Summer Progress and Class 1 Update

Before the semester of Spring 2022 ended, I set progress goals to complete by the end of summer. The goal was to get all of the background characters 30% complete by the time school started again. Nothing too crazy but enough so then I could actually meet my goal and maybe exceed it if possible. Not to toot my own horn, but I think I met my goal and even got much farther than I hoped!

All of the character sketches that I used for reference were done by my groupmate Kat!

The first character I worked on and got to at least 30% was Cher! I was really excited to work on her because of her old grandma body and all of the fun shapes and wrinkles she would have. I left out her hair because I was going to sculpt it along with the face and extra details. Next I gotta add her hers and create eye and mouth bags. She is ready for others in my group to start rigging and working on adding other stuff to. I am very proud of how she is looking as a fairly simple base model.

I started my summer by modeling Arnie. They are one of my favorites of the background characters and they have the most in their design. I figured they might be a fun way to start up the summer. I started with the basic body arms and legs. Then I moved to the head to get general shapes so it would be ready to sculpt later. I later added the hands and toes. My biggest issue was the wings. I couldn't quite figure out how to get the fingers to connect nicely without having a ton of edge loops. Unfortunately by the end of summer I couldn't get that done. The fortunately part will come later in this post.

Next was Harold. He gave me so much trouble with his feet so that's the big reason why he has ears and horns that are fairly solid. It was with Harold that I realized that if I modeled exactly like the reference image, the legs would be really messed up. I didn't fix it yet, but its like bent in two different ways so when viewing in any angle except from the front or side it kinda looks off. But that's alright because it still needs to be sculpted so I can kinda just drag the whole shape around with that when adding the fur and wrinkles.

The last character is Lizzo. Their design was really blocky and square which was much different from my original design. He looks much better this way, but unfortunately I couldn't reuse my initial model for him. Towards the end I really wanted to just give him shoes so I wouldn't have to essentially model another set of hands for his feet.

The fortunately part from Arnie is that we were all thinking about cutting her in the meeting a week before school started, or at least removing her wings and changing her tail to get rid of the main character energy. Unfortunately in the meeting, I was asked to start modeling Finn (the main character). They have not been touched in terms of modeling except for the couple times I tried to do stuff with them but didn't want to get too far because their design had a ton of edits. I started using the most recent version of the concept sketches but it was very difficult because I didn't have quite enough to go off of.

During the first Production class of the semester, I was able to get a better version of Finn's ref so I could start working. I essentially updated the few objects I had on there previously and worked on this for the last hour of class and the next few hours afterwards. I did steal the hand from an old modeling project of mine, but I am very happy with how this turned out. After all of the progress with all of the others, I have gotten fairly decent at modeling fast and getting decent quality stuff out of it.

What happened during the first class was we decided to cut down on scope a little so we could get a smaller project that is very complete. We cut three of the background characters. We decided it would be best to part with Arnie, Lizzo, and Harold. We kept Cher because she shares a lot of similarities with the other characters and she would make a cute addition to the cast.

I am honestly sad that a bunch of that time I spent over the summer is gone now, but I understand that is just simply a part of the process and how the industry works. The perks of doing all that modeling is it is experience that I won't lose and it has made me better and faster at doing my job in the future.

Thanks for reading!