Personal Development Reflection

At the beginning of the year, I had been focused on producing highly detailed and well thought out 3D characters. It had been something that I had been wanting to achieve ever since my second year, however I was unable to achieve the standard I had wanted due to my lack of skill in certain areas of character design and creation. I was very good at much of the technical side of modelling in Maya, however, I was always afraid to pursue areas that I was unfamiliar with. This had left we with many detailed and unfinished works which I was unable to finish.
Influenced by the workflow of both industry artists and the CG community, it made me determined to see a highly detailed character from start to end.

2D Digital Art and Design

I observed the workflow of character creation, from the early stages of 2D design, to the final stages of posing and rendering, I was able to identify areas that I had to tackle in order to progress to finished characters. From the early stages of concept development, it was clear that, although I had many interesting designs that I had wanted to explore, it was difficult for me to communicate that visually before the modelling stage. 2D Digital Art was an area that I had to greatly improve on in order to visualize my thoughts. Not only did I have to improve my Photoshop skills, I had to learn the stages of the design process.

Throughout the first semester, I was able to improve on this through the creation of Silhouettes, Thumbnail sketches and concept paintings. Silhouettes were relatively easy for me, but thumbnail sketches were time consuming and difficult; the concept paintings even more so. Much of this was due to my difficulties with anatomy as my proportions were often very wrong. This work ended up accumulating into 2 highly detailed concept paintings for 2 of my initial characters at the end of the first semester. I was able to produce paintings faster, and to a higher quality than when I had started. I was able to visualize characters in more detail, whilst showing colour, which I rarely included in my 2D art before. My main notable change was my change in preference from creating concepts on a physical sketchbook, to creating designs digitally.

Anatomy

The development of characters also called for a high degree of anatomical correctness. I had been out of life drawing classes for a year, and many of my previous characters often had terrible proportions. I was able to improve on this throughout both semesters, initially through an ecorche study, and later on through further sculpts of my characters. I found that feedback from online sources and students helped find areas that seemed out of proportion with my character, and in turn, made it easier for me to identify anatomical problems better. Comparing the proportions with my initial low poly mesh with my final character, I can see a big improvement.

Texturing

The low poly modelling stages of the workflow was an area that I was very familiar with and I was fairly familiar with the high poly sculpting. However, when it came to texturing, and generating maps for my character, it was an area that I have had little experience with. I had stopped many of my projects before even reaching the texturing stage, so I felt as if I was walking into unexplored territory. Baking texture maps seemed relatively easy, though time consuming to get right. Getting the texture right on my first character was time consuming however, but as I moved on to the second, the process was a lot easier as I picked up a lot of techniques from the texturing of the first. Concept painting also helped me improve my painting skill, as well as work outside that i had done for the Samsung challenge making environments in 2D.

Rendering
The final part of the workflow, and a very important one if it came to presenting work, was the rendering stage. I had always been poor at rendering my work, often taking screen-caps and relying on Maya's viewport 2.0 to make models look nice. Finding a method to present my characters properly was important for me if I wanted to show then in my portfolio. I had always been interested in Marmoset toolbag, seeing highly skilled artists use it to generate amazing looking renders. However, it seemed incredibly complicated to me so I never got round to it. Fortunately enough, it was incredibly easy to use, which was why it was so popular. It also provided real time rendering which made the process very convenient which I loved as rendering had always seemed to cause lots of problems for me. In the end, although not learning how to generate nice renders in a traditional method such as rendering in Maya, I found a tool which was easy to learn which did it for me, designed specifically for the game characters I wanted to make.

Hair
The area was the section I had left till last, as every time I had worked on it, problems with alphas always occurred. I had tried to avoid this a lot by adding masks to my character designs, but in the end I decided it was something I needed to tackle. Problems still occurred when I attempted to get my hair rendered properly, but I was able to overcome these problems to finally have fairly decent looking hair in the end. Finally finding out how to overcome these problems, making hair is now a much easier task for me. A stage that I had always feared to tackle is now a more enjoyable task for me.
I am able to work through all areas of the character design process to end up designing, creating and presenting my characters in a very professional manner.