Hand In

I handed in all my work for my major project this week. Essentially a showcase of the character rig, character models, and environment matte paintings. I think I'd be lying if I said I was completely happy with the hand in. Whilst there were some aspects of my work that I felt went really well there was lots left to be done. I'm pretty disappointed that the film didn't get completed, but I think towards the end it was almost unrealistic to expect it to be finished. My main frustration was the task of exporting the animation. My original plan was to simply export the motion on the controllers as an .xaf file. This seemed to work perfectly in my initial testing. Unfortunately somewhere in the pipeline the rigs got corrupted, the final skinned rig differed from the final animated rig. As you can probably imagine this was an absolute nightmare to solve, after fiddling with the naming conventions for a while it occurred to me that the easiest way to solve the issue was to import the skinned rig to the animated file and align and link every individual controller from the first frame. Importing the skinned file had its own complications and after days of work spent salvaging just a few frames of animation repeating this on nine animation files seemed like too daunting a task in the remaining time. Add to this the fact that the film took almost two hours a frame to render on full quality and crashed the university computers and it would have taken a long time to fully complete and render the final film.

I'm actually quite proud of the character model/rig/texturing. There's tonnes of stuff I feel I could improve on, but I'm really glad I took the plunge and implemented Zbrush in the character. I'm unsure whether I can post the final turnarounds so instead I'm posting a teaser:

After the hand in I was working on an industry showreel for a few days, unfortunately I thought I had more time so I wasn't able to hand it in, nonetheless I'm going to keep going with the character I was working on for it, just at a more leisurely pace. I'm basically remodelling the alien I sculpted in a previous post, taking a Mass Effect twist on him. I'm modelling him high poly in Zbrush then using xnormal to bake the normal map.

Thoughts for next year? Well.. I found myself rigging for a significant amount of time this year, I don't really understand how that happened, I think my goal was to make the film as perfect as possible, which started with the rig, unfortunately it seemed to take over slightly and impacted on modelling and texturing. Whilst I did enjoy rigging and learnt a lot of useful knowledge I can't say that its something I'd like to do again. On top of this, character creation for production seems a lot more difficult than production for games. This could relate to my lack of knowledge in zbrush and dealing with high poly characters but I found myself spending a lot of time playing with displacement map settings, shader settings and render options, trawling the internet for some scraps of help, when I'd rather be doing art. Having seen some fantastic game creations in Dominance War and the polcount Brawl competition I've definitely come round to the idea of working in games.
I'm really looking forward to learning Maya, and getting really stuck in to Mudbox or Zbrush. I'm pretty comfortable in 3ds Max nowadays but there are some cool scripts in Maya that could be really useful, and of course viewport 2.0. Generally though, my goals are to improve my art skills, in both 2d and 3d, particularly when working from imagination.