A super quick post - I uploaded a 35 second song I had to make this semester, CyberVoodoo:
It was made using FL Studio 10 and Audition CS5.5. I'll have a longer version at some point, but for now there's a ton of visual stuff to do. And eh, yeah, there it is.
Nah, that's too short... here's a song from a Arsis' promising 2013 album Unwelcome:
Ah, that looks a bit better.
nethernode, signing off...
Pages
Friday, 5 April 2013
Saturday, 23 March 2013
Ping #002
Pong. Blog is fairly dead... again. But hey, that's what these pings are for. I'm busy with some more theory related modules at the moment, so there's not much to show or talk about. Also doing a ton of Maya and Mudbox studying, as well as some digital drawing/painting practice - but nothing worth showing yet, haha. I saw the Pendulum post I made is getting quite a lot of hits, but I have a feeling these hits were hoping to find a tutorial, so I'll make one at some point.
Other than that -- and in the spirit of "the city" -- here's an amazing Assembly 64k entry for 2010 by Portal Process, "X Marks The Spot":
Now, what makes this particularly impressive is that the entire thing was made using no more than 64kb of Assembler code. For more of these, read the post "How Scary Can An Old-School Programmer Be" by Tyler Durden on the Kaspersky blog.
And, yeah, that's that - for now.
nethernode, signing off...
Other than that -- and in the spirit of "the city" -- here's an amazing Assembly 64k entry for 2010 by Portal Process, "X Marks The Spot":
Now, what makes this particularly impressive is that the entire thing was made using no more than 64kb of Assembler code. For more of these, read the post "How Scary Can An Old-School Programmer Be" by Tyler Durden on the Kaspersky blog.
And, yeah, that's that - for now.
nethernode, signing off...
Sunday, 24 February 2013
CG City Construction Techniques
It's been some time since I made a post - busy busy busy. Anyhow, the submissions for the first phase of the year are now over, and here's what I have thus far:
For 720p & downloads, please head over to Vimeo.
It doesn't look like much at the moment, but a lot of time went into researching cities and finding techniques to build a city. Of all the techniques explored, I found that simple straightforward poly-modelling will be best for the detailed bits, whilst I'll be using Maya Paint Effects for random placement of building. Apparently you can also generate random placement of building with nParticles, but I have yet to explore this.
As seen in the above video, I decided on going for a 3-building look for the city, thus having most of the buildings gradually get taller towards the city centre where three giants stand. In a way, the three buildings represent a podium, and thus also the meritocratic culture of this particular city (and most other cities I guess?).
The initial development phase consisted of a very rough montage that I created by layering and masking cityscape photos in Photoshop. I then traced a path along the rim of the newly created cityscape, which I used to create a silhouette in order to get a stronger idea of how the city will read. Finally, I did a rough outline of the buildings for a more concrete illustration of the city. Here are the three steps:
Onwards to 3D, the first technique I tried was to use a satellite image of New York as a stencil and sculpt the city on a high resolution poly plane in Mudbox. Didn't quite turn out too well for my current purposes, but I might dive into this one again at some point for super-distant shots (planetary shots, perhaps):
Next, I turned to Maya and Photoshop. I made a random pattern in Photoshop which I converted into a work path. I then imported the work path as curves into Maya, made some nurbs planes, converted them to poly planes and extruded them to different heights. It worked fine, but I think some more time needs to go into the initial pattern creation:
Then I gave Maya Paint Effects a go. I'll definitely be using this technique - just need to model my own buildings and I'll be good to go:
The final technique I used was the standard poly modelling approach, and since I kept it really simplistic for now (pure poly cubes mostly), it gave me some time to work a bit on rendering techniques. I applied a sky shader and used a nifty little trick using final gathering maps that took rendering time down from roughly one minute to about 15 seconds (though it did cause some artifacts on the far right building):
And that's that for now. Next I'll be diving into some architecture research before I start creating more unique buildings in Maya. But before I go, two things I want to mention:
One: A huge help in discovering techniques for building a city came from a Gnomon Workshop DVD entitled Digital Sets 1: Design, Modeling & Camera - Urban Environments with Eric Hanson. It's really good and I'll be using it tons for the rest of the year.
Two: Here's a CG short that proves you don't always need an entire studio to do something big (like building a CG city) and serves as a massive piece of inspiration. R'ha by Kaleb Lechowski:
nethernode, signing off...
For 720p & downloads, please head over to Vimeo.
