Thesis: The Progress

It's been a long time, you monster. This post is Long overdue. It is currently the start of week 7, and  my last post was the start was way back at the end of week 4 so I have some updates for you readers. For week five we needed a design document and a presentation. The design doc is primarily a collection of pre-production work, what is our thesis project, what research have we done, what are our inspirations, what our initial designs look like, what our schedule is, and where are we so far. I focused on my research into what makes a good character in an animated short, what gives them appeal, and why we as an audience root for them. My document also went into my plans and my progress showing sketches and blocking models. Hopefully I can add a link to download the doc as a PDF on here, I will update that as soon as I look into how.

Since the middle of week 5 I have been able to get down to the fun parts, actually doing the project. I have been focusing on the head of my model, the shape, the finer details, the general refinement. I was slightly under the weather week 6 and a bit over worked at my job, putting in around 45 hours on top of classes and this project so I did not get in as much work as I would have liked, but I managed to get through the work (sans blogging it would seem). I have been doing a large amount of technical research, reading blogs and watching tutorials, and have been having a lot of fun doing it.

 I have been looking into hair that can be dynamic and attractive. I started with a hood like shape made of lofted surfaces to get the general concept of how I want the hair to sit on the characters head. From there, I drew CV curves onto the surfaces. Those curves were then made into paint effects shapes to increase the number of curves, add thickness, and add some more natural layers of hair. Next, those paint effects were made back into surfaces, and then back to curves once again, giving me a large amount of curves to work with. I created a hair system and applied it to my newly made curves and started to play with the settings of the hair.

The results were not too bad. This is definitely the more realistic style I am leaning towards. I need to introduce some additional messiness to it as it is currently too clean and neat (specifically on the right hand side ) as well as clean up the back some. The color is not bad, but I may need to make it slightly less red. The good part about the Maya hair system is how easily I will be able to make it dynamic, even though calculating those dynamics may take a while. Hopefully along with a HQ character render by the end of this quarter I can also get a short animation of his head moving to show the dynamics.

So along with the modeling (nicely modeled ear for example) and hair, I have been researching into skin rendering. The above image is a solid start for me to work off of. The subsurface scattering is currently a little too heavy as the algorithm scale conversion is at 8, what it should be around 10-12. This essentially means that too much light is shining through the characters body. His ears are too red because the scale is too small and too much light shines through. I foresee a problem with his cartoon style that may require two skin materials with different scale conversions as his hands will only be slightly thicker than his ear.

I got slightly off course with my schedule, working on hair and skin before finishing the cloths of the model. Because I was never completely confident in the clothing design of my character, I haven't been able to commit myself to finishing the clothing models. My quarrels with the design seem to have calmed a bit more so I will likely be moving forward with those this week.