolors, some details have also changed from their Part 1 counterparts. The cat toys are gone, the kitchen fridge is emptier, and the living room plant has wilted. If these were full backgrounds I would probably add a lot more to both my Part 1 backgrounds and these, but they’re not supposed to be full backgrounds so this is fine for what I need.

Backgrounds for shots 03-10! I’m getting tired of fighting with my color palettes so I’m taking the ones I do have and just blending them however to get the look I want

Something about my backgrounds as well is that I have a total of 37, but over half of them are reused in later shots with different color palettes. So basically I’ve changed the way I’m scheduling my background drawing. I’m starting with the most complicated ones first, and the ones that are reused the most times. Like the downstairs hallway shot is reused 4 times, so I can essentially knock out 4 backgrounds with one drawing.

She is retopologized!! Every tooth, feather, and claw is accounted for, and she's sitting at a nice ~12.5k verts compared to her previous +1 million verts.

Her wings took some trial and error (and a lot of help) to wrap properly, but all her loops are connected now! all of her flight feathers are still separate objects for now, I think that may work better for rigging but I can blend them in later if i decide otherwise.

Her paw fluffs were TOUGH to wrap. They're not really wrists with fingers, but they need to be able to match the movement of the actual hands and fingers underneath. This is what me and my advisor came up with, and while it looks really funky on its own, all the loops connect and should let the fluff move in the way I need it to.

Her hands are just cones and spheres, and her feet are the same. Her fingers are going to stay disconnected from her palms for now, because that will mostly be hidden by the fluff and might save me some time with rigging.

In addition to her teeth and gums, she also now has a tongue that I just modeled and retopologized in Blender.

And lastly just some close-ups of her feathery bits along her back and tail.

I want to see if I can bake her high poly normals onto the retopo meshes, but I need to research how that's done in Blender because I've only ever done it in Maya. Then she'll need to be UV unwrapped, and I need to go research how that works in Blender because it's been a hot minute since I last did a UV map in this software.

Backing music: Reunification by Gareth Coker

So Part 2 is supposed to be a lot slower-paced than Part 1, however I think this might be too slow. I've cut out some transitional shots from Part 1 to account for the outside portion at the end, but now I have shots that feel like theyre dragging. Again this is just a beatboard animatic, and I want to add some more panels to parts that just stay static for a second or longer

Backing song: The Waters Cleansed by Gareth Coker

The only big change from my original beatboards and script is that the awkward bathroom shots aren't there anymore. They broke the flow of the animatic and I needed to cut something out for time, so those aren't going to be in the animatic for the time being

Codyyyyy!

Cody has had some design changes in the gap between semesters, mostly because I was breaking their design in my animation tests and I decided to lean into it. One of the biggest things is that Cody’s hair is actually going to be down for the majority of the animatic. I realized there wasn’t a good point where they could have their hair up like in the old turnaround, so I’ve decided to leave it down until the very end of Part 1.

I sort of went back to the idea of giving them short hair to begin with and then it gets longer in Part 2 to show the passage of time, but I wasn’t vibing with what I was coming up with because it just kind of didn’t look like Cody to me.

So I went back to the long hair idea, and I just really liked having the hair draping over their shoulders. Their facial anatomy also started changing with these sketches, something about the big nose really gave Cody some extra personality in my opinion. I also really locked down their ponytail look here, keeping the round shapes from the old design.

Cody has two costume changes through the whole animatic. The first is what I have named Going Out, and it’s Cody’s usual clothes for leaving the house. I thought about giving them a collared shirt + sweater vest combo, but that got complicated quickly for an outfit that’s only going to be in a couple of shots. I went for a simpler jumper in the end.

The other is what I have lovingly dubbed the Depression Fit, though this one is also technically only in a few shots. Cody will have the same outfit from Part 1 until the wardrobe shot, and that’s where they put on the hoodie.

The expression gesture sheet has two expressions per costume change, and it was a challenge to get the vibes across for the versions with bangs covering the eyebrows. I focused a lot more on the shape of their eyes and their mouth to get the expression to read correctly, while I can rely a lot more on the eyebrows for Going Out.

Cody also holds a lot of props through the animatic, and I will probably do another sketch page or study for hands holding stuff like toothbrushes, smartphones, etc. because I struggle with hands holding small or flat objects.

Their construction sheet is pretty simple, mostly just outlining the rules for their face. Cody has kind of morphed into my personal style over the course of their redesign, and it’s really just their face that’s kept some of the elements from their old design and the references I used for it. The sort of shoulder seam triangle is definitely one of my personal drawing habits, and it really makes Cody feel more like my own character.

The last thing here is Nala’s updated construction sheet outlining some more particular rules for drawing her.

Some Nala gestures for the last bit of her character sheets

Nala! Her turnaround isn’t perfect, but this is more than enough for me to keep her consistent in the different angles I’ll have to draw her in. The only real changes to her design since my first solid drawings of her are that I’ve removed her third back stripe, and she has a little name tag under her chin to indicate her collar. Everything else is pretty much still the same.

Animated gradient progression using the upstairs hallway background. Adding a yellow palette definitely helped ease the transition between red and green, however my old green palette did not mesh well with the new yellow one. I reworked pretty much every palette into something more monochrome, with yellow being the only constant color.

Voice: Maleficent; Sleeping Beauty (1959)

Voice: Circe; Justice League Unlimited (2004)

Some Nimea expression tests using her new facial anatomy. I’m HEAVILY referencing Scar’s artwork from the Lion King, which is giving me a great range of emotion and mouth shapes to translate onto Nimea.

Going into the final semester, production to finish both my projects will be TIGHT

Nala

Most of my time will be spent working on production for Nala. I didn’t get to work on it as much as I wanted last semester due to one of the other modules, so in order to get this project done, I’ll be sticking to a tight production schedule.

I intend to wrap up pre-production by the end of May. Cody is getting some slight design changes and both characters need proper character sheets for my own usage. Writing of the full script and making a list of my shots and backgrounds is very important, as is solidifying my color gradient shift. June-July will be exclusively production, and August will be for post-production. I’m going to aim for getting everything done for August 7th (right before my final assessment), but in case that falls through, I’ll give myself until the 17th to finish anything not already handed in.

This production is going to be tight, but I know if I can stick to this schedule and these deadlines, I can make it. I’m already finished with my script, shot list, and background list. Nala’s character sheets are well underway, and my gradient shift is basically finalized. I’m looking good so far for seeing this project to completion!

Court of Radiance 3D

With Nala being my main project, I’ve made my schedule for CoR 3D with that in mind. Retopology is the highest priority, though while I will aim to finish I by the end of May, I’m expecting o get held up in certain places. At the same time, I’m doing 2D animation tests to visualize Nimea as she’s speaking, which will be great reference once I get to animating her for real. On that note, though, I have no idea how long rigging and weight painting will actually take me, so there is a high chance she will only get some still renders with her face in an exaggerated pose.

Working through how I’m going to do the gradient shift through the animatic and recycled my test backgrounds to play around with colors

The general method I have so far is to incorporate my lighter colors first, then go darker as the animatic approaches the “main” palette for a given section. This works pretty well for the shift between the Purple and Red palettes, as well as the Green and Blue, but the challenge I’ve discovered is shifting between the Red and Green palettes in the middle there. Red and green are tough colors to blend nicely, but I think the main thing with that is I have too many similar values on that one.