Final project direction
In the beginning, the project I was hesitant to make was stone, which was a story version I had drawn a long time ago, but never got around to making it. It’s a story that I love so much that I want to try and make it and finish it.
However, I think maybe the main character of this project is too simple. I’m afraid the overall effect is not good. Therefore, I gave up on this project.
I wanted to make a project that might be more technically challenging, so I chose to continue to make and modify the project proposal “Robbing” of last semester.
I have a detailed story in mind for this project, but I don’t have enough time to draw the storyboard. I will elaborate on the detailed story in next week’s blog.
Design and make character models
Reference and inspiration for the character design：
I like characters with personalities and independence. The heroine is a more neutral character. So when I design and make characters, I tend to look for independent, cool references.
These reference images are mainly used to reference the costume and avatar designs of the characters
This picture inspires me a lot. This image is the best reference for my character.
These references were enough for me to determine the initial direction of my character design, so I drew and made the initial character design. And use this character design as a poster of capturing the character. Poster design of the government hunting the protagonist:
The heroine was a famous thief who stole the wealth of various officials of the Jin State to help the people displaced by the war when the Jin State invaded the Northern Song. This poster, to introduce the character’s background, shows that she is a notorious bandit in the Kingdom of Jin. She was in danger of arrest at any moment.
As for the modeling, I have made at least 29 versions:
The making and calcuating the movement of clothes
As you can see, I made some changes to the clothes. The top of the character was originally a cape-like design, but I didn’t think the cape looked good and interfered with the character’s movement and performance, so I removed the cape. In several scenes, the character walked in the dark. In order to make the audience easily recognize the movement of the character in the dark, I matched her collar and belt with bright red.
Front and rear views of the model-The first edition:
After modifying the video model display-The final edition:
The clothes were made in Maya, and I was trying to make the characters look more alive, so I decided to calculate the clothes’ movement in Maya for the characters. This is a way to calculate the character’s clothes movement that I knew about it but had not yet tried to apply to my project. It is the first time I try to do it. In that sense, I feel it could be a new journey and challenge for me.
This is the fabric and the being bumped object in the Maya outline window:
This is the effect of fabric movement calculation in real-time when the character is moving:
The calculation of the fabric movement of the character is possible in Maya. But when the character has very intense movements and huge movements, I have to give up the fabric calculation for a while. Because the original rigging is more appropriate for intense motion shots.
Given the limited time and schedule, nothing is ever going to be perfect, and doing fabric calculation is not the main goal of my entire project, so I won’t spend too much time on this upper part. At least, at the moment the character’s clothes movement looks good to me at the moment.
Rigging and painting weight of each part:
I worked hard on the modeling and rigging. At beginning, I had a lot of problems with rigging, like weird weight distribution.
Finally, all problems are solved by drawing the weight of each part of the character over and over again.
I modelled in Maya and rigged using advanced skeletons, which I thought was an effective rigging way for my project. I also added extra bindings and bone controllers for the character’s hair.
至于绑定，我至少做了12个版本：
Map design of the two countries: