The characters have been fully reposed holding their weapons and the sculpting of each of the characters is finished as well. This weekend will be devoted to finishing the textures of the characters in Substance Painter and rendering.

After receiving critiques from thesis defense I have reposed my characters and they will be holding their weapons. I have also decided to cut down on the amount of text that describes the characters and instead focus on developing the characters further as it was suggested in the critique. It was also suggested that I instead go with stills instead of the camera fly through. I have been working on sculpting in more detail in each of the characters and the texturing. The gun models are from Dan Aran and will be input into the scene. 

Over the past two weeks I have worked on improving my lighting in the scene by adding glowing lights in the ceiling and evening out the lighting and shadows. I have also placed the textures on the models to see how they will look before I refine them more. 

This is the fly-through video with the potential text that will be displayed in the final product.

This past week I reworked my camera moves and finished the sculpting for Kiran and Eloisa. Clarus will be finished up this weekend and then textures will start being applied. The rest of the room will be filled with temporary cubes and other objects and then they will be replaced by actual props. The lighting will be finalized next week as well.

With the wind storm that happened before Spring Break that caused a power outage to most of Rochester as well as the following snow storm during Spring Break I have fallen a bit behind on where I wanted to be. With that said I have the characters posed in the room. Textures and normal maps will be added next week along with more detail to the overall room and lighting. I have been having problems with the hair cards and might just decide to sculpt the hair instead.

This week consisted of thesis presentations and critiques for both Shaun and David's classes. The power point below contains the information about my project as well as what I need to do to finish it. The video below shows my blocking out of the room and the camera moves.

Critique I received was to use separate cameras, lower the cameras, use a pan and cut and use more dynamic camera moves.

These are the head shots of my characters drawn by Gladys and I will have the full colored character sheets soon.

Below is a slide show of Kiran and how she has changed throughout the week ending with my resculpting of her head to match the drawings. The hair will be added later this week as well as her being posed and further sculpted as needed.

Sculpting and hair.

In my meeting with David last week he suggested that I start blocking out what my final product is going to look like with the camera moves and transitions. I will work on that this weekend and every subsequent weekend until the project is due and refine it up to the final presentation.

This past week I worked on UV Mapping every part of the leader character and started working on the fibermesh hair as well as looking in to texturing my characters with Substance. 

After getting critique from the thesis round-robin last week I have moved forward on my sculpts and further refined them to look as close as possible to the sketches done by illustrator Gladys Leung who I have been working with to better fit with the style I had imagined for my characters. You can find her other work at her website here. In the coming weeks I will be getting character turnarounds that better showcase my characters.

I have also added more backstory to my characters and decided to give them weapons to better distinguish them and give them a unique silhouette.

I did a quick sketch of my characters with their weapons to give myself an idea of what poses I may want my characters to be in. I will further refine the sketch and finalize the poses of the characters soon.

I have also worked on better nailing down the proportions of the characters before starting the fine detail sculpting on the leader. The leader has been retopologized and has simpler geometry on the clothing and I will work on the rest of the characters this week.

This week I will continue sculpting the characters and better refining the features of them to match them more closely to the sketches done by Gladys. I will also begin texturing them in Maya to get a sense of what they will look like before going into Substance.

Other critiques I received on the characters was to use Mixamo to quickly rig them and animate them as well as possibly changing the color schemes of the uniforms a bit to better tell them apart. It was suggested I look at Team Fortress 2 characters which have red in their clothing but all have their distinct uniforms.

I also have thought about putting the characters into Unreal Engine as I do want to have these characters as part of a future game. It was also suggested to me to have my characters in freeze frame poses like in this Cyberpunk 2077 trailer where the characters are frozen but the camera moves around them.

The final critiques were to better model the characters to the sketches with paying attention to straight lines and curves and to work on the backstories of the characters and the way to portray this information without stating it.