APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 14 11/21/14

     I continued to work on fixing the cape geometry and face laugh line topology again this week. I pulled down the vertices near the shoulder closer together. I also reformed the abdomen edge loops into a hurdle shape to occupy the large stretched gap area near the cape geometry. The back area and edge loops are also reformed and realigned to a similar degree of the front cape geometry. For the mouth topology I added another edge loop from the eye to the laugh line area.
     Then I deleted some of the edge loops around the mouth area and proceeded to redirect and delete some edge loops to create a curved topology loop that connects to the laugh line to the chin. The edge loops near the crotch area was also tightly crowded, so I spaced those edge loops out too. Once that was done, I re-fixed my UV shells again because of the change in new geometry shape and edge loops. I saved my UV into a 2K map. Next I sculpted my character model in Mudbox.
     Inside Mudbox, I sculpted in a business suit or just a workplace suit around the chest, arms, and legs of my character. After the suit was done, I sculpted in the suit neck collars and a tie. I choose not to sculpt in muscle tones heavily because my character is wearing a suit and heavy muscles bulging out would be inappropriate. Just keeping the shape and form simple. For the normal textures, I was using the tile textures from the default sculpt selections to imprint in the suit textures. For the exposed hands, I still sculpt in the minor details of the skin, finger nails, knuckles, and hand lines details. The hair seems a bit tricky to me as it always is when it comes to fur or hair, because getting the correct hair flow is quite challenging. I'd have to constantly go back and forth in changing the hair flows to my specifications.
     It was a bit frustrating, and so I just decided to move on and come back to it later. For the diffuse color map, I painted in the color of the suit a blue color. Painted the inside shirt and collar a white color and the tie intro a red color. The leather boots are painted a light black color. The skin is painted a reddish pink color and a reddish brown color. At the moment, I'm still working on the shadow shadings of the character. I'll post my character once I'm done with the sculpting and color painting for a better analysis.

APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 13 11/14/14

This week I worked on  my model again and asked Frank for some directions on my model's cape geometry and face geometry.I re-arranged the cape geometry edge loops into a more curved shape along the chest area. I've also fixed the shoulder geometry and curvature to fit with the cape geometry. Maya 2015 also caused some problems for me along the way when some of it's tools won't work, like the merge tools and merge duplicates. This left me to do it manually by connecting vertice by vertice. I've also created another edge loop on the nose geometry and connect it around the laugh line to the bottom chin to create some topology around the mouth area. Working on the model for a bit, I almost forgot the hair and eyebrow geometry. For the hair, I'm going to extrude the head geometry to make a solid hair piece instead of an alpha card. I'll also do the same for the eyebrows. Looking at the UV distortion compression and stretching display still creates a crash for me, which I don't know why. But the checker tiles for the UVs still work fine.

 

 The cape geometry from my previous finished model turned out alright but I feel that it wasn't developed enough. So I continued fixing the cape geometry on my current model. I also found an N-gon on my face geometry along the laugh line near the mouth. I redirected the edge loop to fix the N-gon geometry near the mouth laugh line. I also finished the UV of my model but held back from doing more because I want Frank to check out my character model's cape geometry and face again before continuing on with the texturing and sculpting.

                                                  Here's my character model's UV map.

APCG 493 Fall 2014 Week 12 11/7/14

     For this week I went back into Maya and re-fixed my character's cape geometry and topology. I deleted the top parts of the shoulder and parts of the top chest. I then extruded the geometry from the chest and reformed the upper cape geometry to the shoulder. Once I was done with the topology of the cape geometry, I fixed the hand next. I added some more edge loops to all the fingers and the thumb. Next I evenly spaced out the geometry and shifted most of the edge loops that had large gaps closer to the other uniformed edge loops. For the head geometry, I tried using the box method this time instead of starting with the eye extrusion. The box method was quick but produced a very straight forward line and curvature edge flow and bad topology form. I connected the very low poly basic head model to my character's body at the start of the head creation to make sure that I didn't have any problems later on connecting it to the main body with a lot of edge loops.
   
     Once the basic box head had been connected to the body, I started to add more edge loops to the head and form it into a head shape. I had low poly head wire frame reference images out when modeling the box head but the edge flow curve topology didn't go very much the way I want it to. I basically had to fight my way through all the straight line box curves and force them to form the correct topology that I wanted. After I was done with the head, it looked a lot better and more topologized than its previous box topology. Next I used the sculpt tool in Maya to smooth out all the geometry again due to some of the new edge loops that came from the head while I was shaping it out. I'll UV my model during the weekend and create all the necessary maps for my character. I'll check with Frank Piera next week for any improvements on my model.