Punk Girl 3D Character

With this project I set out to create a final render of a character that clearly shows their personality and is of game cinematic quality. I feel that in the majority of aspects I have achieved this but their are certain areas that I know need improvement in my next project. My first mistake was deciding to pose the character before re-topologising, this made the sculpting and cloth simulation process more difficult whilst also not making the final asset game ready. Achieving the pose I wanted through posing and blendshapes after retop would have been more time consuming but would have brought my skill set more in line with the industry expectations.

I learnt a lot about anatomy during this project but still struggled to get it exactly right, hopefully with more practise this is something I can improve upon. I also feel my texturing ability improved throughout this project, although it took me a while to get the clothing materials accurate I am pleased with the final result.

One of the biggest areas of improvement for me I feel is in the topology because of the awkward position I put myself in by posing the high poly it meant I couldn’t use symmetry and creating animation ready topology was difficult and somewhat irrelevant. Hair is another big area of improvement for me. Despite my numerous attempts I never really made anything I was happy with, I also gave up to easily when I encountered trouble as this slowed down the learning process. I learnt a lot about how to create the hair texture and place hair cards but never managed to effectively master either. This is something I will need to spend some dedicated time learning. Another issue I had during this project was organisation of files and naming conventions. It didn’t cause me to lose any work or any serious amount of time but at times it did become a little confusing and had I been producing this work in a studio it would be impossible for others to easily identify my assets and textures.   

One of my goals with this project was to produce a render of the character that was indestiguisable from the photographs that inspired me to start this project. I feel I came pretty close to achieving this goal although I also decided to take the character in a slightly different direction. The final design also differed somewhat from the initial concept I created, I changed the ethnicity of the character but also wanted to have a more volatile personality. I feel I could have done a better job on the accessories in representing her affiliations, interests and from a purely visual standpoint, blended them better with the jacket

I feel this project has taught me what I need in order to make my next project much better. The areas that I wanted to improve on mostly was my clothing workflow using Marvelous Designer and my texturing ability. Despite some problems in the beginning I know feel comfortable taking a garment from MD through to final asset which is a skill I can hopefully better exhibit in my next project. I also learnt to properly analyse materials and recreate those as textures in Substance Designer and Painter which will also be a skill I will hope to improve upon in future.