Character project post-mortem

For this project we had 5 weeks to concept, model, texture and rig a low-poly character to fit into the village level. We needed to use ourselves as reference and follow the style guide to create a character in our likeness. We had a tri-limit of 4500 with the 500 being for props, two 32bit 1024x1024 texture sheets and a 512x512 for accessories. I decided to do a mayor’s wife initially but later changed it to daughter.

There are quite a few things I feel worked well such as:

The final design: It took a long time to reach the final design because I needed to change a lot of things; I started very early on and did a lot of concepts looking at quite rich dresses since the Mayor was going to be rich. I did a lot of development on these designs but later on found that I had restricted my ideas quite early on and hadn’t really explored enough. This resulted in quite a boring design. I received some feedback and decided to take my designs back to basics again and start pretty much from scratch. With the advice I had been given I was able to create a much more interesting idea that I really liked. 

 

My final concept

Texturing: I really enjoyed the hand-painting process and felt like I made it look nice as well as fitting it into the style guide.  I really liked the way I painted the folds into my fabric making it look a lot more detailed than it is.

Finished model

Style guide: I feel like I managed to keep my design and model within the style guide. I was a little concerned about the colours of the dress but I think they still work okay. My character looks positive and cheery and has just enough stylisation to fit into the level.

The face: I’m really pleased with the way the face unwrapped and how I textured it- there were no awful warpings or seams.

The flowers alpha: Although its only a small addition I’m really happy with the flower alpha that I made for her hair.

In quite a late stage of concepting I decided to change my concept idea because it wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to and I’d received some good feedback on what needed changing. I feel like I essentially wasted a lot of time because I ditched a lot of concepts but I did learn a lot from it. 

Some early concepts that I ended up having to ditch.

What I would do differently:

Neater topology: I feel like I could have used my topology more effectively and therefore made it neater because I think it’s a little messy; this gave me a few troubles later on when it came to unwrapping.

Better rigging: My rigging was a bit of a shambles because I didn’t understand it very well and hadn’t left myself enough time at the end to properly learn and understand it.

To conclude, there are certain things that I would start, keep and stop doing from this project. I would:

Start: Practicing topology more- more research into the topology I’ll be creating before I start.
Keep: Time management- generally overall my time management was quite effective but there’s still room for improvement.
Stop: Being lazy and leaving things at a bad standard because I can’t be bothered to fix them (eg the lower skirt)