#milestone2a

Started with the proxy model and simply connected up the joints in the simplest way possible, following the provided tutorial video for the unit. I planned to come back to the mesh for the joints after to make sure they bend correctly. This took an hour.

Fixing the hands took me an hour and twenty minutes, since I had trouble navigating the higher poly count of the hand versus the poly count of the wrist. I currently have several triangles on the hands and aim to do some more research to make sure any triangles are in the correct position or removed altogether.

Modelling the base of my first attempt was a flawed process, as I attempted to use a basic tutorial that featured a cartoony character being modelled rather than a realistic one. The first attempt to model the base took me an hour and a half. I used my own sketches of Zeal as a loose reference but made the mistake of not including real women to reference.

After I’d created the base it took me a further two hours fiddling around with the flawed mesh I had to make details like teeth, ears, and eyes. It all ended terribly and can be seen below.

After showing the face to several people and being unsatisfied with how it looked, I scrapped it completely and went searching for help with my work. I found a handy tutorial you can see here that went step by step through how to model a human head. I also made sure to use real human references along with my sketches to keep it anatomically correct or at least near correct. It took me two hours to do the process seen below.

After doing the base, it took me a further three hours to do more details such as the brows, teeth, inner mouth, ears, and so on.

After completing the head, I went about working on building the face rig as I believed it was going to take the longest. I filled in the shape keys following a process seen here quite easily and went about setting up the facial rig to control the face keys. The shape keys took me two hours, and the rig + custom shapes took me two hours also.

Compiling the video to show took me half an hour to quickly animate and get into premiere.

Current Progress and Problems:

Compared to the last progress update, that being the milestone, I’ve made no modelling or rigging progress over the past holiday week for this subject. During the week I did spend time practising my modelling on hard surface models for a game studio 2 class. The table pictured below took 3 days to fully complete due to problems I had with moving to high poly too fast and learning how to use rigs in programs outside of blender.

Practising with this helped re-establish the importance of following the workflow and planning ahead. With this knowledge I started doing some character sketches of Zeal to better learn how her face looked and the important blocks of her body shape.

Beyond these sketches and practise with other hardsurface models, I was unable to complete further work on toolkit due to the demands of other classes. One class had a plan scheduled to take over 48 hours during the week, which restricted my time for other subjects.