Final Submission for my class Character Design & Creation.
We were tasked in our 1st Week to create 8 characters with basic forms and reads. In our 2nd week, we took 4 of those characters and further refined the details. For our 3rd week we reduced it to our final 2 characters, and further refined them, splitting polygroups, making sure each piece was separate and doing a lot of Zbrush sculpting. Our 4th week was doing retopology, creating hair, creating a separate Ear asset, creating and applying normal maps and bringing everything together in Maya.
Q1: What worked and what didn’t?
A1: I enjoyed the most, when I was working in ZBrush. Maya isn’t a very good modeling program when compared to what you can create in ZBrush or Blender. Maya to me, takes 3-10 steps longer that could be completed in 1-3 steps required in ZBrush/Blender. When you compound all those extra steps, its a major turn off to use Maya for modeling.
It would be nice if our school program had a dedicated month just to Sculpting human anatomy. Starting from the bones, to the underlying ligaments and muscles, to the major ones on the surface. A single month isn’t impossible to learn the basics, but I would like more time to get into all the gritty details of the human anatomy.
I don’t think starting at 8+ models then working down by half at the end of each week to the final 2 is a very good approach to this class. I see any class not labeled as Portfolios to be learning experiences. The point of these classes should be the students learning by failing. Only by doing something a 100 or a 1000 times do you really understand what you are doing.
One way I feel the class should be restructured is that their should only be 4 characters in total, one completed every week. This is roughly a production timeline for characters I think. 1-2 days for 3D Modeling, 1-2 Days for 3D Sculpting, 1-2 Days for Retopology and Cleanup, and a final day for time buffer.
What we should be learning in these “practice” classes before we hit our Portfolio classes is what works and what doesn’t. We should be expected to stumble and fall on our 1st Week, the 2nd Week is familiarizing with what we learned with Week 1. Week 3 should be us routinely creating another character, focusing on creating something appealing. Week 4 should be putting our previous 3 Weeks of learning into a final character.
This would in my opinion greatly benefit the students more as we are expected to fall hard, then rise again, repeating this 3 times before we hit our final character that we would be proud of. We should easily see huge increment improvements from our Week 1 to Week 2 character, refining what we learned in Week 2 for Week 3. Ultimately our Week 4 should be our Portfolio ready model.
Q2: What would you do differently next time?
A2: Spend more time doing the work, rather than screwing off.
Q3: Did you encounter any major issues, if so how did you adapt?
A3: Not asking for help, I really struggled with sculpting the lips until I asked Adam on our last Lab for help. I finally got it so Lips would actually read as Lips.
Q4: How did the end result come out (give yourself honest feedback)?
A4: Not that great, I had some high hopes for my final turn ins. Things I don’t feel up to par…
+Face sculpts are wrong on many levels. Mostly where the anatomy of the face structure is concerned, and the eyes. I’m happy that I’ve finally gotten the Lips to read as Lips from a distance.
+Didn’t complete my 3rd Prop for my Disney Princess.
+Should of spent more effort on the Staff End Point, it looks more like chiseled rock than a Crystal.
+Hair wasn’t that well done, especially for the Fox Girl and her tail.
+I think the cloth wrinkles are okay for the most part, but their are places that need tweaking.
+Needed to spend more time practicing human anatomy.