Heyo, it's Alyssa here with a little talk about my personal progress on the group project over the summer, as well as something neat I discovered that could be applied to one of my characters.
Summer was very different this year, and it’s both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because the group and I got the opportunity to work well over the summer, but a curse because of… everything else.The main objective: get the modeling done that summer. Six scenes divided among six people and the characters divided up in a variety of ways, and I chose the Flash Dive as my locale. After researching bar aesthetics as well as items to maintain the more “exposed” theme of the Circuit District, I modeled up the bar. A frozen drink machine here, the tables and screws there, ooh, what if the soda taps were like gasoline pumps? The modeling of the bar was complete by the end of July.
Next up were the characters- I modified the Wattie model, redoing his jacket from his beta look, then created Nick LN Dimes, a mouse, and a background character I did clock motifs on.
I was surprised to see it was mid-August when I finished my initial character models. I was pretty far ahead so I figured I’d texture as well! The Dive was going to be the biggest challenge and I realized that I needed to look as cool as possible. As a result, I took on the challenge of UVing and then using procreate to create most of the textures to recreate my concept art as closely as possible.
Afterwards I started texturing the characters and here we are at the start of the school year.
The biggest highlight from this week was a personal internal debate over Wattie’s eyes. When I initially designed him, I originally had his eyes as polygons behind a translucent screen, but I realized I needed Wattie to really express. The idea I had: texture the eyes instead and find a way to cycle through the textures whenever it's necessary. It's safe to say that I was inspired by Animal Crossing's method of character expression.
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| Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), Nintendo |
Deleting the polygonal eyes, I decided to take on the task of making 14 textures for the screen, Wattie’s eyes changing expression each one. My old pal Google told me that if I titled each file wattieface.0000, 0001 and so on in that, they could be brought in as an image sequence that can be cycled through and keyed. As a result, one model, in this case the screen, can now have multiple textures on top of it. I feel this will benefit a lot allowing Wattie to have endless possibilities with how his eye screen looks rather than be limited by the polygons. I used the Reddit question and answer here to find this out, look for the comment by user blueSGL (it should be the second comment on the forum there).
There are still textures that need polishing, namely Wattie’s coat. The pockets are a bit askew and the texture of the coat is being inconsistent because of the UVs. I’ll probably have to redo Wattie’s coat UV and ensure that I have both a consistent place for the pockets using edge loops as guides and a better UV to make the patterning more even. In addition, I plan to program a driven key so that this feature could be accessed from the channel box tab rather than having to go back and forth between going into the attributes folder, going into the texture folder, and clicking on the color to get to this file attribute.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I'm excited for how all the characters will end up looking once I get everything more polished.
Alyssa out!
