Reflections on project
I am now 8 days into the 14 day rapid ideation session. I am starting to become fairly anxious that I may not get this project done before the Wednesday deadline, as I have been on the modelling stage since day 2. While I believe I made the right decision to take my time with this project, I realise I may have gone too deeply into detail for certain aspects of the character such as his teeth and this has prolonged the modelling stage.
Unlike in the first rapid ideation session, I do not feel any inclination or necessity to refine my goal as it is already a realistic, concise and measurable goal but I need to ensure that I meet each part of the goal as best as I can. As a reminder, my goal for this session is to rejuvenate my skills and knowledge within 3D graphics and to become more proficient in Blender by designing, modelling and rigging a character for a game within two weeks. So far, I can definitely say that I have rejuvenated some of my skills and knowledge within 3D graphics, I have become more proficient within Blender and I have designed and modelled a character; I need to remember the last component of the goal, which is that the character is intended to be for a game.
If the character is intended to be ‘for a game’, this could either mean that the character can be playable and interactive, i.e. a player character, or it is simply a character that the player character encounters, i.e. a non-player character. When I first made the decision to create this character, I had the former in mind and I wrote up my game concept with a view to this character being the main character and playable. Regardless of whether this character is a player character or a non-player character, I should at least aim to give the character some animation which can demonstrate its role within the fictitious game I have come up with.
While I must stress that I am not actually making a game for this project and that the Curupira character itself is the creative artefact that I am producing, it would be good to at least make the character interactive and to be able to showcase the character in a simple Unity application in which the character walks around an environment and can perform a few simple actions. I need to ensure that I keep the modelling stage as concise as possible from this point onwards so that I can cover other stages of this process such as UV mapping, texturing, rigging and animation.
Leaf belt
For the first time in this project, I will not be using Darrin Lile’s tutorial and I will instead use the skills that I have learnt to improvide and create the belt of leaves that the Curupira wears around his waist (Blender, 2021). For now, I will be modelling this as a separate model from the actual Curupira. This part of the project is likely to cause issues with rigging and weighting later on as I will need to ensure that the leaves move with his legs.
I started by selecting some faces around his waist and I duplicated them and separated the duplicated faces from the Curupira mesh. I did this to ensure that the belt would to some extent already fit his shape. I then went into edit mode and I seleted the faces around the outside of the belt and slightly extruded outwards. I then went around and moved the vertices to ensure it fit around him and that no part of the belt goes inside the character model.
The next stage was to model a leaf. I did this using the character board reference.
I manipulated vertices and edges to give it a bit more shape in front and side view. Once this was done, I duplicated this leaf and moved it around the circumference of the belt. I then went in and tweaked the vertices to ensure not part of any of the leaves clashed into one another.
Here is the outcome.
I am going to avoid merging all of the parts of the belt into one mesh or even joining the belt mesh to the Curupira model for now, until I have worked out how it will relate to the rigging of the model and how I can make the leaves move response to the character’s leg movements.
Necklace
The next stage was to model a necklace for the Curupira. Again, I did this independently of any tutorials. I started with a UV sphere.
This would make up the beads of the necklace. I then removed the top faces either side of the sphere, as illustrated.
Next I positioned the bead at the Curupira’s neck, in line with the first bead in the drawing.
Once this was positioned, I duplicated this bead multiple times and I positioned these beads around the left part of his neck.
Once this was done, I joined all the beads together as one model and then I used the bridge edge tool to join them together by the holes and to create a string for the necklace.
The necklace goes around half of his neck. I needed to complete the necklace and to do that, I simply used the Mirror tool.
Now that the character has some clothes, I think I will next try making his hair and I will also start to refine his physique and give him a bit of muscle, like he has in the original drawing.
Kanban board
I have not made any updates or changes to my Kanban board for the past few days, but this does not mean that it is not playing a key role in my project management. It is just that modelling has taken up a large chunk of the project, as I expected it would.
However, I have decided to add a new task to the To do list which is Animation, as I intend to give this character at least a few animation cycles. I have put this stage ahead of Blend shaping for the time being.
Github repository
I have made several commits to the repository (Github Desktop, 2021). Before I began modelling the belt, I committed the version with the feet fully modelled to the bodymodelling branch under a commit titled feet. After this, I brought all changes from the bodymodelling branch into the main branch as I am now satisfied with all of the work I have done in this branch.
Lastly, I have created a new branch called belt and necklace, which is specifically for the modelling of the belt and the necklace. I have committed all changes that I documented above to this branch in a commit titled belt and necklace modelled.
References
Blender Foundation. 2021. Blender (2021). [Software]
Github, Inc. 2021. Github Desktop (2021). [Software]
Lile, D., 2020. Blender 2.8 Character Creation | LinkedIn Learning, formerly Lynda.com. [online] LinkedIn Learning. Available at: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/blender-2-8-character-creation/ [Accessed 17 March 2021].