When You Stare Into the Abyss...

... the Abyss stares right back. There's some pretty bad problems with that face, not the least of which is the texture. His lips are darker than the rest of his flesh tone, which, when looking at it here, looks REALLY odd, so that's gotta change. I've been having troubles figuring out how to make the eyes function properly, since they aren't spheres right now. I figure a good solution is to actually make them spheres and change the face to accomodate. Currently, his eyes are unmoving nearly-flat domes with separate circle pupils. This could potentially work, but I imagine in practice it would be easier to do the former than try to animate the latter.

As for the rest of the texture, well... I'm not UNhappy with it. The gloves are a big pain point since nothing seems to fit well with them, and texturing fingers and toes is a royal pain. I am pretty happy with the overall ensemble, though. And the hair turned out okay.

Maybe it all just looks off because of that vacant, soul-crushing stare. It's like the toys from Toy Story when people are around, except not nearly as endearing.

Progress

The model's texture isn't yet complete, but then I've had a pretty busy, exciting week. Last Friday I was supposed to have a job interview for a teacher assistant position at a small, local media academy. Turns out there was a mis-scheduling or something, so the interview didn't happen, but I did have a nice little chat with the assistant director and we rescheduled for next week. While it's not a game development job per se, it most certainly is an opportunity to work with what knowledge of game design I do possess, particularly modeling and animation.

Anyway, back to the issue of the texture. I must not have adequate memory on my PC, because Maya will slow to a chuggy crawl if I begin editing the UV map now that some textures are applied to the model. It looks okay so far. No highlights or blemishes on the skin (it's still all that flat colour), or the hair (same), but the clothes are looking pretty good.

Oh, right. I promised a drawing today.



I do fancy myself a bit of a writer, and this here is a villainous guy called Ash Wordos. His name is a play on the demon name Asmodeus, and he's one of seven assassins in the story. Ash is the only one of them who isn't actually human, but rather a construct of magic. He can easily change his shape as a result.

Colours

The model took WAY longer to UV map than I had originally planned for. Maya crashed twice during the proceedings. Fortunately, not much was lost since I was saving often. The second crash was due to Maya using up so much memory it wouldn't let me save out the UV map. Whee, fun times.

Obviously, this is not nearly close to being fully textured yet, but there are some basic colours and a little bit of texturing on it. I mainly wanted to see how my colour choices would look, and overall it's pretty good, I guess. Originally his shorts were to be red, but I decided to change them to blue to keep closer to his earlier designs (his original had him wearing nothing BUT blue. He also had blue hair. Ah, to be 16 again...).

I've noticed I haven't put up very many drawings save for the front and side view of this model when I started. Next update I'll throw up a few sketches of other characters.

Character Model - Dmitri Hesker

Well, here he is, mostly, kinda, sorta done. At least where modeling is concerned.

Total time spent on it is hard to measure, since I didn't work on it every day and never kept track of time when I did, so we'll highball it and say it was 35 hours or so. He's close to 12,000 triangles, so about 6,000 polygons.

And yeah, his name is Dmitri Hesker. It's been the same name for years and I have no intention of changing THAT about him. Mind you, this model is the result of his seventh or so redesign.

Arms may seem a bit long, but that's entirely on purpose since his hands are so large. I tried balancing it off by giving him wide feet.

As for what's left to model, all he really needs is "straps" which go over the gaps in his shirt. When textured, those will be the large cross-stitches holding the sleeves onto the rest of the shirt. And a few tweaks here and there, of course. I plan to fully texture this model and rig it, but I'm not too sure about animation yet. Rigging will just be for posing it out.

What do you think? Comment and let me know if you think anything needs changing.

Stumped

The title of this post is just for the pun of it. As you can see, the mesh is coming along alright. Some areas need better defining, like the pectoral muscles (they look awful square, don't they?). What you can't see here is that the shoulders have geometry that comes off the pecs, just like actual musculature. College wasn't completely pointless, after all!

I was worried about the neck, since it was so high-poly that it wouldn't fit on the lower-poly body, but fortunately it looks fine, even with a few of the lines merging together right at the base of the neck.

One thing that always bothers me when modeling is the proportions, and if I should follow the drawing or use my intuition to make it look right. The legs were a lot fatter before I toyed with them to get them to look more like the drawing, but then it might seem like he's got toothpick ankles once I get the feet in there. Hopefully they won't be too short, either.

The loosen shirt he wears will be an issue, though. I'm still deciding how to include it on the mesh. Those detached sleeves won't be too much trouble if I plan it right.