Page Title

Project pitch:

Hello, my name is Kieron Saunders, I am a current 4th year university student enrolled in the Bachelors of games and interactive environments course. I am currently in my final year of learning and am looking to improve my current skills and learn skills I haven't obtained yet. To achieve this, I will be working on a 3d model character of my choosing. My reason for choosing this as my main focus is due to the field of work I am looking towards. When looking for applying to jobs, I found that a large amount of studios wanted high end, detailed models. Especially character models. I am confident in my ability to design static objects, but not in designing more organic characters or creatures. I found this to be my weakest skill and require a much higher level of skill in this field. So, to do this, I must design a creature or character for my project.

 

Character Idea:

This character will all be original design with inspiration from other media and artists. I am choosing to challenge myself by not making a standard human character, but rather one that is less human and has animal characteristics. The character will have an assortment of clothing that will be attached to it. This will include basic clothing, jewellery and other such assortment. I will be sticking to a specific theme and culture that will be aligned to the characters design. I will require researching outfits and cultural significance depending on the characters design. Such aspects could be how vampires can't wear silver. It's their weakness and would make little to no sense as to why they would wear that. Aspects like these are crucial in the characters overall quality and design.

 

Mudbox sculpting

After the development of the initial character base, I will use Mudbox to polish the mesh definition and detail to output a more professional level of detail. After this has been achieve, I will then go into making clothing that has a high face poly count that will make the characters look more clean and smooth. I found that jobs really desire people with Z-brush experience, but I do not currently have access to such software. This results in me being required to work in Mudbox.

 

Retopology

After improving the characters mesh detail, I will send it back into Maya, where I will begin retopology of the character. Showing this skill helps with employment as it lets your higher, see that you know how meshes are supposed to be developed. It helps with clean animations depending on the characters design. It also helps with displaying your knowledge on specific anatomy. I found that through my time in university, that when talking to tutors and teachers, that having a basic understanding of anatomy is crucial. The most problem I would have is the facial and hand areas as it has a larger amount of detail and mesh breakage compared to most other areas.

 

UV-Unwrapping:

UV-unwrapping is something that needs to be done with knowledge on layout and how it works with texturing software like Substance Painter. The layout needs to be designed in a way that the texture maps don't overlap and are placed in a way that the textures go across the skin in a smooth way. Can't have two leg UV's next to each and rotated upside down to one and another. If this occurs, there will be huge problems with applying textures and the overall texture looks. Another issue that may arise is how the UV seams may be placed where the texture rotations are incorrect. This causes the viewer to notice the problems with the texture. A reason why this is important to account for is because of how the companies would usually expect you to be able to UV-unwrap the character you have created.

 

Texturing

When it comes to texturing the character, I am looking to make it realistic. I should aim to do research based on skin colours of specific aspects of my character. His race, habitat, origin, occupation. And other such details. If he has horns, potentially make some areas of the horn darker to symbolise the horns age or if it's been damaged in the past or not. These are small details that add to the finale quality of the characters overall design.

 

 

Baking:

I will bake the high rendered character onto the low poly character design in Substance painter. This is a crucial step for high character design as This gives the illusion of extra geometry to the mesh, but isn't actually geometry and is just a texture map. This is ideal for games as it helps the engine load the models faster as there is less Geometry for the engine to load, increasing performance and optimizing the game play. This is a crucial skill that I will be required to revisit, as a lot of large projects which I hope to work on, really require this. This is a skill that's also deemed standard experience. For the studios I hope to work in, they see this as a necessary skill. As in most job applications, they state that the character not only requires the Mesh, but also the textures. And they desire all appearance aspects to be of a high level and to meet or exceed their expectations. This is a challenge as such aspects require a large amount of work. So looking at the timeline, I may be unable to produce such high standards. But I will still make an attempt to reach such levels.

 

Scene:

Showcasing the character will require a 3 point lighting setup. This is crucial in displaying all the characters details in a professional, and orderly manner. This is a simple setup which will not require much time, but does present the finale work in a much better way.

 

Overall:

This project will be a large time consuming project, requiring many hours. The hours and weeks will be broken down in the table below:

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This project will help aid in showing my ability to design humanoid and non-humanoid creatures and characters towards studios. And hopefully show casing this to a higher level.