Week 50 - Thread Between Us, Final Submission

 For the last submission, I made some minor changes to Sol's hair model, adjusting the length of several strands and adding a bit more variation to the curl patterns.

Feedback as mentioned

Additionally, I made some slight tweaks to the base yarn mesh, including a long, coiled, string around the ball to be unfurled in the scene where the yarn trips Luna. Additionally, I added more topology to the strings overall.

Week 48 - In Plain Sight

Colour changing material for background characters, allows designers to change the colour of NPC clothing quickly

hair shader

consolodate both card-based hair designs and curve-based hair designs onto the same material allowing them to get maximum customizability on both

Work in progress hair for background npc

Week 43 - In Plain Sight, Sol Hair Research & Yarn Proxy

This sprint I spent a majority of my time working on secondary character art needs such as working out the workflow for Sol's hair, breaking down Metahumans for their parts, and designing the first proxy of the Yarn Ball character.

Hair Research

For our style, I spent some time looking at In the Valley of Gods, specifically with their character Zora, on how they do hair. This turns out to be a multi-layered approach with a basic mesh and hair cards stacked ontop of them

For this, Ive been testing out both Ahoge and GC Curves as Maya Plugins to see what the best way to get the volume we need for a coiled hair texture. This process started with a mesh volume, then converting that into a random number of curves with Ahoge. Then processing those curves into either cards or tubes to be textured.

Currently Im working with Fibershop to make proper hair alphas/curls, however I need more time with the program to create the effect I really need.

For the Barista, I took one of my Metahumans from a personal project, extracted the face, hands and hair at their lowest subdivision, and reconnected them in Maya. Alongside this fixing other notes that Jocelyn and Jordyn had for me.

Metahuman head raw.

The yarn has been tricky from the start since there are not many good references for how a yarn character should look. I did my best to create a rounded cube and then extrude out segments wrapping around to create individual strings. I used a material in Zbrush to see how a similar shader to the one we're making would affect it.

Week 41 - In Plain Sight, Barista Sculpt & String Sculpt

This sprint, I mainly focused on retopologizing and UV-ing the Barista character. It currently has 132k tris, including the proxy head.

References:

Perforce:

String

The current project im working on is regarding making a proper string model to be used in conjunction with the rig. Using the notes from Jocelyn as follows, I made a quick mockup and test of the string ball, as seen below.

 

Week 40 - In Plain Sight, Barista Sculpt

For this week, I finished the main sculpt of the Barista character and will be working on retopologizing her while creating a proxy for our rigging artists and animators to use for blocking.

I ended up keeping all of the details in ZBrush after looking for further reference for the apron, noting that the strings could overlap the edge at the top of the jeans to hide the fact the apron isn't actually attached. Especially if this is a background character, small details like this should be easy to work with. 

References:

Resources:

For this project I used Sean Forsyth's cloth folds and Mypixielab's IMM bows to help work through the intricate shape of the tied threads.

Further Resources:

• Gio Brush for Soft Forms in ZBrush by Pablo Munoz Gomez
• Kirill Senzu's Clothing and Accessories Tutorial
• Sean Forsyth's Cloth Folds

Week 39 - In Plain Sight, Barista

Important context for the assignment portion of this post: I was away on medical absence until Monday May 18th so my contributions are limited.

For our project, I was tasked with designing one of our background extras, an unnamed Barista that will appear in several shots to make the cafe feel more lively. Everything below her neck has to be seen, including shots up close to her boots, so I focused on making loose clothing that is general enough to fit with our early 2000s aesthetic, but not boring.

One problem I've been running into is regarding the physics of the apron versus the positioning of everything else. I am looking at experimenting with a simple version of Marvelous Designer to create a pattern of the cloth for primary details/basic string placement then add details in Zbrush

References:

Perforce Proof:

Week 25 - Lighting Composition

For our lighting assignment I decided to have a little bit of fun and focus very heavily on the artistic side of lighting, specifically referencing chiaroscuro for how to light the subject.

chiaroscuro, (from Italian chiaro, “light,” and scuro, “dark”), technique employed in the visual arts to represent light and shadow as they define three-dimensional objects. Britannica

In hindsight, I think I could have pushed the lighting further to be more dramatic, but being limited to three-point lighting setup, I think it works for what is needed.

Playing with the different temperature of the lights did also help create a better story for the statue. Warmer lighting next to the bird's neck and a dim light behind the man help imply a story taking place.

This is my favorite of the two due to the high amounts of detail within the statue; with the primary shape on the helmet and small secondary details of the ruffles, it creates an interesting contrast of light and dark.

References:

Week 15 - Final - 'A' Stage

 

UI Implementation on main screen and HUD

Texture fixes 

Setting up controller support for the Witch

Perforce Proof