Sprint Blog #5

     This sprint I finished a character from start to finish. Our last creature character, La Llorona was built and completed this sprint, and she was a learning curve for me. I started building her within Zbrush, based off of the turnaround given by my team's artist. This one was more of a challenge then my last few character's because she's covered in cloth and clothing so I had to figure out how to make that work. I started in Zbrush and quickly realized it was not working out how I wanted it to, so after some research I landed on this program called Marvelous Designer, originally made for fashion designers to mock up clothing prototypes in a 3D space, adopted by 3D artist. 

   Luckily the character didn't need any extravagant clothing so after a few introduction tutorials I got a mock-up of La Llorona's clothing, and imported it into Zbrush where I added details.  



     The most challenging part about the sculpt however, was giving her a mouth cavity. Because she's a character that will be seen up close to the Player, right besides them towards the end of the game actually, I needed to make the face the detailed and "scary" part. Giving her a mouth to let her "scream" was necessary. The hard part about that came when I took her to Maya to get the retop and UV's done. I quickly figured out "opening" the mouth and retopping the inside is very challenging when you don't have it skinned and boned. My workaround to this issue was to just model the mouthbag in Maya instead of Zbrush. During this stage is where I added the "tentacles" seen in the concept art as well, since they were essentially only planes. After I UV'd her, I took her into Substance Painter and hand painted the blood drops as well as some details on her clothes. 

Now starts the learning curve. Although I had experience with rigging character's, I hadn't rigged a mouth cavity before, that is to say the jaw opening up and tongue moving. It took a couple of errors and restarts to finally get everything to work smoothly and that's all because of this video that was very helpful. 

Link: https://youtu.be/3ta5dYLQISo?si=ve3wuehizYIvBqBk

I also learned how to make something called "ribbons" work! This method is fantastic for rigging when a character has a "stretchy" aspect to them, so I added those to the tendrils. 

The tutorial I followed in order to make them was given to me by one of my team members, and I'll definitely be looking into these more into the future. 

Link: https://youtu.be/rCxftP5dLQc?si=nhKDa_7HZWkl5KYn

   Here are two quick animations to showcase the rig! 

 


For the Last sprint, I'll be finishing DuckBob's animations for the steering wheel, animate La Llorona approaching the truck creepily and some idle motions for her as well. 

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