Week 10, Year 2: The week I was ill.

As luck would have it, I remained healthy just long enough to nurse Anya back to health, before promptly falling ill myself. Fortunately not quite as severely, but I'm terrible at being ill so this post is a rather late one. 

Better late than never though, right? So here are the final stages of my character project.

Finally, I finished the model. But it took way too much time! The reason for this is mainly because I took too long to decide how I wanted to go about it. Initially I wanted to learn how to model it from a rough base mesh in ZBrush and then retopolgize it. However I underestimated how much time that would take to both learn and execute.

As I slowly came to the realisation that I wasn't going to have enough time, I fell back to creating the whole thing in 3DS Max, but by then I was already well behind schedule.

A second mistake was thinking that, to save time, I could pose the girl on his shoulders without rigging it. But when I tried it, this turned out to be a big mistake! Fortunately I had previous save versions to fall back on.

So when I eventually decided to call it quits with the model and got it unwrapped, I set about designing the textures. 

Following the DOTA 2 Art Guide, I started with a gradient render to design the values in a way that leads the eye up the model. I chose number 5 as my favourite, although in hindsight I could've used more contrast to increase the visual interest.

I then moved on to colour scheme variations, referencing the art guide and my DOTA 2 mood boards. I chose number 3 because it looked good and best matched the style guide.

Once I had a colour scheme pegged down, I set about creating the texture sheet. I started by applying the base colours over an RGB bake, which I was using as a selection mask. I then overlayed ambient occlusion and light map bakes to very quickly get a base for the hand-painted look I was after.

However as I was running out of time, the bakes were very rushed and contained a lot of errors that needed to be rapidly painted over. I didn't have time to do a lot of the hand painting or properly author the masks. 

The situation was not ideal and I'm not very pleased with the textures I handed in, but I will iterate on it in my own time.

This was definitely the week where I realised just how overambitious I'd been from the very start. A lot of the texturing process was extremely rushed and caused a lot of frustration. 

It was a very stressful week, made a lot worse by being ill. But lessons were learned and I'll write more about them in the next post: Time Lord Post-Mortem.