I was on a roll with modelling my OC this past week! However, I was in the zone so hard that i forgot to do any progress for my Low Poly day piece. Whoops! I don't really mind, I plan on making it through out the week since the deadline is getting pretty close.
Enough talk! Let's get into the progress made on the OC model!
A lot of progress has been made with the model. As well as mirroring the body, I also connected the head! I was honestly dreading connecting up the two parts of the model because of the huge difference in the polycount for the head and neck. I did eventually connect them in a way that I figured would look nice in motion. With the turtleneck, I had a very distinct idea of having sharp shoulders for it. I know that it isn't really how fabric works realistically, but I threw realism out the window when I planned to make a pink-toned half-monster girl with a bunch of eyes on her face's right side. When I first made the turtleneck, I thought that something was missing that would make it look a lot better. I eventually figured out that it was the folded up parts of the model looking too flat. I eventually added extra edge loops to it to add some curvature to it and moved the vertices a bit closer to the arms. I think one of the reasons that I've been having so much trouble with making clothing for my persona is because of the floating limbs of the character. because of the amount of visible negative space from the floating parts, I have to model the inside of the majority of the clothing. With this model, there's a lot more leeway in cheating the clothes for modelling. Whenever possible, I cap off the holes of clothes to reduce the polycount and workload for texturing and rigging while still giving the illusion that the model is being worn.
The part that I'm REALLY proud of with the model is the hair. Shapes like these have one of my biggest modelling white whales for AGES. I've looked at different ways of making this particular shape through things like ZBrush or even Blender. I decided to, through sheer chance, looked up a video on how to make meshes follow along curves in Maya. As soon as I saw the end product, it blew my damn MIND. With a curve selected, I use the Curve Warp deformation function to make it work. It looks soooooooo goooooooooooood! I love how these parts turned out! The best part of it is being able to change the size of the model to go from the really chunking starting part of the hair right to the sharp tip of the end. Combined with bumping the crease tool to the max, I've made the absolute perfect hair. More than I could have ever wanted. The main inspiration for the hairstyle was actually from Mercy's Overwatch 1 look! When I first had the idea of this character, I had the plan of her hair just being a ponytail, with nothing at the first to accentuate the eyes and teeth. As time went on though, I felt that adding some more at the front would be best, since the character is mainly going to be seen from a front angle. I can see this being a little bit tedious if I wanted to try making some larger or more complex hair shapes. I can see me using this in that workflow, though. One of the most annoying parts of making the hair is the parts that don't look as spiky. I've been trying to figure out how to make a hairline to no avail. I've tried using the curve warp method and a cap with guided textures. No dice, though. I might have a plan on what to make, but it's a bit annoying to execute since I have to use the live surface tool to make it. It will probably be easier to do compared with trying to use it with the base mesh, but the complexity comes from the overall shape that I want to get.
In terms of my other projects, I don't have anything updates I've been so caught up on making this model that I haven't done anything else! I'm still racking my brain on how to model a coat for my persona, and the Navi model is at the texturing stage, but I just haven't done it yet. Don't get me started on the Star Slipper, either. That's been the garage in need of a tune up and I've barely touched it.
That's everything for this week! It might seem like it wasn't a lot, but plenty of hard work was put into doing a lot of very small things for the model! I hope to show a little bit more variety in next week's post, so stay hyped!
Thank you and good-bye for today!