Yr2 Week 17: Concept Changes and modelling progress

This week unfortunately I had to backtrack a little. I noticed quite a few issues with my concept which I went back to change and create an almost entirely new design.

First of all, I decided that there wasn't enough contrast between my characters, the original sorceress looked too dark and evil, and not particularly good. As well as this I was told by one tutor that my second character had to be a humanoid, which is not what I was told originally. So I decided to change my frog to be more humanoid and stand up on it's legs, rather than be a regular frog.

I haven't yet done a colour version of the concept, but as I am far behind I decided to start modelling the clothes and to go back to the colour later on, as this isn't needed until texturing.

I decided to try to learn Marvelous Designer for the clothes, as I thought it seems to be a program more commonly used in the industry and if I can learn it quite well it might be useful in my workflows. However I found it extremely irritating. I spent far too long trying to adjust the dress in MD without much success. The straps kept falling off, and the dress kept bunching in strange places, I was also unable to get the dress to flare out as much as I wanted at the bottom either, it would just become puffy and unable to hold itself, no matter on the material which I used.

I imported the basic dress into 3DS Max, where I re-topologised it, added a shell, and modified the topology. I cut out a hole in the dress as I was unable to figure out how to do this in marvelous designer, and also changed the shape a little to match my concept more.

After I had edited the basic shape, I imported it to Zbrush where I modified the dress further. I pulled out the bottom to achieve the desired shape, and added more folds and texture details using a custom fold brush which I created. I then started adding detail to things such as the shoes and experimenting with detailing on the dress. I used the curve snap brush to draw patterns onto the dress. Adding the small details was quite difficult, as the curve snap brush tends to snap to the other side of my dress, so I had to tweak it as best as I could and hope that it doesn't look too uneven.

A few things I have left to do include changing the hair as I am not overly happy with it, and also adding more details to the shoes and dress. I want to change her hands also, as they currently look like balloons and are slightly inflated in shape whilst also being too short. I was hoping to have my model completed by the end of the week, but hopefully I am not too far off of this now and should have it completed early on in the week.