Times up!

I have finally finished making me head. Its been a long and emotional journey with plenty of sleepless nights, but its finally over and ready to be handed in.

At the start of this project i was feeling very overwhelmed and couldnt get started. For the first week i kept redoing my topology because i felt it wasnt right, after being told multiple that it was fine i moved into max. Again when doing the face i started over a few times to get it perfect but eventually made something i was happy with. Thats when it started to go down hill and i lost my enthusiasm. Fortunatly after chatting to people and seeing other peoples work (mainly chris and Abby's) i decided i didnt want to be left behind so i pushed on. I made it through all the tutorials and made the complete head and i even added hair. I got help from friends within the course as well on the parts i felt lost and confused at so thank you to those people.

The hair tool was alot of fun, no really it was. but i eventually had to give up with it, theres only so many times i can comb my hair into my head, drag back out again and repeat before my head explodes. If my head explodes then it means my model would be wrong and i would have to start again, i really dont have the time to start from scratch.

Below are 2 views of my finished model and i would just like to mention why i have added grey hair, It could be to do with the amount of stress i have had these last few weeks which has made it that way but also its because when i made it all black and rendered it you could hardly see the hair. I spent far too long on it for people not to be able to see it so i thought id add some grey and bring it out a bit more.




























I have learnt alot this semester so far about max and photoshop and am proud of what i have achieved. In photoshop when create the maps i learnt how to use the colour match tool to give 2 images the same colours within them. This helped alot with the colour map as the front and side pictures i had were different shades and the hue/saturation tool just wasnt enough to correct it. I also learnt about disaturiaing and was impressed by what i had achieved. In max i learnt how to use reference planes to build up and image, how to use the UVW unwrap and UVW map tools. I also learnt how to use the hair and fur modifier.

All in all this was a very valuable, enjoyable, if somewhat stressful, project which has showen me a new level to max.

As previously promised

Here are the pictures of my hair so far.

























This is the first time i have used the hair and fur modifier and it is extremely frustrating. Having to drag the hair out of my face everytime i combed it a little got very tedious indeed. But i am happy with how it is looking so far. Lessons learnt: Black hair on black background doesnt work!

Hair

Over the last couple of days after completing the map for my face and tweaking till i was almost happy with it i decided to start on the hair.

The mapping side of things was relativly easy and just involved taking the image from the UVW unmapping and using that as a template in photoshop. I then used my original photos and cut parts from them to make up the map. One i had the templated covered with skin, hair and other features i used the clone and patch tools to cover and areas that looked out of place, for example lines that appeared between two different sections. After this i took it into max and applied it to my head.

Next was the hair. I used the hair and fur modifier for this and after numerous attempts to cut the hair to the right sections of my head and comb it down i found nothing i was doing was working. I had previously found a video tutorial online for this type of thing so watched that through again this helped alot and also i remembered a few of Abby's comments about the hair from when she made hers. Thank you to Abby for that. After a serious of trial and errors i eventually got it looking almost decent. Due to the lack of time left this will have to do. Images to follow.

YMCA Pictures and First models

Following our visit to the YMCA last Tuesday i have decided to upload the pictures i took. These photos were taken to give us an idea of the layout of each room so we can try to make the animation as accurate as possible. This is so that we can give children a good idea of how the events work.
























I also started work on some of the models for our animation. After a lot of talking we finally decided who would be doing what room within the YMCA and what models should be made. I am going to be doing the rock school which involves creating the instuments and have some of our YMCA characters playing them. Chris came up with the character design which is amazing and i am quite envious of his skills within max, damn him! So during teusdays lecture i came up with a model of a guitar and then started on the drums. This is what i have so far:

The Head

After dragging out all my points on the face it was time to model the head. This was a fun task that i restarted around 3 times. Mainly due to myself over complicating things and making it all look rather poor.

To start this stage i had to go back to the pictures of my face and add some more topology to the head and neck. Once this one done and the reference planes in max were updated i could start!

A sphere was drawn that was roughly large enough to go from the face to the back of the head. once this was done most of that faces were deleted leaving me with a curve over the top of my head and half way down the back of my head. I then started cloning and pulling out the edges for the back of the head down the neck, and accross the head. This was were i was over complicating it by adding too many faces.

















Once i had this sorted in a way i liked i could then attach the face to the head. this was done by using the attach tool in the modifier menu for the face. Once this was attached the vertices on the edge of the face and the edge of the head could be welded together to make it one solid object.

Once this was all one object a turbosmooth was added to it to make it all nice and rounded. Well that was the aim anyway, it acctually took alot more tweaking to get it to look like the following picture.





























As you can see by this stage i had also modelled the ear. The ear was not too bad and i thought it went really well. Untill i looked at it from another angle that is! What a nightmare, first it looked 2D so i went back through the tutorial and found i has missed a bit and after adding the back of the ear all was well...............................for now!

Im not convinced this looks anything like me, infact im quite certain it isnt me!

When i asked a friend what they thought about my efforts they replied with "cool, who is it?", hmmmm not really a confidence booster is it?

YMCA Character

A little while ago i created a character for the YMCA advert. It was a simple charcater based on the letter M. The main idea behind it was to animate each letter individually and have them in each room.



I tried to make this animation child friendly so that school children would see a fun side to the YMCA that they could all join in on.

The head

Its been a while since my last post on this project so i will give a brief summary of whats been happening. I have modeled the face in Max and it has gone rather well so far. After a couple of errors early on due to me putting in too many sections and having lots of fun trying to line them up i remade them all but this time made less sections.















As you can see i have the face modelled but i need to do a bit of tweaking before i will be happy with the final result. I wont do too much tweaking at this point as i want to get all the parts done. Then if i have time at the end i will perfect it as much as i can.

Group animation

After discussing what we really wanted to do for this project we decided on a short animation showing a range of activities that the YMCA offer. We narrowed these down to 4 main ones which were a Creche, The Y Club, Rock school and Social events.

As there are 4 people in the group we have split these between us so each of us will work on one activity. The activity i shall be working on is the rock school. A few ideas have been discussed for what needs to be included in each room and these have been posted on the group blog.