Fall Directed Study - Week 7

In the seventh week of the last semester of my graduate school career I made a few adjustments to my gallery scene and continued building and sculpting my Warrior.

First, I changed the proportions of a couple of items in the reading nook of my gallery environment according to critique that I received from Tareq last week: I revised the couches in the reading nook by making the back cushions thinner and their overall height a bit shorter; then I enlarged the table between the two couches slightly so that it was a little more proportional to its surroundings. 

I also spent the week UVing and baking normal maps for the sculpted gallery pieces, but I haven't gotten them into Modo so that I can get images of the items with the normal maps on them yet. (I'm stuck on arranging wood pieces in the fireplace because I foolishly laid all of those out before UVing the initial model, and the fire log's one of the few pieces in the gallery that I've sculpted and normal-mapped, so it needs UVs...) Once I get that done, however, I expect the gallery to be finished quite quickly.

The next thing that I did was to continue work on my Warrior character model. He now has a sword, scabbard, and helmet to go with the other pieces that I modeled for him previously, and he is also now UVed and sculpted about as far as I can go before breaking symmetry. I'm almost ready to pose him and then finish sculpting things like an actual facial expression and folds on his cloak before moving on to sculpting a wood-like surface-texture on him. I intend to give him some knots and gnarls and nicks of the type that might be left by a chisel or carving knife. Basically, I'm going to rough him up and make him look more organic - more like a wooden sculpture rather than a pristine 3D model.

 

As far as the state that he's in now: I know that his muscle lines are quite strong at the moment - I will remedy that later (there's actually a method to my madness on that). Also, the many places where the geometry of his armor is intersecting his body and other pieces of the outfit are intentional as well. He's supposed to be carved all from one large piece of wood, so I figured that things like the helmet and greaves and whatnot would be carved right onto the surface of his body rather than clearly delineated as separate pieces the way that they would if he were supposed to be a more realistic character. I just wasn't mad enough to try to model and sculpt them all as one piece... There is also an unsculpted ear in one of the head-shots which I have no intention of detailing: I originally modeled the character's base mesh with an ear, and then when I was modeling the helmet it occurred to me that you will never see that ear. The helmet's supposed to be built onto his head, so it's never coming off. Hence, I actually removed the ear from the mesh to cut out the extra polygons when I UVed the character, but when I projected the sculpted detail back onto the UVed mesh it of course transferred the appearance of an ear back onto the head. I have actually smoothed that section out a bit since I took these screen shots, but I have no intention of making any further efforts to remove it completely. So, in the end: yes, there are unsculpted ears on the high-res character, but I'm leaving them alone because they'll never be visible.

That is, unfortunately, all of the progress that I have to show for week seven. I've been working so hard lately that I got a bit burnt out and am afraid that I slacked off a bit this week. I would have had more progress to show if I'd worked more diligently, but I guess that everyone needs a break sometime. I'm just sorry that I chose to take one so close to a possible deadline...