Initially I tried to get the weighting on Andy's pirates done, but as he wasn't finished finalising UVs yet I couldn't paint the weights. So i scrapped what i'd started and began concentrating on my project.
I thought it would be a good idea spending a day gathering reference images. In hindsight I do think it was a good thing, I've found a few images like these...
and these...
basically a mixture of really cool images and handy reference pictures for proportion/anatomy and style. So i've been using these in cojunction with the pictures that i've drawn of my character eg.
...to try and come up with a fully formed concept for my character. But this is harder than it seems.
With so much reference and so many differing levels of realism/stylisation etc etc it's hard to find a happy middle ground. I'm also realising that i'm probably my own toughest client. When modeling the pirates I only had what i'd been given to go with, and I specifically had in mind that I would put aside my own personal tastes and create characters for the client and not myself. When working for myself I just seem to constantly flipflop between stylistic choices. This is compounded by the technical aspects, also.
In maya you obviously work with polygon - vertices. The free-form sculpting tools available within Maya are not so great, to say the least, and so this has resulted in me getting stuck into detail far too early on, having too many vertices to work with and thus getting bogged down. Here's an image showing a few of the facial variations that i've come up with this week.
As you should be able to see from the images, forgiving the eerie look brought on by having missing eyes, the character just looked strange. The proportions were all out and there was just nothing going for him. The nose on the left face in particular looks rough, as well as the eye, which just looks unnatural. The face on the right is another prototype and the face in the center is what i've been left with (the level 0 mesh from mudbox after a few hours of tinkering.)
Here's the highest level mesh that I got to in Mudbox after a day of playing around and getting accustomed to the interface and it's quirks.
I sort of like this image, but it just doesn't have the zing that I want it to. But that's okay, i'm marking that down to experience. Of course I wouldn't just slip right into it, right? Nothing ever as easy as it seems in 3D land. As I didn't UV the guy before I mudboxed him I can't use this hi-poly sculpt for anything, anyway, which I think is probably a good thing. I took the lowest level mesh from this, though, which i've now taken back to Maya where I will create the entire base mesh for the guy. Here's the progress so far:
So i've not come out with a lot of visible progress this week. Hopefully this post will show you that i've actually been working some lol. It's been an interesting week, I think i'm getting somewhere though. I think really I want to make the guy a little more stylised. It's probably all in the eyes... who needs realism? Perhaps next week (or maybe the week after depending on what Andy's got me doing) i'll go crazy and make the guy super stylised. That could be fun. i'm babbling.
Next on the agenda is finishing the weights on Andy's pirates so that they're out of the way, then i'll get back to this dude and finish an entire base mesh. After that it's back to Mudbox for further modeling, (not before UVing) then back to Maya, tweaks, displacements, etc, and onto the rest of the crap. It'll be interesting to see where I end up. Oh well, i've run out of things to say that make sense, so until next week (Y).
