FMP Final Evaluation

    As stated in the statement of intent, I was aiming to create a character as close to a professional level, with a good topology and number of polygons, even though my project is a frozen still, with no character animation.  The project bears the name of the character, which is “Faith”.  The character is a young adult female, stuck under a street lamp in a world where an apocalyptic event-like happened, when all the electricity vanished. Around the character I will also model a small, but detailed environment, which will help me induce the atmosphere that I’m looking for to the viewer. It’s going to be a frozen scene, similar with the “Carousel” (2009) advertisement, with the cameras slowly moving through the scene, getting closer to the character. In my opinion, I feel like everything turned out great, except some of the characters features which I’ve modelled wrong. Features like the mouth, which has a weird shape, making the character look almost male and the right leg, which looks a little bit fat and small, compared to the other one. The rest turned out to be great, in some parts even better than expected, parts like the year and the building debris falling. 

   I’ve researched a wide range of things for my FMP, from game designs to the Renaissance art. As secondary research, I’ve started to look at some of my favourite characters, and how they were created. Some of the characters I’ve researched were Leah from “Diablo 3” (2012), Lara Croft from “Rise of the Tomb Rider” (2015) and Black Widow from “The Avengers” (2012). They’ve inspired some of my characters traits, story and personality for the backstory. I’ve also studied different types of poses, Renaissance art paintings and statues, which showed me how dynamics and emotions can be send trough a still image. I’ve also looked at some anatomical studies from Gottfried Bammes. As primary research I’ve done some sketches and studies of the female anatomy, as well as environment sketches. These helped me understand the muscles of the human body better, and how some of them move, to be able to try to replicate that in my scene. I’ve also took multiple photographs of a female, photos of her hands, arms and her standing in the position my character will be in, which I’ve also used as a reference image while modelling the character. The research was probably one of the most important thing that helped me develop and achieve my FMP, by providing lots of details without which I wouldn’t have been able to depict my character the way I did.

   While modelling the scene and texturing, I’ve done countless experimentations regarding various parts of the character and environment. The first thing I’ve experimented with was the techniques of modelling a human body, learning them from tutorials, techniques which I’ve further used throughout the project. I’ve also experimented with ways of texturing in Mudbox, on how to do the UV’s of an object, different styles of creating the hair, environments, grass texture, and different music while editing. I’ve encountered problems while creating the character, when trying to connect the head to the rest of the body. Having those both made separately, they had a different number of polygons where they should’ve connect, so I had to redo the body starting from the head down. While doing the environment part of the project I had to problems, because I’ve already made recently 2 other environments for other units at college, and I’ve learned how to create the buildings and various assets fast, effective and how to keep a low polygon count.

    I had the basic concept of how my scene was going to look like from the beginning of the project, even before writing the statement of intent, adding or changing small details along the road. I knew that I was going to create the models in Maya, texture them in Mudbox and do the visualisation in Unity. I decided that the character should be in a danger situation, in an apocalyptic world, and that the environment was going to be an abandon city with vegetation growing everywhere.  I found the methods which I’ve used very successful while working on the projects, mainly because I got used to the most of the tools in the programs mentioned before, while working on previous projects. Everything I’ve learned through the journey of the past year here in college, became helpful in one way or another, from Photoshop techniques which helped me edit and create my own textures, to Maya which allowed me to model the character and assets, Mudbox which helped me texture the character, and Unity to create the lightning system and the cameras for the visualisation. I found that my strength is to model 3D objects/characters in Maya, and I also found this the most enjoyable out of everything else. My weaknesses are in the editing process, because I’ve been focusing on learning to the best of my ability the other methods. I will most definitely try to learn more about this in my spare time, because the editing process can complete a project, or ruin it if not made right.

    My final outcome has little changes in it related to my statement of intent. I haven’t made sketches in Photoshop for my character design because I’ve decided the one made in pencil gave me enough information about how the character is going to look like. I’ve also decided to remove the backpack from my character, because it could’ve distract the viewer from the actual character, and add a high number of polygons to my scene, which I was trying to avoid. Some of the external feedback I’ve received was regarding some of the problems that I noticed myself at the end of the project, things like the lips having a weird shape, the hair looking too cartoonish and that the right leg of the character looks fat and short compared to the other one. But I didn’t received just negative feedback, I’ve also received positive ones which made me feel really proud of the final outcome and it made me want to do another project like this, because I’ve realized that my work was appreciated and enjoyed by others. Some of this feedback was regarding the detail of the hands, eyes and environment, but also about the colour pallet that I’ve chose, saying that it looks like it’s a scene from a movie.  I, myself am proud of the final outcome, knowing how much hard work I’ve put into it and seeing how well it looks and how it was appreciated by everyone, some of them without knowing how much work had to be done for this.

     At the beginning of the project, I’ve created a timetable with what I will do in the period of time which I had allocated for the project.  I didn’t manage my time as intended, because I’ve underestimated the time required to model a character, and I some point I was behind the schedule with a day, but I’ve recovered the time lost working extra hours at night, and use the 2 extra days I’ve allocated in my timetable as emergency. I think I managed to create a good plan on how to use my time, this being proved by the fact that I’ve finished the project without missing any parts of it because of to less time remaining. Managing a good plan is important because it makes the difference between a productive day and a hectic one, and it’s important especially if you have a deadline to achieve. Organisation of time makes the difference between, in this case, a good artist and a bad one.