Quarter 1 Project

This quarter we were assigned a project to create some sort of animation in attempt to help us acquaint us with using Lynda. I ending up choosing to create a 3D character in Maya and to create a walk cycle for it, however I was not able to get to making the walk cycle by the end of the quarter. The only reference I started with was a basic body shape that I had drawn and I had decided that I would attempt to create the more detailed parts of the character without any reference (I later came to the realization that this was a terrible idea.)

The drawing I used as a reference for my project.

The original outline for this project was to create a 3D character that was fully clothed a texture and have it walk, I then came to the realization that having the character walk would not work if I wanted to do that in the given time frame, so I began to focus mainly on creating the 3D character.

I started creating the character by making the body. Using the Lynda tutorial this proved to be quite a help and made the creation of the body quite easy except for some minor issues with how the body looked after lining everything up with the reference. However, I with some minor tweaking I was able to get the body to a shape I was fine with. I then added hands, the Lynda a tutorial was a huge help in this aspect because I had no idea where to start. The body was pretty basic at this point, but I planned on going back to it after creating the head.

I once again used Lynda to help create the head and it proved to be helpful to a point. As I was creating the head I came to realize that not designing the face more in depth was a terrible mistake. At this point the head started to take on a weird alien-like head, so I decided to just go with it and make my character an alien. Now that my character was an alien the creation was a lot more simpler because I did not have to worry about it looking human, therefore there was room for a ton more mistakes as well as being a bit more fun to make. The head definitely took the most time to create because I couldn't get away with a simple shape, I had to add details to

the simple shape I had created which made it a bit more difficult than the body.

The most difficult part of my character though was when I revisited the body, at first I was pretty content with it but when I returned I had found that there were many small problems that if not dealt with would make the project virtually unbearable after mirroring the body. After multiple hours of tweaking and trouble-shooting I was able to restore the body to a point which was not completely to my satisfaction but was tolerable.

I then started on the clothing of the character, which was arguable the easiest part of creating it. To create the clothing all I had to do was duplicate the body, cut of the parts that were not going to act as clothing and then resize it to fit the body. The only thing that was even remotely challenging was tweaking the clothing so it wouldn't be stuck in the character. Even though this part was the easiest I would say it was one of the parts that I wasn't the most happy with. It didn't feel like clothing, rather an addition onto the body of the character. I wish I had more time to really add detail to the clothing to make it feel more like clothing and less like a second layer of color. Unfortunately I not only had to completely cut out the walk cycle, but I also had to dumb down the character drastically because during the quarter I had missed a few days of class which really put me behind.

To complete my project I set my character in a box and added some lights and I was ready to render. The final product wasn't really what I wanted and I was kind of disappointed, but after weeks of work I was still happy to see it turn into something.

Throughout this project I learned that you can use really simple shapes to create very complex designs. I ran into multiple issues throughout this project, most of them involved trying to figure out ways to make the body and head work in a way that I was happy with. If I had to redo a part of this project I would definitely redo the body/clothing. Even though the head turned out in a way that I didn't want it to it still looked nice, the body on the other hand ended up looking really bad and the clothing reflected that. I feel quite disappointed in the project to be honest, nothing really worked out for me and the final project didn't represent my original plan at all. My planning was rather poor in hindsight and for future reference I will remember to plan out things much more in depth. However, I learned a lot about the process of creating a character during this quarter and I will be able to apply some of the things I learned to future projects. My project may not have turned out the way I wished it had, but at least I can walk away with a few new skills.