Photo's to go with the last blog...

Clearly the video was terrible so i will post some photos up as well:

Cleopatra coming at chaaaa

So... i have utterly failed at keeping up to date with my blog... i thought i might have this problem. As a child i could never keep a diary and as an adult, even keeping a calendar is proving difficult, let alone a blog! It doesn't mean i'm unorganised though... in fact i'm quite the opposite... odd that i'm organised but can't keep diaries...


Anyway... we'll just fast forward and take a random leap into what i have recently been doing. I was going to start from the very beginning work wise, but the very beginning is such a long time ago that i may as well tell you what i am doing now.


So, as i said i am studying in Germany now. For my animation class, our task has been to model, rig, texture, light and animate a character from Asterix and Obelix. I decided i didn't want to do any of the main characters e.g. Asterix because i felt it was something everyone would do, therefore i chose to do Cleopatra. She seemed like an interesting character to model and from watching a few of the cartoons, i quite liked her attitude and the way she moved, so i thought it could be quite fun to animate her later.


First up, i had to draw out my character. It was hard, having not picked a main character, to find as many resources to draw an accurate front, side and back of Cleo, but i guess that's what an artist licence is for! 


So first i collected images of Cleo:

Rough Moodboard of Cleo

And then from these images i drew a pen front and side image of her,  to use as a template in Maya to model from:

Then i started to model in Maya. Now, having never really modelled anything in Maya before (We usually just get given a model thats been pre-rigged to animate with at home) this has proved a very challenging task.... i've had to learn how to do everything from scratch and the fact that this Uni is using 3d Max means i don't get any software help either, so doubly 'on my own' there. So really i have been teaching myself everything as i've been going along and looking at the odd tutorials for help.


I got so far with my character that i thought i was almost done:

But after some discussion it was decided that the dress needed.. i quote "more sex appeal" and the head mesh needed to be improved, especially the polygon flow around the mouth and nose areas.


So i plodded on and spent many a nights dreaming just of Maya... oh wait that wasn't a dream!!
And today i just finished the initial model and i'd say it was a big improvement... see what you think:

The head is much better in my opinion, it definitely looks more like cleo and the dress is definitely better fitting.


So next task is UV mapping and texturing..... Oh dear... i fear this will be very complicated! Never mind.. i'll just keep plodding on and i'll let you know how that all goes!