The End: An Evaluation

And so we come to the end of my final year at Glamorgan University, and the end of my degree.

It’s been a wild ride, particularly with this final project; I ran into time-management issues early on, mainly as a result of taking too long fussing over details, and procrastinating on tasks I wasn’t quite sure how to handle (trees for my environments being one strong example). Some projects evolved; one collaborative project was intended to become a fully-fledged game demo but floundered upon the team’s introduction to the engine, the other gave me experience with trying to replicate something that my creative lead had a very specific mental image for, and the back-and-forth exchange of ideas and feedback that took place in that project was something that I found extremely invaluable. 

Overall though, I’m rather happy with what I produced in the end. It’s a rare thing that a project I complete lives up to the image I have in my head at conception, but this year, I think it’s actually been pretty close, with the Knight and the Garden in particular. I’m sure that in time I’ll look back on both of these projects and see them as hopelessly amateur, but right now I’m happy with them and that’s all I can really ask for; as an artist, I’ll always be looking to improve in every project, and I suppose knowing I’ll dislike this work when I look back on it later is (hopefully!) a sign that my work will have evolved further in the meantime.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this final project, it is this: take the plunge. If you’re unsure of how to do something, don’t wait around until the perfect solution arrives in your lap, test things. Experiment. See what works. I did this when experimenting on how to combine multiple textures for my landscapes, and it paid off. If I did these projects over again, I would have liked to do the same for my work with planes and alpha-based shrubs and trees – I hesitated with these, and it cost me. Some of my attempts at these were successful, others less so; I would like to take more time to examine how some succeed where others fail, and why.

I still feel like I have a lot to learn, though! It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect in action, maybe; every time I learn something new, I discover a little more about how much I have left to learn. Overall I’m pretty happy with how my final production work turned out this year, and I learned a lot, but I have a few weak spots that I want to work on improving soon; in my next project I want to use Maya, learn how to effectively polypaint in Zbrush, and possibly experiment with retopologising software. I think I’m going to be using the design for an existing IP for this one, so I can concentrate on the technical aspect rather than the design, but it’s a design I’m extremely excited about. I’ll say no more at the moment, but: watch this space for updates ;)

Peace!

-          Liz

 

I'm nearly done with the brother characters - just making some final tweaks to the face maps before I hand them over for a final check from the director! After that, they'll need to be skinned quickly and put into the poses needed for the cinematic. I'm pretty happy with how they've turned out, and when I look back it's amazing how the elder brother in particular has evolved over this process in terms of proportions. They're now at a point where I'm finally pretty happy with them. Children are notoriously difficult to draw and model, and these boys are a long way from realistic, but they are finally at a stage where I am reasonably happy with them. And as a learning experience, they've been invaluable.

Do they look like brothers to you?

Brothers update!

Working on refining this model's face map. Face textures always seem the most difficult to me - I'm working with only a simple phong shader here instead of using a renderer capable of sub-surface scattering, so it's all about striking a careful balance using the diffuse, gloss and specular maps. Here, I'm putting the final touches to the diffuse map.

Displaying the textures in my viewport is having the slightly unnerving side-effect of making the character look demonic, though - that's a side effect of the method I've used to give some depth to the eyes, but it doesn't half look strange!

She's just about finished! I'm really pretty happy with how she's turned out. I've just spent the last hour resizing all my textures for her - my diffuse and normal maps in particular were being worked at either 2048 or 4096 pixels, mainly because I subscribe to the view that you can always size something DOWN, it's always much harder increasing the resolution if you make it too small! However, I was rather suprised at how little detail was lost when I sized these down, particularly when it comes to gloss and specular maps. The lesson here is that those maps, in particular, do not need to be particularly large!

I'm still a little unsure about her hair shading - I'm using an anisotropic shader set at 90 degrees to create the effect, but I left the highlights quite soft and wide. Making them harsher had the effect of making the hair seem wet and glossy rather than "hair-like": shall have to do some further research on this, and try and improve the effect in future projects.

Unusual Normals

Believe it or not, I've never actually made a tree using alphas before. After a bit of research about how best to go about this, I decided to take a crack at it, build my tree and then try a Max script called SlideNormalThief. The idea with this script is that it will transfer the normals from one object to another, thus enabling oneself to even out the direction of normals across the entire surface of the tree canopy. The first screenshot is my tree with the reference object for the canopy overlaid on it.

Second screenshot is the vanilla plum tree, as it is with the standard normal.

Third screenshot is the plum tree with averaged normals.

Is it just me, or does the second screenshot look significantly better than the first?

After some consideration, I decided that actually, it looked better without altered normals. Experiment failed, but lessons learned. Anyway, here are my other tree trunks! They're awaiting their foliage.