Failed to finish Armed & Dangerous on time.

I failed to complete my original Armed and Dangerous challenge in time. This is more or less due to me completley misjudging how much time it would take to sculpt an entire character. I have, nevertheless decided to try to finish the project for the final hand-in. I will also, however, be entering myself in ConceptArt.org's Character of the Week competition, which I will be talking about in another post. I also realise that I have not been posting my progress on the project nearly as much as I should have, I will be attempting to make a much more regular thing of it from now on.

Here is what I have done to the 6 Armed Nutter since I last posted. I managed to finished up the arms with a decent level of symmetry. I did continue to forget to put symmetry on several more times afterwards. My solution to this was to just open up the last save and redo any work that was not done symmetrically.
I then began work on the hands, using my own hands as reference far more than the anatomy books I had been using before for other body parts. I found that once I had spent a large amount of time on one hand, working out all of the nooks and crannys and trying to develop a technique, the next hand looked far too smooth. This was because the first hand had gained texture and, I suppose, character from all of the erasing and retrying in certain areas. The best way I could emulate this one the other hands was to build up or shave away the shape slowly with a weak brush.

I then decided to move onto the jeans. My initial plan was to sculpt the feet into the bottom of the jeans. However, the distortion from this was far too extreme and difficult to work with without moving up to much higher levels of subdivision, which wouldn't have been pratical. I thought, for the time being, I should sculpt the jeans as is they cover the feet and then make the feet as seperate objects in Maya and bring them in later.
I found that the actual fold of the jeans could not be made realistically with just the Wax tool and found that the sculpt tool was much better for creating the inital shape of the creases and folds and the pinch tool gave them the appearance of a sharp fold.

I used this image as reference for the general shape and location of the jean creases.

 

 

Considering the anatomy was bent out of shape by the grin, with the additional problem of the out of proportion cartoon style I found that I need to have a play with the shape of the head before commiting to any particular technique. It was as I was colouring in the teeth, I found that paint would jump to random areas of the mesh or only colour in chunks. After looking at the UV map I realised that this was because of crossing polygons in the UV. I returned to Maya and re-created the UVs using the "Optimize for: Less Distortion" setting on the Automatic Mapping. I then re-imported the UVs into Mudbox. The paint still ocassionally blots out from the area I paint. I think this may be where the polygons of the UVs are spread to wide. I will re-create the UVs soon, this time manually so that I can ensure the paint does as I wish it to.

When I got back to the face I managed to figure out the shape using a mirror, see check how the face distorts, and Classic Human Anatomy by Valerie L. Winslow. However, I did decide it would be better to create the eyes seperately in Maya out of two spheres, one with indentations for the iris and pupil, the other acts and the transparant gloss that causes the specular highlight on eyes. I found it easier to sculpt the eyelids around the spheres than I did when attempting to sculpt the eyes out of the base mesh during my play around. I painted the eye, including the irish and pupil and then gave it a mid grey specular layer, with a slightly lighter colour around the iris for extra gloss. The outer sphere I then painted with an almost black opacity layer, a completly white diffuse layer and an almost white specular layer. I then discover that the outer sphere would not give the desired specular highlight unless I sculpt a bulge over the iris. Although I am happy with how the eye originally looked, the transparent outer sphere is a little foggy since I loaded it up again. This is a problem that needs fixing.

There are still a few things that need to be done:

• After having a play with sculpting the hair out of the base mesh, I would much prefer to make a seperate mesh that holds the rough shape of the hair. I can then sculpt in texture. 
• The UVs need correcting manually.
• I need to work out a definite colour scheme before the final painting. 
• I need to add smaller details to things like pores, fabric, teeth etc. 
• I haven't yet even started to look at how I am going to pose the model. Although after a quick go on Mudbox's pose tools, it may be better to use Maya for the final pose and then either reimport into Mudbox or use a normal map to render in Maya. 

Above is the turntable showing where I am at at the moment.