Week Summary - BA3b Week 7

Review Presentation

Review of work so far, I'm still a little behind but catching up. I received some helpful feedback during the presentation session which I've elaborated on below.

Low-Poly Model

I made some slight colour adjustments and removed the lower eyelashes in line with a tutor's suggestion during the feedback, I may also still further stylise the eyes to bring them in line with the rest of the model's style. I was also advised to adjust a few small elements like the angle of the belt buckles just to help the flow of the design. I think the overall look is much improved and is very close to where I want it to be for the end result.

At this stage I did a very quick test render in UE4. The model imports very small, but can be scaled up easily enough. It's really reassuring to see the model in-engine, and I'd love to get it moving around.

Rigging went mostly very smoothly, I had to make a few changes as I went to make sure joints were positioned as they should be - given the relative lack of geometry here and the nature of the trousers, I had to be very particular in my joint placement. A friend suggested that I probably could have constructed the legs inside the trousers and added those as a separate piece of simulated cloth, and in hindsight this may have indeed been a better idea, but we'll see how things turn out after the weight painting is finished.

Below is my initial rigging setup; I really wanted to be able to move the ears for this, so they have their own joints attached. I could potentially rig the hands and/or mouth, the geometry is set up for that, but I opted to skip that stage for simplicity's sake and to save on time. This process took a while as it was one I was relatively unfamiliar with having only run through it once or twice before, but I found a few very informative tutorials and took what I needed from each of them to make things work.

And then the final, skinned rig. It includes controls for hip, shoulder and head rotation as well as a locator to define the character's look direction via a point constraint. The arms are rigged with an FK setup while the legs use IK, as that's all I really needed for this project. It still needs some weight painting to be done, especially around the legs and in particular the knees, which I will be running through next week.

Wax Model

No session due to interchange week