KNB 217 Assessment 1 N10128204 DEsHENG kONG

A1 Character Design

Brief

The character design needs to draw on 3D animated characters from folklore or mythology, I chose the direction of oriental mythology, because I come from the east.

Concept development

Since I personally prefer to create a female character, I have searched many myths about women. In the end, I set my goal on the myth of "Chang'e flying to the moon", which I will choose. As the background of the characters, I will use the descendants of Chang'e as prototypes to make the characters.

References

After thinking about it, I thought that the clothes of ancient characters were too cumbersome and not easy to implement in my work, so I wanted to simplify it, so I began to search for the evolutionary history of ancient women's clothing, and wanted to find an oriental style as my character's attire.

After browsing, I chose cheongsam as the character's dress, which can not only highlight the beauty of oriental women but also represent their culture. Coupled with the background of Chang'e's descendants, wearing a cheongsam is not abrupt.

Story for my character:

This little girl is a descendant of Chang'e. She was born in modern China. Her name is Xiaocao. She is ten years old. She has a very rebellious personality and a very small stature. She wanted to buy some ancient clothes behind her parents' back, but unfortunately, she only had enough pocket money to buy a cheongsam of her own size, and not enough money to buy embroidered shoes. So the prototype of this model comes from the image of Xiaocao wearing his own cheongsam and slippers at home.

Concept Sketches

Modelling and Sculpting

I forgot to take screenshots of every step in detail, but every body part has been modified many times. It can be seen from the modification time of the file.

I took several representative screenshots from each stage's files to represent the completion of each stage's work. Here are some processes while making the low poly mesh.

The body, hand, teeth and ear part in the picture is done step by step from the tutorial on youtube. My reference video is this. You can simply find other parts in his channel. for here only post a hand part for referecing.

My character's feet were made based on this video from which I learned how to use the lattice, great video.

The clothes and shoes are made by myself. Since the clothes have no sleeves, the edges are added to the positions where the arms extend and the neck extends, so that the clothes look a little thicker from the side, not like a piece of paper, which is more realistic.

The slippers part is also very simple, just choose the surface of the cuboid to pull it up and bend it to connect.

Because there are no scars or other details, I didn't go to Mudbox for sculpting so there was no retopology. I go direct to the painting stage after UV mapping.

Modelling Hair and all UV mapping

In this stage, I did all the UV mapping and prepared all the models to be ready for textual.

This is the source of my technique for learning how to make hair, which explains how to use soft selection drag to make the hair into the shape you want. This is the source of my technique for learning how to make hair, which explains how to use soft selection drag to make the hair into the shape you want.

All model parts UVs are neatly aligned and ready for the next stage.

Paint and texture

When I imported it into the painting software, there was a problem with my baking, which led to the problem that the colouring could not be uniform. I solved most of the problems by rewatching the tutorial video and started colouring my model according to my design ideas.

The design of adding stars on the cheongsam was abolished when it was painted because it seemed that the cheongsam lacked oriental culture, so it was changed to plum blossoms to make it more spring-like.

The explanation for the two colors for the eyes here is that I want to try to export the coloring of both eyes at the same time, and try which one is more suitable in Maya, so I keep different eye coloring schemes.

Here is the model that has not been painted and painted in maya. You can see from the picture that I chose brown pupil color, because most of the reasons are because Asian pupil color is brown.

Model asset show here

Lighting and environment arranged according to the tutorial video

Rendering in Maya

By modifying the roughness, I finally solved the problem of reflective clothes and too bright skin. I think I didn't set the lighting properly. I don't know why the shadow part of my model is not obvious, which makes the character model not feel like it is truly integrated into the environment.

Final Model Renders