Today went better than yesterday I got the Poster finished and I’m now working on the cloak to finish of the character model, I think the problem I’ve been having with the character model is that I didn’t put enough detail in and around the noise area and in the underneath of the chin, I suppose this is something that comes from experience.
What I’m doing at the moment is collapsing the hood vertex by vertex so that the hood is down, which has gone well but it has messed up the UV map a little. She still needs a little work on the textures, there are a couple of seems that need tidying both on the diffuse and normal maps.
From now on in the show is going to take up a fair amount of time and I’m also back at work next weekend so I suppose that I’m about to hit my crunch time.

Things left to do:
Tidy the textures
Rig
Animate
Render

Oh and sort out the class show reel, do follow up E-Mails, sort out T-Shirts, get business cards, make sure stuff get printed, clear the room, possibly paint the room and put on a show.
Aaaargh!

Anyway here's the poster, a bit small but I'm saving it for the show.

Ok the poster worked out well but still needs a lot more work and the character has undergone a lot of changes, all for the better I might add.

That means that I’m also now not happy with the hood being up so I’m going to re-model it and have it down.
This means I’m a little bit behind with the rigging which will have to be re-done but I’d rather that than regret it later.
Other than that we had a mild panic because the room layout had to change – we lost the rear wall to a miss communication, but I think I’ve figured it out:

Two Major tasks for the weekend: Finish the Poster and Rig Red.

Well today went according to plan – although I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked but instead I did an A2 drawing that I’ll spend a couple of hours colouring in Photoshop (that is if my scanner works).

The college computers couldn’t cope with importing the level 5 meshes from Mudbox which gave me a glimmer of pride for this old rig which can at least import them.
The Normal Maps have turned out a lot better too but I’m still a little undecided on whether to use a slightly higher poly mesh for the poster and video for the show. It’s a tricky one to figure out it because it would be easier to use the low polygon for animation but it will definitely not look as impressive as using a high polygon character, it would also look better as an A2 poster.

Well tomorrow I want to get the print side of things done and the plan was:
One A2 was going to be just the character posing dynamically (CGI), the second A2 was going to show how I created the character a bit like a flow chart but less boring: Concept Art, Low Polygon Models, High Polygon Models, Normal Maps, and Textures.
I think I was down for an A3 as well but I was going to use a few A4 and put a few of the best pages up from my sketch book (scanned in and tidied up), but now I’ve done that rather nice drawing...

I’ll think what I’ll do is sort out the character creation poster first then work on the drawing for a bit and see how that turns out, I can then always take it in and ask everyone what they think. I’ll then work on the CGI A2, the more I think about it the more I’m leaning to using the high polygon mesh (level 3 with Normal Maps) but just repositioning vertices rather than a full rigging, it would take a lot less time and I think it would look cool. Another big question is should I play with the textures to make it look really professional? I suppose it all boils down to time.

I’ll see how it goes tomorrow, but on the bright side I've answered my own question from earlier: High poly for the poster, low for the videos after all I designed this character for a game so it would be good if the videos looked like game play.

Having just pressed the Mesh Smooth button rather than the Auto Smooth button and broken 3Ds Max again I think I’m ready to call it a day early today, I’ve been tidying up the textures for the most part as well as a little experimenting with rigs/levels/meshes.
The results are good, I think I’ve finished the low polygon model for the most part and it appears to be easy to rig which I’ll do tomorrow.

So here’s the plan for the rest of the week:

Tuesday – In the Morning probably going to be sorting out show details but I might get a bit of a crit, evening carry on rigging and tweaking.

Wednesday – I have to get the A2 print finished, this is going to be a shot of the character posing with maybe a tiny bit of Photoshop work to make it look cool and interesting. The Second A2 is going to be how I created the character in stages detailing everything she’s made up of.

Thursday – College in the morning is most likely getting my A2 posters checked and finished ready for printing. The evening will be making a test render (to check codec’s) for the video for the show.

Friday – In the morning testing the video on the college computers and in the evening starting to make the teaser which is now just going to be a few short animations linked together.

Saturday and Sunday – Depending on how things go on Friday really, for example if I get most of the shorts done with relative ease then I might have a crack at making my original idea of a full teaser, I’ll have to see.

Oh and you may have read in an earlier post that I was a bit surprised at the lack of detail in the Mudbox Normal maps well I’ve just tested 3Ds Max’s (using the level 0 and level 3 mesh)and it came out a whole lot better so I’ve got to sort that out, it shouldn’t take too long I managed to do one in the time it took to write this.

In the image below is the level 3 and the level 0 with about a 100,000 polygon difference, not bad eh?

So today’s going a little better although I think I’m about to break 3Ds Max again – I’m importing all the level 5 detail obj exports from Mudbox so I can create a high detail A2 poster for the show, odds on whether or not 3Ds Max can cope with this many polys on only 2 Gig of Ram? Especially when I try to rig it...
Hehehe!

In theory I’ve I’m almost there, all the high detail work is done and I have all the base textures I need they could just do with a little more work.

It’s not looking good for poor old max I’ve got that lovely window within window effect on the go, I leave it for the time being it’s still doing something. Might have to settle for level 4!
Apart from the afore mentioned texture tidy here’s the.. . Ooo! Max has come back! That’s 2 out of 5 meshes. Where was I? Here’s a quick render of the finished low poly with normal maps (with textures in need of a tidy).