It doesn't look like much at the moment, but a lot of time went into researching cities and finding techniques to build a city. Of all the techniques explored, I found that simple straightforward poly-modelling will be best for the detailed bits, whilst I'll be using Maya Paint Effects for random placement of building. Apparently you can also generate random placement of building with nParticles, but I have yet to explore this.
As seen in the above video, I decided on going for a 3-building look for the city, thus having most of the buildings gradually get taller towards the city centre where three giants stand. In a way, the three buildings represent a podium, and thus also the meritocratic culture of this particular city (and most other cities I guess?).
The initial development phase consisted of a very rough montage that I created by layering and masking cityscape photos in Photoshop. I then traced a path along the rim of the newly created cityscape, which I used to create a silhouette in order to get a stronger idea of how the city will read. Finally, I did a rough outline of the buildings for a more concrete illustration of the city. Here are the three steps:
 |
| City Montage |
 |
| City Silhouette |
 |
| City Outlines |
Onwards to 3D, the first technique I tried was to use a satellite image of New York as a stencil and sculpt the city on a high resolution poly plane in Mudbox. Didn't quite turn out too well for my current purposes, but I might dive into this one again at some point for super-distant shots (planetary shots, perhaps):
 |
| The Stencil Tecnnique: New York |
 |
| The Stencil Technique - Close-up |
Next, I turned to Maya and Photoshop. I made a random pattern in Photoshop which I converted into a work path. I then imported the work path as curves into Maya, made some nurbs planes, converted them to poly planes and extruded them to different heights. It worked fine, but I think some more time needs to go into the initial pattern creation:
 |
| The Photoshop Pattern |
 |
| The Extruded City |
Then I gave Maya Paint Effects a go. I'll definitely be using this technique - just need to model my own buildings and I'll be good to go:
 |
| Maya Paint Effects - City Mesh Brush |
The final technique I used was the standard poly modelling approach, and since I kept it really simplistic for now (pure poly cubes mostly), it gave me some time to work a bit on rendering techniques. I applied a sky shader and used a nifty little trick using final gathering maps that took rendering time down from roughly one minute to about 15 seconds (though it did cause some artifacts on the far right building):
 |
| Sky Shader (Global Illumination) |
 |
| All it needs is more buildings... matte time? |
And that's that for now. Next I'll be diving into some architecture research before I start creating more unique buildings in Maya. But before I go, two things I want to mention:
One: A huge help in discovering techniques for building a city came from a Gnomon Workshop DVD entitled Digital Sets 1: Design, Modeling & Camera - Urban Environments with Eric Hanson. It's really good and I'll be using it tons for the rest of the year.
Two: Here's a CG short that proves you don't always need an entire studio to do something big (like building a CG city) and serves as a massive piece of inspiration. R'ha by Kaleb Lechowski:
nethernode, signing off...
Thursday, 24 January 2013
Talis Public Poster
Right, so one of my modules this year will be Graphic Processes. The first assignment for the module deals with Art & Text, so I decided to look into typography. The eventual idea was to create a type of futuristic information board for a city called Talis. The board is essentially more like a mechanical poster with screens and stuff. Initially, I wanted more graphic elements, so I also had a look at some futurism artwork, seeing that the whole idea is based on a type of technological utopia. I also had a look at some World War I & II propaganda posters, as utopian ideals can often be enforced through propaganda. Anyhow, this is what I ended up with:
For 720p & downloads, please head over to Vimeo.
Because it's a portrait poster, a lot of detail is lost in the video, but you can get an idea of how the different text animations work as a whole. For more detail, here's a higher quality still:
The text was created in Photoshop, where I added some effects like stroke for the bottom public section and outer glow for all the sections' text to create an illuminated appearance. For some reason the outer glow setting for the bottom Japanese & English notification text went haywire, and I couldn't figure out why. Anyhow, the text was then animated in After Effects. After the animation phase, I sent a still from After Effects to Maya as reference for modelling a polygon frame. Once the frame was completed I exported it back into After Effects for the final scan line screen effect and the labels on the frame.
For two of the fonts (Media & labels) I went to Dafont.com for some free fonts, the rest were all based on more specific fonts that I actually wanted to use - some imitations, some original. The original typefaces are Futura (Health) and Kozuka Gothic Pro (Public Opinion). The Talis Gov. font is an imitation of New Alphabet by Wim Crouwel (1967) and the Tech&Mech font is based on Carla Bombere Warde's Bombere (1973).
