Final 3D Reflective Journal #6 (+ Feedback / Technical Notes)

 

Final 3D Reflective Journal #6 (+ Feedback / Technical Notes)

As I finished up the face model, I used the soft selection tool to change the mouth and nose position. This was in order to better achieve the proportions from the reference image in the production bible.

This is the finished face model. I was honestly quite happy with the results - especially with some basic materials applied to the different components (and I even used face select to create the purple highlights in the hair, and the purple highlights in the eyes too).

At this stage I was doing some retopology to fix a large number of n-gons present on the initial rock model provided to me. Visually they looked solid, but just had topology issues that Mila needed some help sorting out. I did my best with the rock but it's a static background mesh ultimately, and I don't have infinite time to help with other team member's parts. The character model is of higher priority.

Starting work on the hand model at this stage, because Gabriella's workload was too high and she needed help.

I finished making a hand after a little struggle - it looks basic but I believe it gets the job done decently well.

Had to help Gabriella with the body mesh on a few occasions too - there were some symmetry issues so I encouraged her to delete half of the mesh again and re-mirror it later instead of trying to manually fix the numerous symmetry issues between the left and right sides. This also proved helpful in that it exposed overlapping/internal face and n-gon issues inside the model which I helped her delete. She was very understanding and receptive to the feedback and help provided, and certainly learned well from this too.

Completely broken mesh for the legs of the vehicle model I was provided (I was left to clean it up myself, no further iterations were provided in response to my feedback, which ended up taking a fair bit of my time)

Reversed normals incorrectly on several parts of the provided vehicle model are pictured above (dark faces)

 I had to redo the leg model because unfortunately the initial iteration was inadequate - as you can see my redone version on the left looks very similar but doesn't have the ugly face overlapping errors.

Had to add extra details to the vehicle model that were lacking and noticeable (such as the reigns, and rings around the neck)

Added materials to the vehicle matching the reference vehicle's colours - it looked a lot better with those basic colours applied.

Materials on everything, awaiting body mesh to be provided at this stage (unfortunately, teammate overslept their alarms and was late to provide this. This was understandable, as we had both been working very late the prior night together)

Quickly joining the two halves of the body mesh together.

Soft selection allowing me to shape the trousers to match the reference better.

Joining hand mesh to the arm vertex by vertex.

Maya crashed often especially when trying to move vertices together and join them. These crashes made my life a lot more difficult and miserable, but I approached things slightly differently when I rebooted and was able to work around these issues.

Successfully joined hand meshes after 3x attempts and Maya crashes.

Joined head to neck with less trouble - I am quite happy with this combination job and feel the neck flows pretty well into the head. I think (aside from the tutorials having good content) this is a testament to both Gabriella and I's work on the topology there. It is great to see that collaboration come together.

Modelled the shoulder plating with some simple hard surface modelling techniques and bevels.

About to create some basic clothing for the top half. The 'detatch' and 'extract' tools in the mesh toolbar were very useful for this.

Done with the basic clothing job and ready to render now. I had to reboot Maya with the legacy render layers enabled so that I could see the wireframe and rendered versions. Then I switched to the rendering mode and set up to render the PNG image sequence to the correct folder. These renders took about 30 minutes each (for render + wireframe).

Some video editing to create the final video output from the image sequence and export it as an MP4 - I ended up including a short clip of me orbiting the meshes in the Maya viewport to get a more holistic view of the wireframe.

I think we executed on what was provided in the production bible fairly well - the colours and shapes match quite well for the character and decently well with the vehicle. The environment feels suitable, and overall I feel like the essence of the reference is captured in a respectable manner.

I feel that we didn't have to compromise and change the designs much. The vehicle ended up being more rounded and sleek than the original deisgn (looks a bit less mechanical to me). This was not my decision and I have no way of knowing the thought process of that teammate as they did not communicate with me, however I would assume it simplified their workflow. There are many smaller examples of this with the character mesh too - such as the jacket being extrapolated directly from the body to make the approach simpler and more direct. There were minor errors, such as I note that the earrings ended up being black instead of purple in the final render due to a material assignment issue that was unnoticed initially. Things like this don't significantly take away from the representation of the source material in my opinion, and I think the connection between the original art and our output is clear. If doing it again, I would have made sure more time was set aside to work on and polish the clothing. I would have also personally approached the vehicle quite differently. You can see an example here of what my blockout looked like (I think it doesn't need nearly as much curvature on the main body, as per the reference and the aesthetic likely intended):

Group status:

The final 2 days were frantic. But things pulled through, I just had to pick up a lot of slack in the form of the tasks of others. This was not necessarily unexpected - unanticipated things always happen, and in this case some group members were over-optimistic about how long it would take to achieve certain things, which is fine. Other group members were simply non-communicative, which is less fine (but just have to work around that and not expect they will contribute). Overall, I feel things could have been far worse, and I am proud of our output. I feel I did my very best to give all 3 other members ample opportunity to contribute - I did still end up doing a slightly disproportionate amount of the work on top of being the leader, but I feel that my teammates as a generalization put in some solid effort and hours, so I am happy.

Feedback

I not only received (a lot of) feedback in regards to my 3D modelling this week, but also in regards to my leadership and management of the project. This feedback was positive and very welcome/pleasant. I am glad that my group mates felt like I was able to lead them well and provide guidance in a way that wasn't too overbearing, and happy to hear that they felt I had remained cool under large pressure from the deadline and having to take on a lot of additional tasks to help the team.

The model feedback from Sylvain was to encourage my team to not use a sculpting workflow (as Max was initially doing for the vehicle, which would result in very poor topology) and so I steered away from this too. My friend Vicky advised me to focus on capturing the right proportions and silhouette from the original, which was what encouraged me to use the soft select tool so much to try and mold things to the right specifications (within reason/practicality within 3D - you can't push things as far as easily with a 3D mesh as you can with 2D art, as I have come to realise with this project).