Re-Submission Fun Times

This week its back to work on Off the Map as the Easter holidays are now over sadly. However there is a lot of work to do at once like the presentation and the essay which are in my opinion more important, but I am organising myself so I work on all three at once and as equally as possible.

Over the holidays I've been re doing some of the Dichotomy Character project, not because I had to but because I enjoyed that project and I wanted to boost my mark.
For the re-submission I wanted to re model the hippo character which I explained in an earlier post. The reason for this is because it was a very poor and rushed model which I wasn't happy with at all. So I went back to my original idea for the Dichotomy project the “Hippope” and Scientist Gorilla.

As I haven’t been posting much about my progress with the Hippope I've decided to do it in this post overall and as a bit of a review.

Firstly for the Hippope I went back to my original silhouettes and explored some more interesting shapes, I then chose which one I preferred and did some more polished concepts with different clothing and props. I chose to then post the concepts on Facebook to get some feedback on which concepts were the most liked overall. After getting feedback I made a few adjustments as it turned out that people preferred parts of different concepts, so I just combined them all in a way that worked as a final concept and ran with it.

Here are my 6 concepts each referenced from real Pope clothing 

Final concept taking parts from 1,4 and 5

After choosing a finalised concept I went onto modelling it straight away, annoyingly I had to wait till I was back in Leicester for the last part of the holidays so I could start modelling as I don’t have 3ds Max on my PC in my apartment. This wasn’t much of a disadvantage however as the modelling didn’t take as long as I originally thought it would.
I tried to see if I could just adjust the original model for the hippo but I couldn’t, it just didn’t work. 

So I started from scratch, overall I think it took about a week maybe two to complete all the modelling, unwrapping included. As I was modelling I was very conscious about making it looking like a hippo because the first model didn’t at all so I spent a lot of time reviewing the head of the character as I was modelling. I found in my first few iterations the face of the hippo was too long and looked kind of weird and awkward so I got a load of hippo reference images and just kept comparing until I got it right. I’m quite happy with the model now it’s finished, the topology is ok as it’s fairly low poly there wasn’t much I could do but I tried to get it to flow as much as I possibly could. The final tri count for the Hippope 2,713 which is slightly higher than the gorilla but this character has a more complex silhouette and more clothing.

Here was one of my first iterations which really doesn't look right. 

As i kept working on the face of the hippo comparing against reference images and just going by eye as well I finally got something that looked right and that I was happy with. 

After applying smoothing groups

Topology and tri count

The unwrap wasn’t as efficient as I could have made it but I was fairly happy with it as it didn’t take very long, I’d say about 4 hours for the whole model and then the props and clothing. As soon as I was done unwrapping I went straight into hand painting the textures. As a review on the textures I’d say I definitely could have done better but I still have time to go back and edit the textures a bit like adding more detail and tweaking the normals.

I decided to rig the Hippope really only so I could pose it for beauty renders later on. With the topology and low poly model it wouldn’t be able to walk as it doesn’t even have legs because I modelled just the clothing to save tris. I’m fine this as I didn’t make it go into engine so to speak as I wanted characters that were interesting and fun and really showed off a personality.

Finally I exported the Hippope and put it into Marmoset Toolbag 2. I chose Marmoset to make beauty renders because the gorilla was also rendered into Marmoset and both characters would look better if they were rendered the same. I also really like how Marmoset works and its different backgrounds which both worked well with my characters.

Here are some of the beauty renders of the Hippope in Marmoset:

In my review Mike Powell suggested that I changed some of the textures for my gorilla character as they were fairly simple and boring, so I did.
First I modelled some of the props for clothing separately instead of just being painted on as a texture. This would not only add more to the silhouette but look a lot better as you can see I also added a pen to the props which makes sense.

Heres a concept I drew up to show the changes in the design: 

I’ve always been pretty happy with the gorilla character so I didn’t feel like I needed to do much more to it, I also didn’t want to ruin it. The final gorilla came up to a tri count of 2,520 which I’m happy with as I wanted to keep these characters fairly low poly and a good range for me was between 2000 to 3000 so I did well in my opinion.

Here are some final beauty renders of the gorilla character also in Marmoset:

Finally here are both characters together. I think they're pretty dichotomous.