Demon Axe Week 2 - Sculpt

 This week I pushed my axe into sculptville. This went by surprisingly well since the proxy/game-res already had a lot of the shapes built in so a decent amount of the work was already done for me. This has been a relaxing and affirming break from characters! I definitely needed this self esteem boost, haha. I have the UVs cut but not laid out still but this upcoming week I'm just going to dive directly into texturing. My goal is to be finished or mostly finished by next weekend so I could use week 4 to finish the cyclops project.

Corpse Bride Sprint #5

Our team treated Sprint 5 as our tweaks and polish stage, which means these two weeks were fairly relaxed.

I mainly went back to spend more time with Emily in the following ways:

- Fixed her face textures so that it cooperates better with the facial rig, specifically her eyebrows which are textured on. I just made it so they clearly ran along an edge and deformed more cleanly per Abi's specifications.

- Reorganized her hair UVs so that her dissolve effect was distributed correctly. Two of her hair shells were upside down, so I shifted them around and edited the texture maps in Photoshop so that they aligned with the new shell set up.

- Gave her a little "bald cap" the color of her hair on her scalp to make said dissolve effect look better.

- UVed her "little legs" and made it so the UV shells were over the same spot her torso is on the body texture map to help make the clipping look less noticeable. Before her little legs were a significantly darker grey and noticeably stood out. 

- Revisited her roughness map to give certain parts of her more shine (teeth, ribcage, eyeballs) and make her skin look a little more natural in engine. This meant I also tweaked some values in her material itself. It's still rather hard to notice the difference unless you're looking closely due to the bright light on her.

Cool to finally see some facial expressions on her!

Demon Axe Week 1: Proxy

 So for my next assignment I'm tackling a prop so that I could take a bit of a break from characters and give myself some time to work more on my Cyclops project (and go back and tweak the witch some more because I'm neurotic :) ). I was actually pretty anxious about this project because I have historically sucked ass at box modeling but I somehow actually made it happen and now have hope for the future? I also pushed a little extra and have the UVs shelled out, just need to lay them out. Anyway here are some pics.

Concept by Betty Jiang.

Also mini-update on Cyclops. He's all baked down and has base colors on him. Had to do a lot of cleaning up because my ID map was sloppy as hell and I still need to revisit the sculpt to fix whatever's going on with his red loincloth piece but he's coming along, albeit a little slowly. I'm just happy the arm pieces baked down as nicely as they did despite me doing a goofy ass job on the retopo for that (I lost the OG low res pieces, rip). Maybe not as goofy as I thought tho........

Cyclops Project Week 4

 This week I focused on playing some catch-up and aimed to get the retopo, UVs, and first bake complete. Here's where it currently sits.

I plan to take an additional week to complete textures and final presentation by next turn-in along with the proxy for my final project.

I also finally merged the arms with the back so here's where the sculpt ended up.

Corpse Bride Sprint #4

 My deliverables are highlighted on the schedule and will be as follows:

Sprint #4 Beerstein, Flooring, Vase, Upstairs and Doorway Tapestry Textures

For this sprint, I moved on from Emily and helped wrap up a few odds and ends in the bar. 

Beerstein

Vase

Upstairs tapestry

Doorway tapestry

Flooring

And Emily's finally been assembled! I just wanted to show her off in engine since last time it was just her flat textures. 

No Country for Old Men Relit

 I'm on Corpse Bride and was tasked with lighting the No Country for Old Men scene. I wanted to go for something dark and moody and just a hint creepy based off the references I picked.

Here's what I ended up with:

Cyclops Week 3

Life happened in a serious and difficult way this past weekend so I flat out barely got to work on this at all. I'm just going to take a 5th week (again...) to finish this project up because I don't want to rush it and make myself miserable. I think it'll just take me a day or two of solid work to get the hi-res finished and then I'll move on to retopo. I'm being strict about having clean polygroups so the texturing phase for this shouldn't be too painful. It's been fun focusing on anatomy for this project and trying out different ways to get engravings done, makes me excited for future projects!