Eh - where was I? Oh yes...

Hello folks, D.T. back here after... how long? Don't know and in the famous words of a certain work colleage, "Don't care".


Anyhow to explain my long absence from updating this blog, I was actually involved with the creation of a teaser trailer of an online social game world created by the company I'm working in.

So without further ado, here's the trailer:



To explain my involvement in the trailer's creation; I was primarily in charge of the Meeble's (the humanoid beings featured in the trailer) character designs, models and textures, as well as having worked along with another work colleague on the trailer's post-production including sourcing sounds and music, the timing and sequencing of the scenes, and additional effects. In effect, this was my big chance to expose my capacity as a 3D artist.

Below is just a teaser featuring one of the Meebles, courtesy of Morf Dynamics:

To see more, check out the Mojikan Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/MojiKan

To see more information on what is Mojikan, click here. (Don't worry, it's a safe link.)

Anyhow~ now that I've explained what has been happening, time to explain what I "plan" (as in if I'm not too lazy) to do with my own 3D developments.

Because of recent events the swordsman character that was previously featured in this blog will be put on the backburner indefinitely. This time around, I'm working on a entirely new character concept - again, it will be a gaming character model designed for high end computer games, only except it won't feature much capes or another other flaps of clothing. Besides that, I had been working on a few pieces of digital art and will be featuring them in this blog in the foreseeable future.

Alrighty - See ya again sometime. Peace out!

- D.T.

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.

It's been... Damn I've lost track of time.

Sorry for the lack of progress update guys, there has been too many things on my plate as of late, including a family emergency and me undertaking a secret side project.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten this project but for the time being it's been put on hold to make way for other matters.

It's Alive...!

... Alright - maybe not, but hey at least now I have a template of a male human body I can work off:

 

Picking up from where I left off last week, I started modeling the hip and the legs. Unlike my modeling odyssey when I was working on the arm, the hip and legs proved to be less troublesome than the arms thanks to the lessons learnt from the time spent modeling the arms.

After the hip and legs came the hands and feet. Figuring that the feet need less detail, I spent most of the time modeling the hand.

 

I was a bit confused when modeling the hand since... wait a minute, I've just noticed a 5-sided polygon on one of the above pictures. Hold on, be right back...

There, fixed. Anyhow, modeling the hand took quite a bit of time since, let's face it, it is quite complex (and God help me when I rig the resulting character...). With a bit of help from modeling and anatomy references, I finally managed to complete the hand. The only problem I face now is the fact that the hand alone has around 200+ polys - much more than I bargained for.

Overall, the whole body contains 1496 polygons - somewhat below my expectations, but at least it should give me some room should the time comes when I have to add polygons.

Anyway, that's it for this week - peace.

- D.T.

P.S. - Shoot, them legs look a little bit too long...

The Arm is Connected to the...

Week 5

Before I begin to unload typing diarrhea, a happy belated new year to all those who happen to be reading this.

Okay, now that's out of the way this week has been quite productive as far as modeling a human body goes. So far I managed to produce a torso with the head and arms attached. Pictures of the model are shown below:

 

 

 

... Okay, it's not perfect. Although I tried to keep all polygons as quads, in the end I have to cut some corners and use a mixture of tris and quads or else the poly-count would end up being 1000+ instead of the current 590 poly-count that the torso has. A bit too high for a low-poly model but I'll keep on working on optimizing the mesh once I have the hips, legs, hands and feet sorted out.

So... onto the foil of my plans. Modeling the torso and attaching the head to it is all fine and dandy but when it came to modeling the arm... Heh, let's just say that it was a s*** fight when it comes to modeling accurate human anatomy.

This:

And this:

 

... were the reason why there was a s*** fight in the first place. My first attempt at the forearm ended up being scrapped due to my ignorance of human anatomy; so as a result I have to rip off the arm and replace it with a clone of the original arm model and start over again. However, partly due to the way I modeled the original arm, it proved difficult to properly add edge loops for the muscle definitions of the forearm, resulting in dodgy triangles that didn't help with my conquest of minimal polygons. While the elbow was less troublesome, the crook/joint of the arm ended up being simply edge-looped.

For the most scrutinizing, here's a closer look at the abdomen of the torso:

As some of you may have noticed I took some anatomical liberties when modeling the abdominal muscle groups - not to mention that since I was looking for a low poly count the model ended up with very peculiar looking edge-looping as I went in and merged a couple of vertices. I reckon that out of all the things I've done on this model, the only proper edge-loops I've done so far were the ones on the armpits...

... And just to give you guys an idea of what I've been through, here's a bonus picture:

Until next time~!

-D.T.

What exactly am I making???

Okay - Some of you may be wondering as to what exactly I'm modeling for my personal project in the first place. Whelp... Here's a few concept drawings that I did about - let's say 5 months ago. The design had been finalized back then so not much has changed for the current time.

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What you're looking at here is the subject of my project at hand. Partly inspired by the Dynasty Warriors and the Otogi video game series, I designed this character to be some sort of a oriental medieval fantasy swordsman. Apart for the corset, thigh armour and armoured leggings that are inspired by fantasy and Japanese/Chinese/Japanese-Designed-Chinese armour, the feature of this design is the armour that is worn on this character's left arm.

The above picture shows how the armour is supposed to be "constructed". This will give me an indication of how I should model the armour once I get up to that point.

 

Showing the helm design... Actually, I might alter this design since I'm not 100% happy with how this guy looks. Again I'll save the redesigning until I get around to modeling the armours.

... And what's a swordsman without even a sword? Presenting 2 sword designs, the coloured one being the selected choice. I might also create one other weapon type for the swordsman, but would depend on my progress of animating him.

PS: Sorry for missing out on updating this blog last week; other plans got in the way. Same thing with this week too - not much modeling is done so showing my concepts should suffice for this week.

Until next time.

- D.T.