Week #9–7125GFS CGI: Character Modelling
This has been a somewhat productive week for CGI: Character Modelling.
I say “somewhat” because while I’ve done quite a bit of work, it feels like it was all spent on something that shouldn’t have taken so long.
This week I managed to finish retopologizing the hand and only just started retopologizing the leg. The hand took far longer than I thought it would. I ended up having to build it from scratch using the hand featured in “Beginners Guide to Character Creation in Maya”.
Retopologized Hand
As I mentioned in a previous post, I originally attempted to draw the topology of the “Beginners Guide to Character Creation in Maya” hand onto the base mesh that I submitted for assessment two.
Unfortunately, the topology of the hand was too dense to reshape from the base mesh hand shape. In other words, it was a failure.
So I swallowed my pride and built a new hand from scratch using cylinders for the fingers and planes for the front and back of the palm along with front and side reference from the textbook.
The front and side views weren’t perfect since they were screenshots from a video so some compromises had to be made.
I’m going to tweak the hand a bit more after I finish retopologizing the rest of the body. These tweaks will likely include:
- Reducing finger spread.
- Adjusting for a gloved appearance (the reference for the hand is for a male so the extra thickness could pass for a gloved female hand).
- Maybe change the glove to be fingerless?
- Reducing edges to link to arm.
Retopologizing Leg
I’ve only just started on the retopologizing of the leg. I expect it to go as smoothly as the arm and not be as difficult as the hand.
However, once I get to the foot, things will get difficult again. Much like the hand, the foot is a slightly more detailed part of the model that wasn’t well shaped in the base mesh. Compared to the hand it looks more like what it’s supposed to be but I have my doubts.
Once I get to it I’ll have to decide whether to attempt to draw the proper topology onto the base mesh or build it from scratch.
Final Thoughts
There is a bit of a problem that I haven’t mentioned up until this point…
I have been working on the retopology while waiting for my marks and feedback from the basic mesh that I submitted for assessment two. The results were actually better than I expected. I was given a thirty-six marks out of forty. That basically boils down to ninety percent.
This basically means that the base mesh is more viable for the final assessment than i originally thought.
Now that I have received my marks, I am now expected to begin work towards assessment three, rigging the model. However, I have not finished the retopology.
Here is my conundrum, I’m worried that continuing to work on the retopology will eat into my assessment three time.
My current plan is to continue the retopology and see where I am by the end of week ten. If I don’t like how its going then I will scrap it and proceed with the basic model.
Wish me luck.
