Self evaluation, AKA, the final post!

It sadly came to my conclusion the other day that I would not be able to accomplish what i set out to do, which is why in this post I'm going to summarise what I did wrong, and how i can improve myself for next time. Hopefully over the Christmas break I will continue working on this project, attempting to fully texture the main model and then later rig properly and animate it!

When we worked on our project, although both of us had created enough development work before we started modeling, when we modeled we decided to model pretty much in Mudbox straight away (though I made an extremely basic mesh in Maya beforehand), instead of going from Maya to Mudbox. Part of this was because we were both slightly concerned as to how to model in Maya, and secondly because we had completely forgotten what we had learnt the previous year. If we had some classes before we modeled, I think we would've been able to achieve everything as we set out to do.

Both myself an Emma used PuppetMaster (suggested by Steve!) to rig the characters easier, since by the time we got to rigging we didn't have as much time as we had hoped. The rigging worked great, however, the painting weights with our extremely high poly models caused A LOT of issues, and at the end of the day was not achievable to get it done. As you can see some posts below, the models when rigged would've been extremely hard to sort out with painting the weights, and we just simply didn't have enough time. Over the Christmas break I hope to continue rigging my character, and then attempting to animate the model as well.

However I have learnt A LOT, and this project has been extremely useful to my knowledge in 3D modeling. I learnt a lot about the development process, colour, and making final model sheets to help create the model. If I do continue I may even somewhat restart the project, and at which point I'd post the process of it here. I will still set myself a deadline, probably about 5 weeks or so (since this term was spent on two projects, hence the time we had), and try and accomplish it COMPLETELY in that time.

Earlier on in the blog I created 2 animation tests to aid me in my process, this was what I was going to animate Wee Eck doing, so hopefully when I continue with the project I can accomplish this in my original claymation vision!





Here is a final render of the model pretty much finished, the only thing I sadly couldn't achieve was the texturing (and obviously the rigging as I mentioned!).



So all in all the project was of great use to me, and that's why I shall continue in accomplishing my claymation piece, I'm also heavily looking forward to the environment project, since this I believe will also be a great help to me for our short films in the BA year!