Week 30, Year 2: Time Lord Resubmission Post-Mortem.

The 'dichotomy character project' was by far my weakest project of the year. Due to poor planning, an overambitious idea, and falling ill, I produced an absolutely atrocious pair of characters. Happily, we were all given the chance to resubmit the project before the end of the year, so I've been working on it in the evenings, in-between writing essays and working on Off the Map.

I decided to drop the second character stretch goal and just focus on getting the one character right. I had limited spare time to work on it, but I wanted to produce something polished all the same. This is also the first time I've used Zbrush for a complete sculpt. As the original model was such a disaster, I decided to totally redo it. I'm quite pleased with the results and it's certainly a vast improvement!

The face and clothes came out well but I struggled with the shoulder piece. I'm aware that amazing hard surface results are possible in Zbrush, but I'm not even close to proficient enough with the software to be able to achieve them. I knew this would be a sticking point for me so I chose to use the original Timelord design, despite it being quite flat and plain.

I would've liked to incorporate more asymmetrical elements and varied materials to break up the character. I feel the main thing that's lacking is complexity and visual interest. I focused too much on tinkering with the DOTA 2 shader, when I should've been painting textures and trying to match the art style rather than the tech stuff.

It was also my first crack at retopology. Surprisingly, it went very smoothly. It's definitely something I will use in the future, so it was nice to get my head around it. But it was a slow process, as the characters modular nature required me to retopologize it piece by piece. 

This also became very time consuming during texturing, as each piece requires a set of 10 maps and masks. As the character was broken up into 8 'components', I had to author 80 of these which slowed me down significantly.

I learned a lot from redoing this project. While the final result is far from perfect, I feel that if I was to repeat the project a third time, I would finally get it spot on.

So, next time I will:

• Use more asymmetrical elements, varied materials and visual complexity to add interest. I should settle on the design, down to the details, from the start of the project.
• Be mindful of the tri-count and how it will be rigged during the design process. I wasted triangles on the hands by modelling individual fingers, which would be rigged using a maximum of 3 bones. I could've also used more triangles to add more interest to the silhouette.
• Don't use a primarily visual project as a technical exercise. I should have ensured accurate anatomy and proportion were in place before worrying about tools and software. This was the root of a lot of the problems I encountered throughout both the original and re-submitted project.
• Plan better. The first time round, the plan was wildly overambitious. The second time round, I wasted time as a result of not planning enough. Had I reduced the number of modular pieces, I would've had more time for iteration and stretch goals.