Some of the actual messages aren't too clear, but they read:
Talis Gov.:
Regarding the After Effects animation, I used the offset effect for the continuous scrolling for the Talis Gov. and Tech&Mech sections; I adjusted and manually keyframed the opacity settings before adding a loop for the Health section's three ALERTs; the Media area was just good ol' manual keyframing and looping. The 3D rotation for the Public Opinion section was supposed to be done in Maya, but I had loads of issues with texturing, so I ended up doing it in After Effects by activating the 3D layer option and simply rotating around the Y-axis and hopping between opacity on & off to swith between the two languages. I'm not too much of an After Effects user, and I plan on mainly using it for compositing eventually, thus whenever I try to do stuff in After Effects I always find myself running to CreativeCOW - it's a brilliant site for all things VFX. Just wish I can get Maya sorted already.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm having a hard time with all things related to Maya texturing at the moment, so I'm spending a bit of time on that now. I know I'm planning on doing animation, but at the same time I feel that Maya is such an amazing tool, and I should simply push through and learn as much as possible if I'm to become a worthy animated filmmaker one day. Back on topic, the modelling went alright, and initially I started to texture the frame, but then I discovered mental ray can't render PSD texture files directly - they need to be placed in a PSD node blah-blah-blah. I haven't touched render nodes & the hypershade all that much and was running out of time, so I decided to simply add a Phong material and render the thing as some super cheesy CG metal frame. Come to think of it now, why the hell did I use Phong and not Blinn? Guess it was late at night or something...
And I guess that's about it for this post. I'm currently working on my starting project for Visual Arts, which is the initial design of the city I'm trying to create... will have something about that in a week or two.
Small thought for today: when typing public, type public; when typing public, don't type pubic.
nethernode, signing off...
For 720p & downloads, please head over to Vimeo.
Because it's a portrait poster, a lot of detail is lost in the video, but you can get an idea of how the different text animations work as a whole. For more detail, here's a higher quality still:
 |
| Talis Public Poster |
The text was created in Photoshop, where I added some effects like stroke for the bottom public section and outer glow for all the sections' text to create an illuminated appearance. For some reason the outer glow setting for the bottom Japanese & English notification text went haywire, and I couldn't figure out why. Anyhow, the text was then animated in After Effects. After the animation phase, I sent a still from After Effects to Maya as reference for modelling a polygon frame. Once the frame was completed I exported it back into After Effects for the final scan line screen effect and the labels on the frame.
For two of the fonts (Media & labels) I went to Dafont.com for some free fonts, the rest were all based on more specific fonts that I actually wanted to use - some imitations, some original. The original typefaces are Futura (Health) and Kozuka Gothic Pro (Public Opinion). The Talis Gov. font is an imitation of New Alphabet by Wim Crouwel (1967) and the Tech&Mech font is based on Carla Bombere Warde's Bombere (1973).
 |
| Crouwel's New Alphabet. |
Some of the actual messages aren't too clear, but they read:
Talis Gov.:
- Say no to naturalism
- Trust in Talis
- Read your manual
- Update 29.371_#5c//113 released
- The war machine needs your outdated civilmech
- Our soldiers need technicians, our soldiers need you
- Japanese: 故障中 このサービスは一時的にご利用いただけません。
- English: Out of order. This service is temporarily out of order.
Regarding the After Effects animation, I used the offset effect for the continuous scrolling for the Talis Gov. and Tech&Mech sections; I adjusted and manually keyframed the opacity settings before adding a loop for the Health section's three ALERTs; the Media area was just good ol' manual keyframing and looping. The 3D rotation for the Public Opinion section was supposed to be done in Maya, but I had loads of issues with texturing, so I ended up doing it in After Effects by activating the 3D layer option and simply rotating around the Y-axis and hopping between opacity on & off to swith between the two languages. I'm not too much of an After Effects user, and I plan on mainly using it for compositing eventually, thus whenever I try to do stuff in After Effects I always find myself running to CreativeCOW - it's a brilliant site for all things VFX. Just wish I can get Maya sorted already.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm having a hard time with all things related to Maya texturing at the moment, so I'm spending a bit of time on that now. I know I'm planning on doing animation, but at the same time I feel that Maya is such an amazing tool, and I should simply push through and learn as much as possible if I'm to become a worthy animated filmmaker one day. Back on topic, the modelling went alright, and initially I started to texture the frame, but then I discovered mental ray can't render PSD texture files directly - they need to be placed in a PSD node blah-blah-blah. I haven't touched render nodes & the hypershade all that much and was running out of time, so I decided to simply add a Phong material and render the thing as some super cheesy CG metal frame. Come to think of it now, why the hell did I use Phong and not Blinn? Guess it was late at night or something...
