I finished my model of Maya. In the end, I’m very dissatisfied. The character model itself isn’t terrible, but has a lot of flaws. I modeled the clothing the old way, thinking it would save some effort, but it ended up being more of a hassle. I think next time, I’ll sculpt and retopo it instead. I also noticed clipping on the skirt that shouldn’t be there; it’s rigged the same way as the body, so it should have moved as one.
The Freestyle lines behaved unexpectedly in a lot of places, too. The mouth and fingers, for example, are totally covered by the lines. It’s not a good look at all. I wanted to change it, but for some reason, the shader took a ridiculously long time to render; it was all I could do to get one image. Partly, it was because Freestyle, I think; the hair is dense and a bit complicated, so it probably made it choke. I added the hair to a collection that Freestyle should have ignored, but I must have made an error, because it rendered it anyway.
I did manage to work out rigging now, at least. I used a mesh deform for the body, and then armatures for the hands and face. It was really tricky setting up the vertex groups just right for that, and a hassle, but it can’t be helped.
I have that now, though, so I’m going to save it separately for easy reuse on other character meshes. That way I won’t have to re-rig entirely each time. In this instance, I made a larger duplicate of the main one to use on the clothes. Next time, I might just make only one cage for all of them and just make it bigger. I need to change the weights in some places, though. The arms didn’t deform quite right. It might be a corrective shapekey requiring issue.
I’ve also realised I should change tactics with some things. With this model, I used normal maps instead of a higher poly count, because I thought a lower-poly mesh would be easier to work with. It was, but it also limits it. I can’t modify the shading normals the way I could on a standard mesh, because the normal map would be applied after that. And it ended up being a pain trying to keep the details via the normal map; I think next time, I’ll just make a higher poly mesh from the sculpt and preserve the details as much as I can via raw polycount instead of tricks.
I also need to revise my watercolour shader; I need to find out why it was so slow to render, and fix it. It was too sluggish to modify the shading using my vertex colours method, so I had to render as was, which is not ideal.
I have a lot of things to do differently next time. I’ll do better. Next, I’m going to make models of Malik and Mariku using those techniques.
Riya's NPR Log 