Character Design and Creation Finale

   I know it's been a while since a wrote in my blog so I want to tell about my latest experience. This  was the 4th week of my Character Design and Creation class. This had to be the toughest experience with a class I had yet. Our final project for CDC encompassed  everything we and learned in modeling up to this point and then some. From modeling in Maya, to sculpting in Z Brush, everything was covered. We had to model an ear, sculpt hair for models from the previous weeks, layout UVs and bake normal maps. We even had to do a resurfacing of our Z Brush sculpts in Maya, something I had never done before.

   Completing all these tasks on satisfactory level was a tall order but for the most part, I think it worked out OK. My ear build came out great I was very proud of the way it turned out. I think I also did good on the hair sculpts. Especially considering this was the first time I had tried my hand at sculpting hair in Z brush. I do think the hair breakdown I did before hand helped considerably to determine which parts of the hair needed separation.

Hair breakdown establishing parts and flow.

    I was really surprised by how well my UVs and normal maps came out. They were mountains better than any I had done previously. Unfortunately, they didn't work out completely. See, I had two very good normal maps for my resurfaced heads but I could only get one to load at a time. When I bake one map it comes out perfectly, but when I go to bake a new one, that one ends up replacing the other. It's like they both can't exist separately. I don't know why this happens. I ended up baking the second map again while my first map texture was still on the model in the view port. It showed up then. I took a screenshot of it as proof of both my textures knowing full well that I would lose the first one the next time  I reloaded the Maya file. If I could do it differently, I would spend more time on trying to figure out what's going on, maybe reach out for help from an instructor.

This is the screen shot I took of my final with both normal maps loaded.

   I another thing that didn't come out that great was my second resurface. I think a big reason why the resurfaces did not come out as good as I hoped was largely due to an issue I was having with the edge looping feature of the quad draw tool. I managed the  first head ok but the second suffered more because of it. I adapted to the situation by going in and out of quad draw using the edge loop manually but it wasn't as efficient  and very frustrating.

Troubleshooting the edge looping problem in Quad Draw

  I very proud of what I have accomplished with this assignment. I do wish my resurfacing topology came out better and my normal maps would have loaded properly but overall I think I did very well. I struggled a lot this month, but in the end I feel like I overcame all that and learned so much in the process and that makes me feel good.