Week Summary - BA3b Week 6

Low-Poly Model

This week was mainly spent on texturing - I used dots to place the eyes initially and make sure they were where I wanted them to sit before moving onto the rest, but the look with just the dots was actually quite effective, so I may come back to it later.

There was unfortunately some wasted time on the UVs here, as I initially tried to get more out of my UV space by mirroring the facial features. This may have worked fine if I had modelled the eyes into the geometry, but as I've painted them onto the texture it meant that I wouldn't have been able to animate the eyes looking around, as any animations would have been mirrored across the face. To compensate for the loss of texture space, I adjusted the scale of the face UVs to give that area more texture density to work with.

I decided to design some knotwork of my own for the coat detail, using existing Manx knotwork as a reference. Initially, I started working in illustrator, but moved back into photoshop to finish the process as I didn't have time to spend working through it in an unfamiliar programme. I made sure to make the design something that could be used in a repeating line, as it has to wrap around a shirt cuff.

I had to simplify the pattern to go onto the final texture sheet so that it was still readable on the model at the required scale, and in the end I think a lot of the detail and nuance was lost, but I'm still happy with the end outcome. 

Below is the model with finished textures. I've made some further minor adjustments to the topology, and there will likely be more tweaks made moving forward, but for now I'm happy to move on from this stage and onto the rigging and animation. 

I've tried to find a good balance between hard and diffuse shadows throughout painting the textures - in some places, such as the trouser legs, hard shadows provided a much better visual, however in places like the hair and around the face, diffuse shadows gave a much better effect, so I've used one or the other depending on which looks best in each context.

Wax Model

Spent this week adding the skull, it was really interesting to consider the structure here and I've found it so helpful in personal drawings I've done since constructing this. I still need to do some refining and work on the teeth, but overall I think it's looking good.

The below painting needs some further work, but I think it's a good example of how learning this section of the body's anatomy has really helped in my facial structures. I've started to stop on occasion as I work to draw out the form of the skull underneath the face, and I think it's really improved my understanding of the translation of this shape from 3D to 2D.