Project TFD

      At last the Superhero model is officially finished and moved to the texture chapter. After some advice from our look development mentor, Michele Ahn, we might polish up the the fabric texture of the coat, specifically the gold lining to actually look golden.     As for other models, I used a placeholder texture on the bandage model. Our rigger to set up the band-aid to bend and place on the daughrer character's finger is a little MIA but in the meantime, I can use this in one of my new animation shots.     One new model I was assigned to was the broom and dustpan for the same animation shot and a few after. My director has proposed I use strands on the bottom of the broom instead of a smooth surface. Fortunately we learned a new trick from our Look Dev mentor using a plugin called MASH available on Maya. Supposedly it's old that not many people talk about it but there are still plenty of tutorials about it. With Mash, I should be able to provide ...

       Thanks with the help of my colleague EJ, and classmate's mentor, Michele, I was able to find resolutions to UV'ing the superhero model. It's been a while since I've used the UV tools and I newly approached unfolding these pieces using the planar, cylindrical, and spherical tools to unfold the UV shells of the stubborn pieces. On that note, I also found the error in the boots and it fixed everything. It was an extra vertex that created a rogue triangle pointing inward and inside the right boot. With this, I was able to unfold and optimize the pieces as much as I wanted. Funnily enough though, optimizing the top pieces was more problematic as these pieces kept wanting to wind up. I can understand why because of the middle/smaller part of the piece, as many other UV shells of that constuction do the same thing. For this one, I resolved it using the clylindrical tool. As for the other stubborn piece, the vest I followed Michele's advice in attempting to smoothen ...

So it was up to me to unfold the UVs of the new Superhero costume. I managed to pull off unfolding and organizing the coat, the hat, and other things were already unfolded based on the former Mother model. Unfortunately two pieces would not unfold due to a "manifold" error. Usually when I opt to unfold with this error, it offers to "fix" this but with the vest, it tears apart the following faces in this next picture, separating the vertices. As far as I know, there were no ingons and all faces were quads. The vest wasn't the only piece with the manifold error. The boots were also an unknown fix. With this "fix" nothing was solved because nothing happened when I opted to fix. Somehow I had help to separate the pieces but I still could not unfold nor optimize the UV shells.     For the time being, I moved on from UV'ing the costume to other involved errands like the Band-aid that goes on the Daughter's finger. This model was fairly simple and as ...

  The model for the superhero costume is now coming to a finish. All that was left were some adjustment according to the director's notes and a suggestion I made to shaping the hat after lifting the back of the hat's rim. Mainly I was to thicken the hands to be gloves, make a slight extrusion on the bottom of the vest, add more topology on the elbows of the sleeves, and readjust the shoulders. These are the results of the new adjustments. Some of these adjustments have also just been approved by the director. As for the animating the other rigs. We've recently had the teeth and tongue added to the daughter rig. As we started animating the jaw and lips, I noticed a few flaws on the daughter's teeth and how they were positioned and made notes of that to the crew. There was also a problem with the skinning on the lips as they wouldn't open properly. As for the mother rig, tests on the mouth and her rig went smoothly. All that needs to be done is to finish animating her...