My first attempt at modelling the main body without any prior experience. Not great. I have long since deleted this and restarted again with a fresh new mesh:
First attempt at making a head:
I tried to sculpt it out using Zspheres for the first time. It came out decent, but I felt it was too simplistic for the head I aimed to create. So I started over again:
… And I’d say it came out much nicer. More for me to work on with the damstandard, clay buildup, etc.
Once I felt satisfied with the details, I attempted to rig and pose Garr to have a similar pose to the concept sketches. The rig came out fine; but it deformed the mesh considerably and so I decided to discard it.
The final render turned out a lot better than I was expecting- albeit I had to scrap the human statues from the hand statue asset due to the complexity of the idea. I am only just a beginner to Maya and modelling as a whole, so this is something I need to work on when tackling future and personal projects.
Texturing was quite fun and mostly easy to do, but only because the mesh was separated into different objects/assets. It was not like this before; my mesh was separate objects all combined into one mesh, which made painting it at first very difficult due to overlapping UV shells. However this was quickly resolved after I returned back to Maya and separated all the objects and put them in a group instead of combining them.
In conclusion, going out of my comfort zone was daunting, but also quite interesting. I learned loads with every mistake and accomplishment, and I look forward to improving my skills when making future models.
My mood board contains a variety of references for my world, ranging from medieval, rural environments to futuristic and advanced environments.
Thumbnailing:
Further Thumbnailing:
Gallery visit:
Visited the National Art Gallery at Trafalgar Square to gain inspiration from various different background paintings by various different artists. I got a lot of insight that day, as well as a greater understanding of perspective and composition used in each piece I sketched out.
Value studies + artist studies:
Moving onto a solid concept
After much thumbnailing, planning and correcting mistakes such as incorrect perspective and inaccurate values, I decided to settle one a singular concept and moved forward with it.
Rendering/Lighting
Final
The final illustration came out really well after much editing. I’m very satisfied with the lighting, the framing and the color.
Perspective was an issue, but with some critique from my tutor and assistance from a perspective grid I made, I was able to fix it and so now everything in the piece follows the same lines from the vanishing points off-screen. The lighting really emphasises components like the dome, which is distant but also large. Its size is shown through depth; the lighting being much brighter than most of the buildings in the piece. The creature up front is also back lit by the buildings behind it, which makes it pop out more against them and feel realistic.
Coloring was certainly interesting at first, the first pass looking like this:
It was far too yellow, so I added blue to the sky to make the background stand out among all the warmer hues. I also changed the saturation of certain things such as the foreground buildings and the creature so that it is less intense to look at. (I flipped the canvas also, just because I think it looks better flipped personally)
In conclusion, I am very happy with the result and I had a lot of fun creating this illustration. I think for next time, I would like to practice perspective more so I am able to execute it more efficiently in my artworks, both personal and for future assignments.
Created the spoon at the very last moment, to account for the poly count (almost at 10K!)
UV mapping
There were a few holes inside the mouth cavity where I ended up finding multiple faces separated from both the upper jaw and roof of the mouth. I had to fix this issue about 4 times- It just seemed to keep happening when I was dealing with the face’s UV shells. I manged to fix it for good on the 4th try thanks to clean-up. The problem seemed to be non manifold geometry, which was mostly prominent around the corner of the mouth. A perilous problem, to say the least.
Finished UVs
These four below are before layout:
Texturing
UVs were caught in a snapshot and exported to CLIP STUDIO PAINT so I could more accurately paint over them. Definitely made the substance painter painting process bearable.
When I exported these textures into maya, they didn’t work properly … because the material was lambert and my export is for aistandard. So I had set all of the mesh’s materials to aistandard, reorganise them by name, and export them back into substance. Luckily, I didn’t have to redo the textures on the lambert version as I could carry over my textures to the new one. Saved me a lot of time.
