Back to Work

Finally, I have decided to pull myself out of this apathetic (also pathetic) slump to continue work on the Dmitri model. Or rather, the textures, starting with the eyes and hair and other small touches.

Finally, he's got actual eyes instead of two vacant black dots. It's amazing what an iris and some fake shine can do to make a character seem more alive. The hair is another matter, however. I believe I mentioned how slapdash the UV map for it was before, so I've really just been layering a ton of different things on it to try to make it look good and hide seams. It's worked, for the most part, and I think I can say I'm satisfied with it now.

Other things I did were, obviously, that "stubble" on the chin, and added a bit of noise to the skin. The latter is hardly noticeable, though. The former... looks okay, I suppose. I can already see the comments from my friends: "It looks like dirt." Which is true enough, I suppose, but it'll do for the time being.

I'm beginning to doubt I'll have the will to rig this one. Rigging is a pain for me and I'll avoid doing it if I can, even if it would be nice to have this guy fully poseable. I guess we'll see.

Oh, and one more treat...


















AAAAAAAAAGH!!!

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.

Small Stuff

By far and away some of the easiest things to model and texture are cylindrical things like pipes and pillars. In fact, it's often so quick and easy it often feels like cheating to not attempt to go the extra mile, especially if you'll have lots of them in your environments for whatever reason.



These are pipes that will be placed throughout the Forest Mill. No rust or leak spots yet, since the exact locations of all these pipes haven't been thought-out yet, and if my last level is any indication, sticking in rust before that just makes the rust look like orange, splotchy paint.

It feels a little silly to be focusing on something so minor, since these pipes will likely be in places the player won't necessarily look, like ceilings. In fact, before I wrote this blog entry, I was content to say these pipes were as good as done, but now actually writing it up has made me think harder on it.

Anyways, yeah. Woo, pipes. Maybe I'll show off an awesome BOX or something tomorrow. You never know!