Week 10: Texturing and Physical Model

    So, following on from last week's blogpost that I wrote about three days ago, I have continued texturing the little girl. I think she's mostly finished now, I really just want to make her hair a little less shiny, because she looks a bit plastic at the moment. Her cheeks could do with toning down a bit too, to be honest. I'm really pleased with how her eyes look, I think they make her look quite cute. The details on the poncho look quite good too, but they weren't really that difficult to make, just a bit fiddly.

   Yesterday I decided to make a start on the teenage brother, so I unwrapped and started the textures for him. Unwrapping was a lot easier this time, and I think it's because a lot of the elements between the brother and the sister are rather similar. So, for instance, while I was unwrapping the little girl, I spent a long time trying to unwrap the face well. Their face structure, although a different shape, was built fairly similarly, so I was able to identify early on that I would need to unwrap the teenager's face in the same way I had for his sister. I used the same texture I had painted out for the eyes of the little girl, because I want the style to stay as consistent as possible. I changed his eye colour, but I'm going to try it with the same eye colour as his little sister to see which looks better.

   In the screenshots below that I have taken of the model in 3DS Max, I have put a specular and glossiness on, purely to see how the eyes look with a shine in them. I've found this has been really useful in checking to make sure the eyes look alright. I'm going to do my best to get the textures finished this weekend, so that on Monday I can rig at least one of the characters. 

    I haven't yet included any pictures of my physical model! So here it is! I started by making the wire armature that we were taught to make in Chris's class. The first time I tried to build this, I didn't wrap the wire around enough, so it wasn't very strong. When I put the sculpey on the model, it bent and fell at the legs. So, with a sigh, I took the sculpey off and built a second, stronger model.

   I was sad to put sculpey on to the model, because I thought it looked actually rather cool the way it was. However, I wanted to focus more on modelling details of my own character. First I flattened a small base for the armature to stand on. 

   I very haphazardly put Sculpy onto the armature, building the basic shape of the armature, before I sculpted the more refined details of the model. At this point the sculpture stood well, it wasn't until I was refining the details that the model all of a sudden decided it was all too much.. and face planted the table.

   It did the same thing whilst it was in the oven, resulting in a very flat nose and a broken base. I sighed again. 

   Following this, I carved into him a bit, to put back in some of the details that were lost when he fell over in the oven. I think he looks quite good! I really need to work on my physical models, though I enjoyed calving into the model afterwards.