Portfolio

In this module, I have learned a lot of new things and I improved in each of them. In the beginning, I was worried that my skills in Maya will not improve quickly enough, I was confused most of the time, but I prioritized this module to the point I understood what I was doing and I knew what I wanted to do. Although I know I've still got a lot of room for improvement to be really good and skilled in 3D, I think it is not bad for my first 3D character. The final look of my character has changed a bit during the process, I wanted her to look both, human and non-human, at the same time. That is why I changed few proportions of her face, to give her more "alien" look, to show she is not completely human. Her glowing eyes without pupils add to the extraterrestrial look. Another change I made was the denim jacket. I didn't make it to show the texture of her jumper more because I think it is the best part of my character with all those details. I also changed the shoes ...

UV mapping and texturing were also done during the Christmas break but I decided to make a separate blog post for them, together with lighting. In the beginning, I had some problems with UV mapping. It just did not work and I was already in Slovakia so I contacted Kristina for 3 days crying how it is not working at all. Crying helps, I guess, because after that I successfully UV mapped everything in one afternoon.  For textures, I combined photos and digital painting with filters. I also used bump maps for every texture, I just didn't include them all in this blog post because most of them were so subtle, that they just looked like grey squares. Photos of my knitwear were used for the jumper which was the most difficult texture I made for my character. I had to tweak those photos without damaging the pattern and connect it in places where it was not connected in the photo. For the texture of the skirt I had to make a texture which looks like thick fabric...

The last things that were missing were headband, necklace and shoes. I hoped all my modelling was going to be done before the Christmas break, so I needed to catch up a bit, but fortunately, all those things were not that difficult to make. The biggest struggle with the headband was bending the hair to make it look like the headband is really "sitting" on the top of her hair without having holes between hair and the headband. The necklace was way easier than I thought, even the moon shaped pendant was done very quickly. I can see here how I have improved during this semester because, in the beginning, even the necklace would take few hour to make. Because of the lack of the time I decided to change the shoelaces for velcro stripes. I also think they match platform shoes more than shoelaces. 

This week at first I finished gums with teeth and I modelled the tongue. I am really happy with these, it is a pity they will never be very visible. It was a bit of a struggle to place it all into her head because I had to be very close to it to be able to see, because of the back of her head. I started making the hair but I found out that I forgot to connect neck with space under her ears. It was one of the most difficult things I've done during this module and I couldn't get it right. I always made too many faces for some reason and I didn't know how to get rid of them. After all, it looks quite alright however there still are too many faces. The next step was hair and I had no idea how to do it. I tried to work with many hair strands which did not really work and it would take a lot of time. I decided to make the hair as one piece and then work on the texture and bump map to make it seem more realistic.