Week 15: The beginning of Phase 2... BANG!

Ooh-Kay, D.T. back again with more pure Maya 3D awesomeness - almost as awesome as Bang Shishigami's explosive spirit of Passion! Love! Bravery! and Honor! (If you don't know what I'm talking about go Google "Blazblue")

...Alright, alright, so far the stuff in my blog has yet to reach the epic-ness of the manliness of the man himself, but I'm getting there!

But I digress; anyway here's another update to my personal project and this time the mannequin that I've finished last week is no longer naked.

All costume components have been colour coded for both of our viewing convenience; trust me you wouldn't want to see a model with grey all over. Anyhow, what you're seeing now is a 75% completed model of my gaming character; whilst the left arm armour and the helm are currently missing, some components of this dude's clothing needs to be further refined.

The above image is a closer detail shot of the swordsman's greaves (shin/leg armour). As you can most definitely see in the image, I have cheated a bit at the toes; I'll will probably fix that up, as long as it doesn't cost too much polygons. Besides the shins needs A LOT of working on; while making screenshots of the model I have discovered that I have forgotten about how the ankles are supposed to move and what parts of that area are going to be exposed when the ankles flex. One quick fix I can think of here is to raise up the part of the armour around the back of the heels; either way, needs more investigation.

This next image is a brief look at the clothing components around the torso area. The current models for the clothing are kinda rough as they're simply blocked out to give me a overall view of how the character's shape is going to look like. The shirt in purple and the green trousers most definitely needs more working on, otherwise I'm happy to leave the waist and thigh armours as they are. A new addition to the costume is a sash-like cloth that is hanging around the left leg; it's a feature that originates from my earlier designs that I did for this character but left it out at the final design due to time constraints and the lack of knowledge in using the nCloth simulator in Maya (I was still in my half-completed 3D animation course at that time); well since I have time to kill outside my working hours, I thought this would make a good experiment... Although I seriously need some help with this; the nCloth tutorials out there on the internet are either very vague or uses a flag as the only given example. *yawn*

Oh whelp, take it easy guys any I'll see you next time. Peace out!

- D.T.

Week 14: *Deep breath...*

*Shouts out profanities at the top of his lungs* Phew, that feels better.

For too long I have been refining this dude, but at last I can finally say that this dummy is now ready to play dress up as I can progress to the next phase of my project.

As you can probably see in the image above, I have substantially increased the poly-count on the model to accommodate the updated edge loops as well as a new direction for this project. As a result, the dummy alone sports a whopping 2390 polygons.

Above are detail shots of the updated arm mesh; proper edge loops now make up the muscle groups on the arm as well as experimental edge loops that constitutes the arm joint on the inside of the arm. The reason why I said "experimental" is because I have no idea whether it is going to deform well during animation. Retrospectively, for a gaming character that arm joint has way too many polygons; I might have to modify it or replace it altogether if things don't go well there.

Up next is the abdomen; and man, can I say that this gave me a run for my money. If I have to rank the amount of time spent on on this area, I'd say it'll rank 2nd behind the time spent on the legs (shown later in this post), the reason being that due to the new direction I'm taking (which is to develop a gaming character for at least higher-end computers) I can no longer afford to skimp off the edge loops. Due to how the abdomen was previously modeled, it took me quite a while to figure out how to modify it so that I can properly edge-loop it and yet make it still resemble my original concept. There was also another issue of blending different edge-loop groups together; that issue along with other issues regarding this particular area was solved through insanely lengthy trial-and-error.

Finally we come down to the legs. In my eagerness to somehow accurately reflect the muscle groups on a human leg, I literally had to strip off the previous version of the leg down to its basic mesh structure and remake the edge-loops all over again, hence why it took the longest to do the legs in comparison to the other parts of the body. I also tried to do the experimental edge-loops for the back of the knee, but determined that there were more than enough polygons on the model already and that due to model typology it was basically unfeasible to do so. Of interesting note, the cause of the dramatic increase of polygons also stemmed from making the newer version of the legs; since further vertical polygon divisions were done to the leg, it eventually affected the rest of the body in that it was necessary to do so to maintain edge-flow.

And so there you have it, a completed dress-up dummy for me to play with in my current project as well as future ones too.

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Just to give you an idea what I have been through to get this far, here's an extra picture detailing the number of iterations made up until the final one (V2 which is highlighted).

Peace out!

- D.T.