Mindmap
Mood board
Character Design
Draft
Design
Model
Reflection
In the game art elective, I want to discover more about 3D design and modeling as I am not familiar to these. I am hoping to discover and learn the process of 3D modeling works.
At first, we are being told to choose to design a character or an object and could think in pairs pr alone. So I had chosen to work with my friend and designed two characters. My friend and I started with a mind map to think about a rough background for the two characters in order to develop further ideas of the design. Goat and salamander are the two forms of characters we have chosen. They are enemies at first to compete who is the best chef and become friend afterwards. Then we looked for pictures of these two creatures and the imagery of chef as research to make a mood board for our design. I am thinking of finding some traditional Chinese clothes for chefs but it is quite hard to find. So I decided to mix some western fantasy clothing with some Chinese elements for my character and use the color combination that is usually used in the past in China to show the Chinese elements. I have tested and developed the clothing and accessories to show the identity (a chef) of my character. I had also tried different color combinations to choose the most pleasant one.
After designing it, it is time to create the model of the character. I have given my design to my teacher and being told that the model is better to be less than 2000 polygons as to simplify the process. This is because most of us are beginners to Maya and I understand that. So he advised me to remove the basket of my character and the accessories could be added in Substance Painter and no need to model them. It is a very useful suggestion to me as while I am making my model, I find out how hard it is for me. It is very complicated at first while using Maya as I do not remember the hot keys and the interface of this software, I had done loads of mistakes and I did not notice them. I was enjoying to make the rough low poly model in Maya as this is the most simple part for me. I used around one week to make the low poly model and thought I had finished it and I realized that there are many errors in my model when I am checking the points and faces of my model. I find out that I had duplicated my model many times and had jointed and moved some points that I do not wanted to. Then I used around one week to fix them and started to do the UV mapping. The UV mapping process is not very successful too. I had done it three times as there always some unexpected errors occurring after I reopen my Maya file. After asking my teacher, I notice that this is because there is still some small mistakes in my model that drives to these errors. By the help of my teacher I sorted them out and done it. Then I used Nomad to create some details for my model and import it into substance painter and to add color and more details. These part are quite successful and fun.
For the final outcome, I am quite pleased with it as this is the first time I create a character by using Maya although it is not perfect. There are a lot of improvement could be done if I am more familiar to this software and if I have more time. I did not know that I can bind bones to my character and to animate it in Maya so I have jointed my character’s arms with it body. This is because when I am creating its arms it will overlap with its body. As to solve this problem I had jointed them together as to prevent the overlapping and makes it look better. When I know I can animate it it is already too late to make the changes for me. There is also some very odd looking places on my model as I do not have enough time to do more fixing and details on it. I had used too much time on fixing my errors of the model and UV cutting of it. I will be more careful to it next time to avoid mistakes at the beginning to reduce the amount of fixing works that need to be done later on.