#lyra2.0

On each frame I outlined each principle that will be applied to the shot. I forgot to add Secondary action and overlapping through the hair and cape. 

Below was the start of me adding armature to my model. Adding the armature and rig was actually pretty straight forward. I just an issue with parenting the hair to the body and rig. 

Below shows the issue I had. After a lot of time researching I realised that as I used curves in the hair there were too many vertices for the rig to be able to understand what to rig. Again I forgot to screenshot the process but essentially I selected the hair and used the Decimate modifier and the Weld modifier to reduce the vertices in the curves and after that I was able to parent the hair to the body and rig.

Also, I added armature to the braids so that I could animate the hair. 

After finishing the body and I started to texture my model and create the eyeballs. The eyeballs were made with just spheres and adding an image texture on to them. 

When looking a them straight on they looked okay, but overall the placement of them and the shape of the eyelids around them wasn’t very good. I couldn’t fix it as I had an issue with some extra vertices that seemed to appear out of nowhere (as shown below). AS you can see I tried deleting the extra vertices but they were connected to other vertices so it didn’t solve the issue. I think to properly fix it I would have to redo a lot of things with my model. Which, unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do. So next time I would give myself more time to finish my model and potentially time to fix it if anything goes wrong. 

Additionally, I realised this was issue when I was really to make my character blind. I was following a tutorial of how to make her blink with the shape keys. 

Below is the finished texture before I added the boots and the top. As the trousers were going to be skin tight I didn’t make a separate mesh for it, I just textured the lower half of the body black.

Since the eyeballs weren’t working I wanted to add extra detail, so I added an earring on to her ear. 

To make the braid I tried two different things but the first thing didn’t work so the screenshots below are of the second process I tried. The first way I tried was with arrays and then adding a skin modifier to the arrays. I don’t know what but I had some distorted faces when I did that. I didn’t get any progression shots. 

Therefore, I tried it a different way, which is what you see below. I added a plane to the file and placed it in this pattern. I the selected three different paths that would make the strands of the braid and separated them from the planes. Then I delete the planes to have just the lines left. I converted them to a curve and then added a circle and connected them together. This made the actual braid a braid. 

Below is the construction of me joining the braid to the model. For each braid I duplicated the braid so that the braids were made of two braids each. Rotating it and moving the braids to fit around the head took a lot of time but I eventually did it and I think it turned out well. 

Above are the finished braids. Below is the start of the rest of the hair. For the rest of the hair I main curves and connected them to circles (just like I did for the braids) then I twisted and shaped them all to fit the style I wanted. I did this process for all the bits of hair that covers the scalp.

Below is the finished hair with the Toadstool shaped pin in the hair. Overall, I’m really happy with how it turned out, making the hair was actually really fun just very time consuming so I think I would try to find a different way to do it next time that is quicker or I would have a simpler hair style. 

Below shows the body reference I made for my character and the lining up of the head in the blender file.

For making the torso instead of doing poly-by-poly I decided to make two cubes subdivide them and then shape them and join them together in the middle. Overall, doing it this way was a lot more efficient and quicker than doing poly-by-poly. Also, I like the end result. However, the second photo down to can see a strange edge that goes around the top bit of the torso. I wasn’t sure how it got there, maybe it was due to the subdivision but I ended up deleting the edges and it was fine.

Below is the finished body. I forgot to show the process of making the arms and legs. However, overall I like how it came out and the body doesn’t contain a lot of polys which is good. I didn’t make feet just yet as I didn’t need the feet just yet and I plan to give her boots as her clothes.

First I started with importing my reference and stared with making the top of the head. Just making the head and head shape was easy enough. 

Moving on to the nose and eyes were a bit more difficult but I managed to get there. I’m proud of the end result. I like how it came out, I think it looks good and similar to the designs and drawings of my character. I tried to keep it as low-poly as possible. 

Then I moved on to making the ears. This was before starting the body or even storyboarding the animation. Therefore, I made this ear below and thought to come back to it later on when my character has a body.

The image below is the edited ears I made after I finished the body. I elongated the ear a little and changed the shape a little to make them stand out a bit more and then I attached it to the body.

Here is a rough sketch and colouring of my Alter Ego character which I am calling Lyra 2.0. I wanted to keep a lot of the colours similar to the original design of Lyra to show the connection between them. Therefore, Lyra 2.0 has a similar colour on the cape as the dress in the original character design. The hairs are the same colour as well as the eye colour. Furthermore, I added a little mushroom shaped pin to her hair to represent that before she was a toadstool.

Below is the colouring of the original character from term one, for comparison reference.