This has been an incredibly productive week. I don't feel like I've made a lot of visible progress on my Juggler sculpture, but I've done a ton of behind-the-scenes kind of work on it. I've UVed the majority of Juggler's objects this week. I still have a number of objects to go before I'll be totally done UVing, but when you've got a character made up of 60 different objects, getting the majority of the objects done is still a sizeable accomplishment. I haven't done any additional sculpting on the character since my update to last week's post about the finished, normal-mapped phone, but I'm happy with what I have accomplished this week. All of the colorful checker-patterned items in this image are now UVed:
Additionally, I've made quite a bit of progress on my creature (whom I've dubbed Feles Velos, which is something like Latin for "veiled cat"). I sculpted his skin texture everywhere on his body except for his face, then posed him, then shaped the fleshy folds down his back and his hood using a dynameshed sphere:
Then I saw this image:
I liked this view of him so much that I decided to try changing his pose, since most of the detail that you can see in this image would never be visible in a turn-table of the creature in this pose. I decided to try him rearing up on his three hind legs, and it worked like magic! I made one rotation of his front body from the point of his pelvis, and he instantly gained not only a better view of his detailed underbelly, but a very clear personality as well. As soon as his body reared up, his hands looked like they were reaching out to embrace something dear. All I had to do after the initial rotation was rotate the lower portion of his right arm to turn the palm inward and bend a finger joint or two and viola: instant personality created through body language!
I'm really happy with him. Of course, I now have to redo some of the fleshy folds down his back because they didn't transpose well, but I hadn't done any real detail work on them yet anyway, so it won't be too cumbersome to fix. I'm really excited to finish him. I think I'm going to give him a little dirt platform to stand on and have him reaching for a firefly. I really want to texture him eventually too, but that won't happen until after this semester's over. There is, however, only one week until that's true, so it won't be long now until I have the time, and, thanks to McKay's Modo class, I now also have the skill. I can't wait to show him off in his finished state!