Saturday 4 March 2017

YPGTTO Character Modelling: Yellow Progress

Today I am showing my progress on Yellow.

I'd like to say that I've modelled and fully rigged Yellow, but things got complicated with the modelling process... or rather, I probably made things more complicated than they needed to be.

So this is where I'm at right now.

Here is a picture of Yellow in its current form (& Red for size comparison).



There are still some things to finish off, such as:

  • feet need to be outlined instead of solid 
  • body needs to be filled yellow 
  • the face is missing the outlines / nose & extra bits of hair on top 

Unfortunately, the hair has been a big stumbling block.

I have tried many things in order to get the hair to work well in 3D, but it has taken a lot of experimenting, all of which lead me to one conclusion.

I can't draw the perfect 3D spiral to look good from all angles... it's just a physical impossibility. Therefore, when animating the hair, it is going to be necessary to orient the spiral to face the camera so it always looks correct (like in the drawings).

This picture shows what I mean:



It may not be ideal from my point of view, but giving animators more control can't ever be a bad thing. I also need to accept that it's never going to look exactly like the original drawing.

When I have some more time, it would be good to explain all the experiments in more detail, but to keep this post from getting too long, here are a selection of images showing some of the things I have tried (from drawing curves manually, to drawing mathematically with code, to sculpting fully 3D meshes - you name it, I've probably tried it!).




I had hoped to be further than where I currently am, but sometimes it's necessary to spend a bit of time trying different things, even if it means discarding it at the end because it wasn't right.

Thankfully the note shaped body was more straight forward and 'just works' from virtually all angles (this is a refinement of the model I showed in my last post).





That's all for now.

Ethan Shilling

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