APCG 498 Work Progress Week 9 October 10/31/13

I couldn't finish all the texturing and render this week but I managed to get my UVs done. They have gotten better from the last one but still need some fixing. Also since I will be drawing and shading in colors for the texture, I hope some of the small bad UVs don't ruin the drawn in textures. The bottom leg UVs looks bad but since I'm also placing the leg gauntlets on top of them, it won't matter much. Anyhow, the textures that I will use to shade into the tiger's body is mostly plain black and white, so hopefully it will reduce the negativity of the UVs.

Since I'm going to mirror half of my geometry, I only UVed one side of my tiger model. I also had a lot of problem just refixing and re-UVing the meshes, along with trail and error to get some shapes unfold correctly and flipped. Most of the hard parts are finished now and only the texturing and wireframe turntable are underway. Next Week I'll begin my next creature concept art and later model.

APCG 498 Work Progress Week 8 October 10/24/13

These are the mesh that I've refined so far and have also added the leg gauntlets and spinal column spikes. I also added spikes to the tail and added the ice chest piece.

I added some plain shader colors to the model just to see how it looks like. This isn't how the final model texture would look like.

I retook the images again because the earlier images of my creature tiger was too bright. I also think that I will need to separate the leg gauntlets, chest armor, spinal column, and tail spikes away from the body because when they are smoothed their shape doesn't hold up. I'm also having trouble deciding whether I should use the hair tool to create the yellow hair mane for my tiger and its tail or should I just create some hair from polygon geometries. Anyhow, I'll try to finish the UV, texture, and finish rendering the creature by next week. If not all, then I'll just try to at least get the UVs done because they are one of the most troublesome obstacle to me right not and long before, especially on this tiger model because I haven't UVed a quadruped before. I suspect the head skull crest crown to be the most difficult.

APCG 498 Work Progress Week 7 October 10/17

I had already begun to work on refining the body and the muscles of the tiger until I had a recent file corruption on my current Maya file. The whole body seems to be completely gone. So I had to go back to a previous backed up file and reconnect all the body, head, and legs again along with fixing and adding geometry to them. Luckily I was able to piece them together.

I added some checker textures to checkout which parts of my tiger needed more geometry and UV texture fix. I can see that the both the front and back legs need some fixing to do, and also the back. I decided not to include the back spinal column and gauntlets yet because I don't know whether to make them a separate prop or a complete prop from the tiger's body geometry.

APCG 498 Current Work Presentation 10/15/2013

                                                            Current work done so far.

APCG 498 Work Progress October Week 6

I managed to finally complete modeling out the head piece after a refixing some pole and fore-shorting geometries. Then I landed with another problem, I forgot to give volume to the head. So I tried extruding the whole head piece back to form volume but it didn't turn out the way I wanted it to. The only way to make this go faster was to duplicate a portion of the front head and just extrude and bridge the geometry together to get depth and volume. Bridging also didn't work out well, so i had to manually extrude each length of geometry and merge each vertices together. Frank also helped me speed it up by using an edge line merge tool.

So far the problems with the head mesh has hindered me from progressing farther but I'm still going on slowly and learning new ways to solve some of the issues in my geometry. I guess I'll have to crunch through this work throughout the weekend and hopefully get at least some checker textures and UVs done before Tuesday.

APCG 498 Work Progress October Week 5

I've encountered some trouble here on the head geometry refix over the weekend and this week. Made some pole geometry and In-gons that I didn't even know was in there until I rechecked the head model. Another mistake that I found was that my concept reference art had some fore-shortening drawing parts on them so I had to go back and redo and realigned the head structure all over again. Just thinking of solving the top head geometry right now as you can see that the top isn't done because there is some geometry and workflow that needs solving before extruding the top head piece.

I haven't done much with the body yet because I'm still addressing the geometry and workflow of the head piece.I also just added a basic six sided cylinder tail to the body. I'll get to working on the body next week once I finish fixing the complex head mesh.