Week 9 : Modelling the Sibling Duo

   Well, week 9 and half of week 10. Last week I started modelling my characters. I am extremely glad of the extension we've been given, I was certain I could get one done but because of the extension, I've been able to give my attention to both characters. I'm really glad because I like them both, and would have found it difficult to choose one to develop. If I'm honest though, I'm disappointed with myself. I feel like I spent too long on the modelling stage, because I wanted to perfect the style of the face, while keeping the topology flowing well. I found this fairly difficult though; it's something I still need practice with.
   I started by building the teenage boy. Even though he took too long to model, it was good because this prepared me for building his sister, which took half the time. I started by building a simple blockout of the boy, then going on to make it more interesting. Aside from the face, I think it was the hair that I found the most difficult. It was tricky knowing where to start, and how to do it. I decided to build it like a block and make it quite angular instead of using alpha planes, because in all of my concepts the hair is blocky and I think it suits the style I have chosen better. It was here I was able to use smoothing groups to my advantage as well, to be able to flatten off the hair in sort of blocked out strands.

      Building the little girl was a lot easier because I had already modelled her brother. I was able to use parts of the face and re positioning the verts so that they're how they're supposed to be for the girl. I compared the faces of the girl and the boy throughout this. I think that this has gone really successfully so far, because the two faces look like they're from the same stylised universe, but already have completely different characteristics.

   I went on to build the rest of her head where, again, the hair was the most difficult bit. The fringe was horrible to do, but that was mostly because it was really fiddly. For the fringe I adopted the same method that I had used for the boy's hair. I compared the two models continuously as I went on, to make firmly sure that they fit together well. 

   After I had completed the head, the rest of the body was fairly easy to model in comparison. I'm a bit apprehensive about rigging this to be honest, because of the poncho. If worst comes to the worst, I may have to do one positioning with the poncho and a more complex one without the poncho. 

   After this I unwrapped the little girl so I could start to texture it so I can make sure it's finished. Unwrapping her face was hell, but some of the results of the pelt map I tried to do made me laugh so much that I came out of unwrapping not quite being able to breathe. Anyway, eventually that was solved by unwrapping halves of the face separately, stitching them together and repositioning the verts.

   So today I've been able to go on to texturing. I had to edit her eyes a lot in the textures, making the iris smaller and repositioning the eyeballs in the head until they looked right. 

^ Bloody hell, keep it away. 

   
   To be honest, so far I think she's looking pretty cute! I tested it with a gloss material in Max, just so I can see what her eyes look like shiny, which makes them look even better. So tomorrow's task is to continue and finish the texture on the little girl, and her teddy, of course.