UID: n11558423
Mood Board
After watching the lecture video explaining the assessment, I knew I needed to scale down any ideas of a full scale character, and so I wanted to create a mascot character like pompom from Honkai Star Rail, but I also included the animal cross characters. I still did want something that wasn't a chibi but wasn't a full scale character either. I also wrestled between different races of character, mainly between deer or fox, but since you can get arctic fox but not arctic deer and I wanted a white colour palette I went with the fox.
The references help a lot with understanding conventions of how people draw furry characters or chibi characters, as well as outfit references that helped understanding topology and fashion.
2D Turnaround Journey
I started this assessment not knowing how to draw a character, or draw anything really well. So I had to learn how to draw which took a while, but I'm really happy with how it came out.
As a beginner hard lines would've been the easiest to draw, but I was dedicated to take this time and opportunity to learn and create a really cute character. The head shape was the hardest to do and as shown is what took the longest, 2nd hardest was the side view and then the clothes. I didn't want a basic humanoid head, I wanted to combine both features of being humanoid but having fox likes features, I then twisted both into a softer rounder character opposed to maybe having a longer muzzle, or human nose / ears.
How does it meet the criteria?
Lumi meets the criteria by being bipedal with symmetrical limbs, has very stubby small hands not paws, she has spherical eye balls, and a mouth that can open and close.
The turnaround meets the criteria by being a useful reference for the 3D modelling processes, all aspects are at the correct height to the best of my ability and show a somewhat accurate version of how it would look at that perspective. (Front and back completed), (T-pose completed), (Clean linework with dark blue outlines) (I did not include a personality pose.)
Finalised Character - Lumi
My character's name is Lumi, she is an arctic fox anthropomorphic furry character.
She doesn't have many interesting personality traits, she's very shy and quiet and likes sticking to herself. She's interested in fashion but is limited to what I can draw / 3D model. She's not that strong she's just kind of normal.
Creating The 3D Model
To create the model I chose to use Blender over Maya, this helped at numerous points during the development process as, and was especially useful at keeping the polygon count low.
I started off with creating the head, there was a few approaches I could've gone with this, and starting from a plane would've resulted in the perfect topology, but I didn't understand anatomy topology at this stage, so I took a subdiv cube approach.
One of the hardest parts of the model to make, was definitely making the paws / feet, I had no clue what I was doing, I first started with the stubs on the left as I knew that I wanted to take it into that direction, then I just wanted to make the shape of my drawing, so I just gave it a try and I think it worked out. Working with the small polygon count forced me to find creative solutions to get a nice looking mesh but also try to keep the poly count down. To create the shape of the paw curves and keep the polycount down I ended up using edge creases to pull the mesh down.
Moving on, another difficult point was making the chest look accurate, the right side is the before, left is the after. What I did was make a semi circle and melded that to the chest after shaping it, the original chest was too smooth and didn't create the correct mesh. I do believe the changes were effective, but there was some issues with the shape that I couldn't figure out how to fix, just mainly the blocky shape itself.
I was really happy after making the knees, I utilized a sort of circle shape to create the knee caps with just moved around vertices, I also edge creased behind the knees to create more of a curve.
The hands weren't hard to do but it did take a few attempts, at first I modelled the hand and fingers separately, but then I realised I couldn't join it to the body properly if I did that, so then I decided to manually create the hands 1 edge at a time over the old mesh.
The mouth was one of the hardest things to get started due to Lumi's head shape, the first picture is what I originally had before creating the mouth cavity, and I like it the most due to it's simplicity, the 2nd picture was after I created the cavity and remeshed the mouth a bit, the last 2 pictures are the final versions of the mouth and it opened to show the teeth / jaw.
Small note on the jaw for submission: I confirmed the subdivision on the jaw, then accidently joined it to the head, which I then confirmed the subdivision on the head, and then separated the jaw resulting in the jaw being more subdivided than it needed to be, it went from 9k to 24k tris. I submitted with the 24k version but I was meant to submit with the 9k version and didn't have any time to change it.
The ears were definitely the most easiest thing to create, not much went into it other than just making sure it fit the shape of the drawing, for the 3rd pictures it looks lower quality because I decided to improve the topology and then drop the subdivision multiplier of the whole end from 2 to 1 so less on the poly count with minimal impact to detail, the ear being pointy at the top might be remedied through a bevel or two,
Lastly I added clothes to Lumi, I wasn't able to get into as much detail as I wanted due to time constraint and skill. For example I wanted to add hems to the end of the sweater. The skirt was really easy to make it was just a process of twisting some vertices smoothing and pulling, and then some light sculpt pulling to shape it correctly. Lastly the leggings aren't actually colliding with anything, the artifacting is just a rendering issue on blender when you've zoomed out a bit.
That was the final changes to the model, I applied all the modifiers and had a total tri count of: 41k
UV unwrapping:
UV unwrapping is actually one of the things I was happy to do, but I ran out of time and had to panic unwrap it a bit, and It also just was not working for some reason some seams didn't cut properly, so I will have to redo the UV unwrap. I plan to have all the seems on the sides of the character's clothes just like real life clothes, and for the body and head to also be on the sides, because currently the head seam is at the front and it looks horrible, so having it to the side would have it be noticed less. The jaw is UV unwrapped as well.
