Minor Update

Live stream

What a funny day. Myself and Pol are constantly sending screen shots back and forth over MSN. A crazy amount in fact. My desktop and received files are a mess currently. The other day Pol said "Lol, wouldn't it be funny if we could see live streams of each others desktops." So today I woke up and decided to do exactly that. I then messaged Pol with the link, he opened it up and laughed, and said "How nerdish is this, I'm sitting here pouring myself an orange juice watching someone else model." But it worked really well! Pol had a live feed to my Maya all day, which saved me having to keep sending him files.

Character body progress


I've been working so hard on this character. Trying to understand all of the muscle and bone structures to make it look real. It's come along way, I've learnt a lot, but there's still more to go. I'm really glad to have had the chance to invest some time into learning this now. It will really help me in the future. Here is a screen shot of the progress now. The face is really WiP right now, so please, avert your eyes from it. It's just aweful. I plan to really sculpt the bone structure first, and then add on the mass for the cheeks and such. Should be done with that tomorrow, here's hoping! I want to move on.


So it's getting there at least. The butt area was a huge focus today, and I think it's certainly more realistic. The knees still aren't working, but it won't take much to tweak that. I'm also some what tempted to add looping systems for the calves and the thigh muscles. We'll see. My main focus is the head right now.

Also, as you can see, there's a LOT of geometry in there now. 14254 tris in fact. That's over double what my model was before I started really going for that more realistic look. It really shows just how much geometry you need to produce hi res realism. Although you could say it's a little too much in there now. But it won't be a problem for us, we will be fine with a lot of polys in the characters, I just went over board as all I did was low polygon game characters last year! Oh yeah, this character isn't even smoothed yet. All that Geometry there was put in by myself. No wonder it's taken me some time! You know progress has been made, and that you've learnt a lot when you look at wireframes from just a few days ago, of the same character, and you are disgusted by how poor they are. I'm actually ashamed of some of that, I'm so glad that I'm pushing past that crap and am entering new exciting territory. It's such a great feeling to see how much progress has been made after days of feeling like it's getting no where.

My plan is to finish the head, make it nice and then start working on the outfit. It really is time to move on. Once the outfit is produced I shall start cutting the geometry away I do not need, and then I can put even more attention into the muscle definition in the areas that will be showed. We'll see how that goes. I know exactly how the outfit will look, and on a previous post you can view some of my drawings. Things have moved on and changed a bit, so I'll have to produce a new sketch in the next days to illustrate the outfit as it stands now. So watch this space for that, and the head model being finished!

The course changing

I've been checking out some of the first years blogs. Maya tutorials seem to have progressed so far. They are producing some great stuff already, really impressed by it. It's also satisfying to see that all of mine, Pols, and some others moaning and nagging for more classes and more content in Maya class has paid off. Enjoy and reap the benefits guys. Really great to see.

Time to clear up my desktop and then sleep!

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About Me

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I am a video game artist at Dovetail games, working on Train Simulator 2014, 2015 and an unannounced title. I also graduated from the CG Arts course at UCA in 2010 with a First Class. www.jonstewart.co.uk