And I guess that's about it for this post. I'm currently working on my starting project for Visual Arts, which is the initial design of the city I'm trying to create... will have something about that in a week or two.
Small thought for today: when typing public, type public; when typing public, don't type pubic.
nethernode, signing off...
Thursday, 17 January 2013
Ping #001
Pong. Haven't updated the blog for nearly three weeks now, so I thought I'd just give an update to stay in habit. Studies are going full steam for 2013, but because everything is still in its initial "dirty" phase, there's not much to show. I might have something up by next week though.
Overview of the year to come: aside from dreaded art history essays and some communication studies, the 2013 practical year modules seem like they could be a lot of fun. I guess you could expect a lot of stuff with a strong cyberpunk essence and some screwing around with utopian/dystopian concepts (mostly around the notion of humankind's future and its habitat... if you can call it that). I also have a digital music-making module this semester, so I'll be diving into MIDI and Adobe Audition quite a bit for the next six months or so.
I made a song the other day whilst playing around with LMMS and Audition. The main instrument was done with a plugin called DVS Megabass, and the additional music box instrument was done with DSK's Music Box plugin:
I'm actually more of a metalhead, but I'm really enjoying the whole electronic music-making process, so I might be doing this every now and then.
As for Maya, after having a lot of trouble with texture mapping, I decided to spend more time on just the animation phase. I can model and make a basic skinned puppet rig by now, so at least I can make some personal rigs for animation, but I want to push anything else aside for now. Maya is really a huge program and it's going to take quite some time to get to know it well from the initial model through to the final render, so for employment purposes it might be better to focus only on animating for now.
Lastly, I'm going to spend some more time on digital painting and sketching as well - simply because it's awesome. Well, and because it helps to visualise projects... but mostly because it's awesome.
And I guess that's more or less all for now.
nethernode, signing off...
Overview of the year to come: aside from dreaded art history essays and some communication studies, the 2013 practical year modules seem like they could be a lot of fun. I guess you could expect a lot of stuff with a strong cyberpunk essence and some screwing around with utopian/dystopian concepts (mostly around the notion of humankind's future and its habitat... if you can call it that). I also have a digital music-making module this semester, so I'll be diving into MIDI and Adobe Audition quite a bit for the next six months or so.
I made a song the other day whilst playing around with LMMS and Audition. The main instrument was done with a plugin called DVS Megabass, and the additional music box instrument was done with DSK's Music Box plugin:
I'm actually more of a metalhead, but I'm really enjoying the whole electronic music-making process, so I might be doing this every now and then.
As for Maya, after having a lot of trouble with texture mapping, I decided to spend more time on just the animation phase. I can model and make a basic skinned puppet rig by now, so at least I can make some personal rigs for animation, but I want to push anything else aside for now. Maya is really a huge program and it's going to take quite some time to get to know it well from the initial model through to the final render, so for employment purposes it might be better to focus only on animating for now.
 |
| Bouncy ball exercise from How To Cheat In Maya 2012. |
Lastly, I'm going to spend some more time on digital painting and sketching as well - simply because it's awesome. Well, and because it helps to visualise projects... but mostly because it's awesome.
And I guess that's more or less all for now.
nethernode, signing off...
Monday, 31 December 2012
Industry Thoughts: The Price of Creativity
I read a post on Ed Hooks' Acting for Animators blog on AWN entitled Rise of the Guardians - Why Did It Flop? some time ago, and the closing paragraph has been stuck in the back of my mind for quite some time now:
Firstly, I don't plan on bashing Rise of the Guardians here - the movie had a slow start, but it eventually got going (I see that IMDb has Rise of the Guardians' US gross income at roughly $71million on 16 December 2012, which is about half of the estimated production budget). Plus, I haven't seen it yet, so derp. What I want to focus on is the "We are poised for a new generation of feature animation studios that will begin with the story and craft the budget to fit that rather than other way around" part.
Now, I'm not an active professional in the industry (yet), but I have watched my fair share of animated movies, television shows, anime and--more recently--shorts, thus I suppose I can at least slap my opinion onto the community wall. Something is definitely wrong with animation since the late 90s. Why? Well, here's some personal character exposition: Armand is constantly searching for newer productions that will make him feel a bit more optimistic about the current industry, but almost every search has him running back to the older stuff. Why is that? This question has been bugging him for a long time now, and he's seriously longing for a straight answer... but it's simply eluding him all the way... and it's incredibly frustrating.
