Model Refinement
First things first came refinement. Geometrically, I believe my model was sound enough in it's iteration …Though I neglected to show any evidence of the actual geometry shape in the prior stages.
Body
And it would have to be. During my development of the body, I made edits to the body shape post-normal bake. If I were to edit the mesh geometry, I would then need to re-bake, which means I would need to remake the original mesh, which is a lot of work for a model that already looks like this:
Most of the geometry on this model is already sound enough. The only area of contention in my mind is the Kelpie's rear. One of the aforementioned body shape changes was lifting her butt in order to make the thigh-torso connection look better. A consequence of this is that the topography of the tailbone is a little odd, but hopefully this would become an issue considering she is wearing pants.
The Face
The face of my Kelpie needed a significant upgrade. My original face's lips were monkey like, and the eyelids were done at the last second meaning they looked completely out of place. I showed my final render to one of my classmates and they laughed loudly at it. Hurt my feelings it did.
The two biggest issues with the eyes were that they were added on post-bake, and that they were geometrically bad. The latter issue was solved first.
Originally, my kelpie had eye sockets shaped into the back of her head. Because the eyelids went over them, this caused odd shadows to appear in the smoothing groups. I promptly removed them.
The shape of the eyelids were as the cool kids call 'munted'. They were too closed in, and clearly didn't follow the shape of the eyes and skull. Using a similar method to before, I recreated the eyelids using a shrink-wrap method around the eyeball. Once done, I added a little face inside the eyelid to give it some added depth.
The eyelids were not perfect, but this would not matter, as I was planning on re-sculpting the head next.
Much like in the prior sculpt, I used blender's multiresolution tool to tinker with the face shape. The lips suffered from having such a significant cleft, which made the face look more animalistic than human (the wrong kind of anthro). The newer lips have a stronger contrast between skin and lip-muscle.
I also took advantage of the new sculpt to add little details like cuts in the lip and wrinkles around the eyelids. While hard to see from afar, they add good depth to the design.
The shape of the nose and cheeks of the Kelpie were changed also. There is a clearer nostril shape, and a better contrast between the two areas. The original mesh was transformed to better reflect the higher-res, and a new bake was applied over the top for the higher-resolution details.
A blessing in disguise of my prior mistake (making the head and body different objects) is that only the head needed to be baked. Put the choker back on and no one will be any the wiser.
Oh, honourable mention. The importing/exporting of my hands in the prior assessment caused their vertices to connect strangely (diamonds instead of squares if that make sense). I quickly reimported and reattached the hands with the appropriate geometry pattern.
Texturing
Looking back on my model, I was unsatisfied with the colour scheme I had chosen. The choice of white skin and red hair, while natural (and Scottish), it made the Kelpie lack a mythical, witchy feel. Now that I had to remake my base colours due to retopologising the face, I switched to a paler, greener scheme.
Other additions include subtle amounts of shading around the eyes, ears, and nose of my kelpie to help create some realistic skin tones and contrast, as well as finding a better texture for her eyes (the old ones had black scleras). Oh, and she has eyebrows now, which drastically improves her visual appeal.
Here's her new facial textures, UV, and Bump by the way. Because the UV is completely different, new textures were required.
Rigging
Doing the Rigging Myself
Beginning at the pelvis, I extend the bones into their appropriate positions. For the spine, I decided to use a 4-part vertebrae. The reason for this is that my character is wearing a bra that is separate from the skirt, meaning that bone 3 (from the pelvis) can control most of the bra, with no influence from bone 1.
I also made an effort to place the bones into a place that would be identical to a real person. Because the spine is way at the back of the body, so too is my armature (as Blender calls it). I may consider inserting an extra bone in the chest of my character since I predict I will have muscle group issues with the breasts.
The same philosophy for bone-placement applies to the fingers. Because the bones of a finger lay on the top of the hand, I place my armature akin to a real finger.
Once I was done I gave the muscles a test. Using automatic envelopes, I attached my Kelpie to the skeleton. Most of it worked well, but not perfect enough:
The fingers bend pretty well because of my bone placement, but the thumb needs to be retouched.
Arms and Legs are good, with the exception of the leg-hip relationship. Currently there is too much influence in the thighs causing the model to fold in on itself.
The chest probably doesn't need its own bone, however it is currently getting too much influence from other bones causing the breasts to warp strangely with twists.
Interestingly, the clothes are about 90% compatible with the armature. With a little bit of mesh culling the clipping shouldn't be noticeable at all.
Using Rigify Instead
Right. So forget all of what you just read. I came to the decision to- instead of making a custom rig, use a premade auto-rigging addon developed by Blender. I would have done this earlier if I had known that the Maya-folk were also allowed to use automatic rigs.
Using similar philosophies from the prior rig, I place the premade bones into places where the muscle-strength would be most effecive.
The rig could not correctly apply weights to the hair of my Kelpie, so I did this part automatically. Following the spinal structure, I apply muscles to the hair based on where it would lay on her back.
You may have noticed that the hair-hooks are gone. An issue with my design of them was that there were dozens of them, and all of them needed to be weighted separately yet equally with the hair. This was too much for me to care about, so I removed them. They weren't even that noticeable to begin with so its no biggie.
I wanted to create some form of physics for the hair, but as the deadline drew closer, I decided to cut my losses and not implement it.
I removed some parts of the original mesh that were no longer visible. The idea being that it will reduce the amount of clipping issues between the apparel laying atop these areas. The breasts did not cull, but I would later remove them as their wire mesh would mysteriously show through the bra when rendering (only from afar).
Posing
Faces
The rigify comes with an assortment of rigging layers for modifying the body. The face in particular has three different control schemes: basic, primary, and secondary layers. I use these tools to modify the
Poses
My poses were inspired by the faces my character made. I chose two faces to work from, the happy and grinning emotions.
An important aspect of my design is removing the symmetry from a pose. For the happy pose, one foot faces forward and the other back while the arms hold different bits of her hip. These little touches help make the character feel more real.
Rendering
Exporting and rendering into UE5 last assessment was a detriment to my grade. My computer did not seem agree with whatever Unreal is made of. This gave me two choices: export everything I have been working on into Maya and use their Arnold renderer, or give Blender's a go.
I have chosen the latter option, acknowledging that it may not comply with the standards of this assessment. I have confidence that Blender's cycle method is equal to Arnold in design and method, so hopefully it is okay.
I began by setting up a scene. The backdrop of the scene comes from polyhaven, and is a misty forest setting. The reason for this is that it allows the scene to have a lot of natural light without the need for additional spotlights. I had gone for a dark-scary vibe in my UE5 render, and this caused my character to lose a lot of fidelity in the darkness. Not a mistake ill make twice.
For my settings, I set the renderer to four thousand samples. Admittedly this may be too much, but because my images are rendered at 2k, I didn't want any blemishes.