Final Submission Requirements
I did put Lumi into a maya file which worked fine, there was initially some issues to do with the subdivision and shading, but it all worked out in the end. Eyes jaw tongue and body are all separate meshes, and I included an optional version where the clothes and body are a separate mesh as I did work on the body for most of the assessment and it has better topology work.
Improvements
I will 1000% be working to improve Lumi for assessment 2 and for my self, especially with cleaning topology and reducing it, properly UV unwrapping, and adding as many accessories and improving the clothing as I can.
Assessment 2
SUBMISSION NOTES
Please repath the textures using the file path editor, all you need to do is make sure to check the subdirectory option, and repath to the main overall file, it'll find the materials automatically. I don't know why this is needed since I did everything correctly but it resets on another pc, sorry for the inconvenience and thankyou.
This is how the project will look when you open it, because the path of the materials isn't correct.
How to Repath Textures:
Go to the File Path Editor
This is how it looks for me, /sourceimages/lumi_textures, don't worry about the other 2 they aren't needed at all, only the lumi_textures file.
This is how it might look on your computer, it'll show the full hard coded path instead of just sourceimages.
How to fix:
I purposely broke mine on a separate save to show how to fix it.
First select all the files, you might have 3 options, the bottom most one is the one we want, but just select them all anyway.
Press Repath Files once it's selected
Checkmark both the options, the bottom one isn't necessary but there's no reason not to click it. Press Browse and find the overall area for the entire project.
With this screen press set (this is different then setting a project I believe, because I did both and only this one worked.) And on the original screen press Repath.
And it should be fixed, ignoring the top one that is old stuff.
It's fixed because once it knows where the overall file is, it knows to search through the source images for the materials because of the search subdirectories for files option.
Cleaning Up The Model And Adding Additional Elements
Back to the actual start of the assessment, I went back and decided to add more elements to lumi
Original
The cuts in her eye's was a stylistic feature that I had to unfortunately get rid of.
Final
Essentially went back and gave her eye brows, eye lashes, a nose, better eyes, and nails on her hands. Reasoning for doing this? Because she's now super cute and pretty compared to before, but practically it also allows for more blend shape options and emotions. And swapped out the jaw from the high poly to low poly version.
And redid the uv map, it was really easy I should've done it the first time but I was running out of time, but I'm happy I went back further and fixed the model with some stuff.
Substance Painter
Substance painter was good, overall I wanted Lumi to have a cutesy pastel outfit, her sweater was initially pink but I wanted blue eyes, so I swapped her sweater to blue to match, I also wanted to make her as sparkly as possible to stay on track with my inspiration, so I made her fur/skin sparkly as well as her socks.
The sparkles are really difficult to make right, and it's still not exactly how I'd want it, I want more sparkle to it like a diamond or glow, but not sure how to make that in substance painter.
Only issue with substance painter is the ambient occlusion making textures darker, which I thought was ok since you don't see it, but with how I've done the eye brows it becomes a small issue later.
Blend Shapes
Overall the blend shapes easy to do but took a while due to the constant minor adjusting, I do feel that some blend shapes should've been extended further to allow for more options but it was harder to get right.
Rigging
Rigging was the most easiest part as it was mostly automatic besides aligning the hand bones, I didn't take a photo of the rig, but here's a photo after the skin was binded to the rig show casing the head rotation before skin weights.
Weight Painting
Weight painting took a bit of time to get good at, at first everything did ended up looking really noodly because I over smoothed everything, but then I learned how to make it cleaner by just having sharper transitions, between weight paint values.
Again NGskintools broke towards the end resulting in weird looking weight paints on the maya screen, but looking fine on the NG screen, and the influence doubling? not entirely sure but the weight painting broke numerous times which resulted in loss of work and time reducing the quality of the weight paint for certain sections specifically the hands.
Posing
I had a few options for posing but the goal was to make lumi as cute as possible in a single pose, I didn't want to do multiple shots and as far as I knew we're only meant to do one. So I decided to take inspiration from cutesy media and decided on a heart hand symbol, of course this was a tough ask as the rig and weight painting has to be on point but it was a risk I was willing to take no matter what, I also had her put one leg up and tilt her head to create a nice C shape pose.
Here is the final render!
Overall looks really really good I'm quiet happy with the final product, for being a semester worth of work, and a semester worth of troubles I'm happy that I got to make Lumi.
That said a few critiques or changes I would've done: Her socks are too glossy it's meant to be silk or polyester but instead it looks like latex. Most obviously her smile is really uncanny because she's kinda awkward smiling, if I really wanted to I could say it was intentional and a personality trait and it would work, but I just didn't pull the sides of the mouth enough. Her sweater material is rendered weirdly, I actually have no clue why it's doing that, the only guess would be overlapping mesh with the inside of the sweater but that should be close to impossible. The weight painting could be redone on the fingers and sweater but overall it was actually done really well for the skirt, NG was useful while it was working, but then it stopped. Her eyes are also uncanny but I actually think it's ok in the render. The heart hands make the entire thing worth every moment though, she is so cute.