Character Render

Below is my final character, created and textured looking at the front back and right views of him. I found creating him a great fun, I really enjoyed it as towards the end you gain a lot of satisfaction from creating and finishing a whole 3d model and this is definitely something I plan to do in my spare time over summer.

Although there were some faults creating this character as can be seen with the white eye peeking through his eyelid there. Also I found the stretching of the material was also a slight issue as it blurred the texture.

Final Character Turnaround

Below is the final character turnaround that I am going to use. As you can see I have shortened the arms somehwat as well as lowering them just so that they aren't quite upright and awkward and they are in a more natural pose.

Render and Greyscale

Looking at how Valve created the different classes within Team Fortress 2 and using a similar procedure, we were tasked with creating a render of our 3d character as well as a grey scale of the T-pose. Although this isn't strictly 3d work it is very important as it helps me get a feel of how my character is going to look and what kind of aesthetics to go for.

The render came out quite well I felt, although I discovered how awkward it can be to draw a guy who has gangly arms and legs, it can be quite hard to get them into a half descent pose. This guy just looks like he's doing a little jig.. Alas I gained a sense of how my character would move and react so I felt that this exercise was a very good one.

Above is the grey scale of my front T-pose and you might notice that it has changed somewhat from the original mafia T-pose. This is a slightly altered T-pose where the arms are longer to try and make the character seem more stylised to try and make him fit in better with a Team Fortress 2 art style. However I now feel that his arms are too long and that they should maybe be shortened in the next version of the T-pose.

Lighting

So today in class we looked at lighting within 3ds max and how to best set lights up to present a 3D object. The standard lighting within 3ds max is quite good but a much better result can be obtained through using lights.

As you can see a variety of different lighting creations can be made. Using your own lighting also creates a much crisper 3d model, as shown by this teapot.

Unwrapping Revision

A while back we revisited the method of unwrapping a model so that it could then be textured which was really useful since as it turned out, we all had more or less completely forgotten how to do it.

For this task we were given a 3d model of an SAS soldier's head. In order to unwrap the seam tool to create seams along the areas that would need separating such as along the outside of the gas mask and along the edges of the different pipes along the mask.

After we had created our seams, all that was left was to pop the areas that were separated with the seams in the UV editor one by one so that they were positioned correctly and then scaled so that they were all the same scale.

Above is the render of the SAS head although it is a little untidy with areas not quite properly seperated, although this is easy to fix.

Ear Modelling

One of the hardest parts to model on a human head are the ears, as they are quite complexly shaped with dips and ridges that morph and blend together. However after quite a bit of experience modeling organic things like faces I felt I could accomplish this task. It was indeed very hard to model the ear and took roughly the same amount of time it would take for me to model the majority of a head, but thankfully our tutor and done an easy step by step method of modelling an ear which made things a lot easier.

I am very happy with the way that the ear turned out as it does look very organic, like an actual ear and I am very proud of the fact that I was able to model an ear as I can hardly draw one.

Face Modelling Continued again

Following some slight experimentation with alternative modelling methods and modelling different heads using different templates, with and without edge loops shown I then modelled another head, although this time round it was an old man with wrinkles and with one eyebrow raised above the other and so the edge loops with this head was going to be slightly different.

As you can see the edge loops around his left eyebrow have been raised to account for his quizzical expression on his face. I thought this head went very well, although the edge loops seemed to get lost around the mouth and the poly count sharply increases here and there as well which makes the model look a little odd, but other than that I thought it went very well.