Challenges (Modeling part 2)

When it came to modeling I took a more literal approach and spent days following James Taylor's tutorial (Here) They gave me lots of good pointers on topology which while I haven't encountered as an issue yet- I'm told will become a problem when it comes to animating/rigging the model. I spent days trying to make sure that I followed his tutorial as closely as possible as this is in essence my first attempt at a 3D character and while I would have liked to deviate more from the learning materiel James provided I  was concerned that it might lead to unnecessary model issues later down the line.

I'll go through some images 

This is exactly the topology I was aiming for based on Jame's videos, everything matched up and looked good, it was evenly spaced and a really good starting point. 

Now just to deal with the UV unwrapping. Unfortunately I didn't capture much of that process as I found it really frustrating personally, but again following James' tutorial series really gave me a helping hand. 

I then began the texturing process, as you can see I did this in mudbox by projecting my reference imagery onto the model to create a basic starting point, as you can see there are lots of errors that I'm going to have to go in and fix.

This is looking much better, in mudbox I'm essentially using the different paint brushes to duplicate the skin from the references I have to fill gaps where the projection wasn't necessarily working or getting the model to look right. I didn't have any references for the rear of the model so quite a fair amount of that was 'improvised'.

This 'rear' was painted with the airbrush and using the projection to really make sure that the model was consistent, it's not a perfect solution but for the sake of getting the model completed it's a reasonable compromise. 

I really enjoyed the texturing phase, it felt like the more work I put in the more the model started to come alive and really develop into something that looked really good. 

As a little bonus I took the textures from mudbox and tweaked them further in photoshop including generating some automated normal maps- again if I had more time available I would have gone into the normal maps in more detail and really tried to bring the character to life without the high polycount of sculpting.



Again based on the amount of time I wasn't able to fully follow Jame' tutorials here, which is a shame as his textured model does look more life-like than mine but I did use the opportunity to make some tweaks to the textures within photoshop- namely add a beard to the character! Nothing big but I did enjoy finally adding some personalisation. 

Again, my regret here is that I didn't create something more original, or unique - I'm happy with what I've learned so far and although the model is 'complete' I will probably continue to build on it and make tweaks along the way.