As a little side note though, I have to admit that Disney's Wreck-It Ralph and Pendleton Ward & Frederator's Adventure Time have me more optimistic lately (Adventure Time is simply too awesome), but compared to the earlier years when every second animated production gave me a fuzzy feeling, two titles aren't enough.
Back to the actual issue of story first and budget later - isn't that the actual chronological progression of a production? Once again, I don't have any industry experience, but what I can tell from my university studies and books like Your Career in Animation by David B. Levy and Animation: From Pencils to Pixels by Tony White, is that you start off with an idea, write the first draft, do some concept art and character designs, get a basic storyboard going, do some pencil tests and more complete animated pieces (the title sequence, perhaps?) AND THEN--based on your findings through the first few creative steps--start to compile a project budget and schedule accordingly. I suppose this is a lot more complicated when dealing with multi-million dollar production companies and projects, but shouldn't the majority of the initial presentation package consist of enough creative material to determine whether the production is really worthy of a decent budget? How do flops make it past this point and get huge budgets? Aaaah!!
My main argument is starting to fall apart at the moment, so I'll put it in the back of my head again and try to figure out what's wrong... Who knows, maybe it's a simple matter of me becoming more aware of the realities of the animation industry from a more professional point of view? Or maybe I'm being a romantic student who hasn't fully embraced animation's contemporary reality yet? But yeah, so my current investigation has two suspects in my "what's wrong with animation these days" case:
nethernode, signing off...
"The American feature animation industry is at a tipping point. Budgets cannot go much higher, and the big studios are not going to lower them. There will be no returning to the days of 'Toy Story' or 'Peter Pan.' When projects are considered for development, the primary consideration is their commercial potential. Story is secondary. We are poised for a new generation of feature animation studios that will begin with story and craft the budget to fit that rather than the other way around. Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli operate on a pretty good production model. He makes a movie when he has a movie to make, not when the studio assembly line demands. I read someplace that 'Spirited Away' cost the equivalent of US$30 million to make. That is probably in the ballpark in which the producers of Rise of the Guardians should have been playing."
Firstly, I don't plan on bashing Rise of the Guardians here - the movie had a slow start, but it eventually got going (I see that IMDb has Rise of the Guardians' US gross income at roughly $71million on 16 December 2012, which is about half of the estimated production budget). Plus, I haven't seen it yet, so derp. What I want to focus on is the "We are poised for a new generation of feature animation studios that will begin with the story and craft the budget to fit that rather than other way around" part.
Now, I'm not an active professional in the industry (yet), but I have watched my fair share of animated movies, television shows, anime and--more recently--shorts, thus I suppose I can at least slap my opinion onto the community wall. Something is definitely wrong with animation since the late 90s. Why? Well, here's some personal character exposition: Armand is constantly searching for newer productions that will make him feel a bit more optimistic about the current industry, but almost every search has him running back to the older stuff. Why is that? This question has been bugging him for a long time now, and he's seriously longing for a straight answer... but it's simply eluding him all the way... and it's incredibly frustrating.
As a little side note though, I have to admit that Disney's Wreck-It Ralph and Pendleton Ward & Frederator's Adventure Time have me more optimistic lately (Adventure Time is simply too awesome), but compared to the earlier years when every second animated production gave me a fuzzy feeling, two titles aren't enough.
Back to the actual issue of story first and budget later - isn't that the actual chronological progression of a production? Once again, I don't have any industry experience, but what I can tell from my university studies and books like Your Career in Animation by David B. Levy and Animation: From Pencils to Pixels by Tony White, is that you start off with an idea, write the first draft, do some concept art and character designs, get a basic storyboard going, do some pencil tests and more complete animated pieces (the title sequence, perhaps?) AND THEN--based on your findings through the first few creative steps--start to compile a project budget and schedule accordingly. I suppose this is a lot more complicated when dealing with multi-million dollar production companies and projects, but shouldn't the majority of the initial presentation package consist of enough creative material to determine whether the production is really worthy of a decent budget? How do flops make it past this point and get huge budgets? Aaaah!!
 |
| Some half-arsed digital figure drawing to demonstrate a half-arsed argument. |
My main argument is starting to fall apart at the moment, so I'll put it in the back of my head again and try to figure out what's wrong... Who knows, maybe it's a simple matter of me becoming more aware of the realities of the animation industry from a more professional point of view? Or maybe I'm being a romantic student who hasn't fully embraced animation's contemporary reality yet? But yeah, so my current investigation has two suspects in my "what's wrong with animation these days" case:
- carbon copy syndrome (stories of stories, characters of characters, etc.)
