I am posting this a little bit later than usual, but I'm sure that isn't much of a problem. I was reading a graphic novel that I borrowed from the library last night that I needed to return soon. I got to tired after reading it to post yesterday, so I'm doing it now.
This week I didn't do any animating or drawing, but I did do some modelling! I wanted to take it a bit easier this week, and modelling is a more chill and relaxing thing to do for me than the other two.
Here's what I've been working on!
This doesn't seem like much, but it's slowly coming together. I'm trying to make a 3D persona to represent myself online. I don't feel comfortable posting my face online all that much, so having a little guy to be my face would be much better. I've got some ideas on how I want it to look, but I don't have anything down on paper to show the final concept. It's all in my head for the time being. Working with Maya's content browser is honestly a godsend. I'm not really the best at modelling organic things, I'm more comfortable modelling robots and stuff like that. With the content browser I just grab a model and change it to suit my needs. There's a little nagging feeling that I have to make everything by myself by hand, but I there's limits to what I can do. Besides, people make base sculpts for ZBrush, so there's no harm in using any of these for my models.
This one is a little bit more interesting in terms of the more technical side. I'm obviously trying to recreate a Madness grunt in 3D, flash style shading and all. The modelling isn't too tricky, but getting the shader down is a but harder. I'm using Kamone's Maya Toon Outline Shader for the shading, which gets the problem of me not knowing a clue on how to make nice shaders out of the equation. That only really leaves the problem of making it look as close to 2D as possible. Even for the head, it's surprisingly tricky. I have to tell the shader how much of the model needs to have a shadow, what colour and from what angle the light source is coming from. I do eventually plan on using this model in animations, so I'll have to find a way to keep everything consistent while in motion as well. The shader is a bit finicky with how it handles outlines. When I would zoom the camera out while using the shader's outline, it would scale relative to how far away the camera was. In the end, I just ended up modelling my own outline by slightly inflating a duplicate of the head mesh, reversing the normals, and then turning on backface culling. Backface culling is just a special way of saying that the program will just not show the back side of a polygon. The grunt's face is also a model, not just a texture. When I tried making the cross a texture, it simply didn't look how I wanted it to look. It was too low resolution and I didn't want to bother getting the UV scale right. I think that the model looks better anyway, since it can scale nicely and doesn't look out of place on the model.
This is all that I have to show for this week, but there's something that I want to talk about before ending it off.
On Sunday, I watched a video by DeadlyComics on Youtube. It starred a little crocodile/alligator making jokes about an Easy Bake oven that they had. The video shows them making jokes, and also them having difficulties making up some more. I felt like that I related to this video quite a lot. The plight of an artist trying as much as they can to make something they like, even if it's discouraging at times. There is one part a the end of the video that really puts things in to perspective for me. At the end of the video, it shows the little reptile is in a room completely filled with tapes of their previous recordings. Shelves upon shelves filled to the brim with these tapes. It finishes with a quote that I have really taken to heart.
"If it's easy, then it ain't worth doin'. If it's worth doin', then it might be a little hard."
The line might be underselling how hard that thing might be, but it's hard regardless. It's something that I think I need to teach myself to understand. I'm sure I've talked about this in another post, but I have a tendency to quit something after only barely starting something. I think I really need to get it into my head that I haven't been doing this as long as I think I have. While it probably won't get rid of all of my problems, I'm hoping that adopting this mantra will at least alleviate it a little bit.
I'm not sure if I'll do more animation or drawing in the coming week, but I'll certainly have updates to show. I'm quite excited for how the persona is going to turn out in the end!
Thank you and good-bye for today!