week 22

Week 22

So that's it. The character project is over. To my surprise looking back, I've managed to model, texture, rig and apply a simple animation to a character of my own design. From my own personal viewpoint for something to be my first attempt at something, it does not look too bad. 

To me though the outcome of the character project is not what was significant it was all that I had learnt from having the time to spend with such a large-scale project. I feel as if my skills in art have jumped quite exponentially in these last 8 weeks. This I feel was because we were given so much time to focus on one thing and one thing only. This gave me the freedom to do some research into the fundamentals of art, and I have to say I had such an enjoyable experience taking in all this information and starting to see it appear in my work.

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Over the course of the weeks, I have been refining my skills in anatomy; finally attempting to study and simplify the forearm muscles as well as improving my proportions to my figures. In addition to this through constantly producing digipaints, I started to improve my use of values, working within midtones as well as introducing colour to my pieces. These couple of weeks allowed me to investigate colour and form as well as other illustrative styles such as cel shading. To which one of my cel shaded sketches actually got noticed by one of my favourite youtubers.

This week was also my self-proclaimed rigg week. And what a week it was. I spent each day rigging and re iterating my rigg. Looking back I'm glad I burnt myself out spending that weekend texturing as I wouldn't have had any time to get my rigg to the best of what I wanted it to be. The process itself isn't actually that hard, I just found it way too mathematical and tedious at times which caused me some problems. However once it was done, I was ecstatic at the way this character which I concepted on paper is now moving on a screen. I've never felt a sense of pride such as this one in a long time.

 Finally, we also had reviews by our tutors. My feedback was generally positive, they said that I am passing the first year, which has put so many of my worries to rest however they said something that I was weakest at to my surprise was my anatomy. I managed to achieve inadequate. This piece of feedback shocked me slightly since I spent the past weeks refining my knowledge of human anatomy, however looking back I do feel as if they were referring more to the anatomy of my 3d model rather than my 2d as I do remember them tell me to really observe the different viewpoints. In the future, I should ask more questions when receiving feedback.

 

3rd Years analysis -Very appreciated, however I have noticed that they measured the heads taking in account of the
hair as well which has created some inconsistency - On the other hand points about the legs were
very useful

However, before I handed in the character project I did adjust the anatomy of my model by firstly asking many 2nd and 3rd years for some feedback on the proportions of my model as well as self-reflecting myself.

My analysis

This as an exercise got me to really push my analytical skills and kind of revise over what I had learnt over the past few weeks of the project.

Anyway, the project is finally over. It's been a tough one but bring on the next project I'm excited to see how much I learn from the next one. (Fingers crossed it's a big one)