- more budget/investment focus, less creative focus
nethernode, signing off...
Sunday, 30 December 2012
Maya R&D: Stylised Female Modelling
Another of Digital Tutors' tutorials on how to create stylised female models using mostly polygon modelling techniques. It basically teaches you how to make characters like the one's you'll see in Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks productions, like so:
The modelling took quite some time to complete, mostly because I only spent a few hours a day on it, and a lot of those hours went more into getting to know the tools and troubleshooting errors than anything else. Anyhow, I would estimate that creating a model like this without the aid of a tutorial would probably take around two days for me with my current skills. This post only contains the modelling part of the tutorial, because I want to look into more modern UV mapping techniques before continuing (Maya has a new tool these days for unfolding a mesh in the UV Texture Editor called the smooth UV tool, which has an "unfold" operation, and it's apparently very helpful).
Regarding the actual process, it consisted mostly of starting out with primitive geometry (cubes, cylinders, spheres etc.) with as few divisions as possible before shaping it into very rough and basic body shapes. This was generally followed by some extruding and further shaping by either manipulating vertices (in standard view) or via the Sculpt Geometry Tool (with Smooth Mesh Preview activated). The body was modelled first and served as the starting point for her hair and clothing. At the moment she's still missing her teeth and some buttons on her blouse, but I'll add these during the texturing phase.
Regarding the model itself, it was created from some concept art instead of the usual orthographic guides, so a lot of the process involved creative interpretation - which really made this tutorial awesome and useful. There were, however, lots of frustrating areas, the following of which I want to highlight:
Anyhow, I'm going to push the blend between the three styles until I get something that works. If I can actually manage to pull it off, I should have something that feels real, with the aesthetic value of anime, all whilst being very CG-friendly. But yeah, this was my first attempt at modelling a character from start to finish without using any project files (save for the concept art). I did model the spacesuit lady from Mastering Maya 2012, but I merely jumped from project file to project file, so the end result wasn't really my own. Next up will be UV mapping, texturing and the final model with a turntable movie (not sure whether I'm going to take this character all the way to rigging and animation though).
nethernode, signing off...
 |
| 4 View Orthographic |
 |
| Face |
 |
| Ribbon & Bun |
 |
| Breasts & Blouse |
 |
| Sash Ribbon |
 |
| Hand |
 |
| Shoes |
The modelling took quite some time to complete, mostly because I only spent a few hours a day on it, and a lot of those hours went more into getting to know the tools and troubleshooting errors than anything else. Anyhow, I would estimate that creating a model like this without the aid of a tutorial would probably take around two days for me with my current skills. This post only contains the modelling part of the tutorial, because I want to look into more modern UV mapping techniques before continuing (Maya has a new tool these days for unfolding a mesh in the UV Texture Editor called the smooth UV tool, which has an "unfold" operation, and it's apparently very helpful).
Regarding the actual process, it consisted mostly of starting out with primitive geometry (cubes, cylinders, spheres etc.) with as few divisions as possible before shaping it into very rough and basic body shapes. This was generally followed by some extruding and further shaping by either manipulating vertices (in standard view) or via the Sculpt Geometry Tool (with Smooth Mesh Preview activated). The body was modelled first and served as the starting point for her hair and clothing. At the moment she's still missing her teeth and some buttons on her blouse, but I'll add these during the texturing phase.
Regarding the model itself, it was created from some concept art instead of the usual orthographic guides, so a lot of the process involved creative interpretation - which really made this tutorial awesome and useful. There were, however, lots of frustrating areas, the following of which I want to highlight:
- the eyes
- the mouth
- the breasts
- the legs
- the overall proportions
Anyhow, I'm going to push the blend between the three styles until I get something that works. If I can actually manage to pull it off, I should have something that feels real, with the aesthetic value of anime, all whilst being very CG-friendly. But yeah, this was my first attempt at modelling a character from start to finish without using any project files (save for the concept art). I did model the spacesuit lady from Mastering Maya 2012, but I merely jumped from project file to project file, so the end result wasn't really my own. Next up will be UV mapping, texturing and the final model with a turntable movie (not sure whether I'm going to take this character all the way to rigging and animation though).
nethernode, signing off...
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