Pocahontas!

After a long an stressful term of knowing nothing about character modelling I've finally finished and actually produced something that you could call a character!

And here she is in an odd gorilla-style mid walk. I discovered that because of her weird body shape and possibly incorrect rigging, it was difficult to leave her arms in a natural pose. Especially as the arm controls would only allow me to rotate the joints as the translate tools were locked. And because her shoulders are small and her belly is large, the armpits would starting deforming when the arm rotated too much.

But overall I am quite satisfied with my final product. I like her hair and the way the belly is textured, however if I were to re-do my character I would work more on the rig and skin weights for better posing flexibility. I would also work more on the overall texturing on the model. 

Textured!

I'm quite pleased with the final outcome, especially the way the patterned belly turned out. However, I would have liked to work on the texture of the rest of the model more, and have time to research more into ways to make her closer resemble plasticine. I did look into any techniques previous modellers might have used, but nothing solid came up and majority of people used other packages such as 3ds Max.

UV Mapping

UV mapping was definitely a difficult one. After several attempts of cutting seams, sewing them back, mapping, relaxing and unfolding UVs I eventually got there.

And below is a somewhat decent effort of my first attempt at ever UV mapping. The checkered pattern allowed me to determine any distortion and I discovered that UV mapping was basically trying to get as many squares straight, levelled and evenly distributed as possible.

Rigging and Skinning

Using the Rapid Rig : Basic script downloaded from Creative Crash I was able to quickly generate a simple rig for my character. After placing the joints in the correct place the more difficult part came of painting the skin weights.

I was able to find several tutorials to guide me through how to paint the skin weights, and after a while it was quite simple. The only annoying part was when I thought I removed all the unwanted weights but it'll still move to the wrong joint as sometimes a faint unnoticeable skin weight is still left, so it became a lengthy process of going back and forth fixing each part.

3D Printed Model

My 3D printed model! One of her hands fell off but it's still pretty cool.

Modelling in Maya

Being very new to modelling and even Maya, I had to do a lot of research before getting started. So I rented a couple of Maya books from the library and mainly Googled or YouTubed some more tutorials.

One of the most difficult part of modelling my character was the hair and face, as the hair wasn't symmetrical so I had to model it as a whole. And I had trouble with the random spikes in her hair, as I didn't want to model every individual piece of hair on her head, but rather have her hair as one mesh as this would resemble clay more.

And because she has such large eyes which are wide apart it was quite difficult to try and model a smooth face with good edge loops.

In my original design my character had a large zip at the back of her suit, however I decided to not include this as I'm now trying to model a claymation style character and the zip has far to much detail and might not look right. 

And here are the renders of my completed model. I tried keeping as much of the model as smooth as possible to stick with the claymation style.

Claymation

The brief states that our characters could be modelled in the visual style of claymation but using CG techinques. I do like style of the characters especially those below from the Aardman Studios. Their famous characters tend to be made up of simple shapes with smooth rounded edges. They don't concentrate on immense detail which gives them a very unique style. 

Wallace and Gromit

Animals Save the Planet

Pib and Pog

Colour

After having designed the pattern of the belly I now need to decide on Pocahontas' colouring.

I began with thinking of the most obvious colour scheme, which is that of an actual gorilla however the black hair and black suit is quite dull and unappealing. It don't quite work well with the pattern and her childish nature.  

I do quite like this purple suit but the colour is too harsh against the pattern and her skin.

Pushing it further I decided to change her hair colour to a much brighter, warmer colour and the same with her suit. The colours gives the impression that she's an energetic and happy character which is the direction I'm going towards.

So still sticking with using warm colours, I finally decided to give her bright orange hair and a pink gorilla suit. The orange hair I think works well with her messy badly cut hair, and the pink is a nice bold colour but still goes well with the several patterns.

Pattern

I found this really helpful site called Patternhead which provides hundreds of patterns for free, and below are several that I liked and thought I could use on my model. I saved the patterns that were appealing to me, and were a mixture of complex flower patterns and simple geometric shapes as the idea is that Pocahontas asked her grandma to help make her gorilla suit. So the strange miss match designs will represent their different tastes. 

In Photoshop I merged the patterns into one piece to resemble a patchwork blanket and applied a craquelure texture, which raised the patterns a little. It now looks much more like several materials sewed together rather than one flat image. Then I added stitching for the finishing touch. I'm quite pleased with the finished design.

Final Concept

I've finalised my design of Pocahontas. She's wearing a one-piece which zips up at the back. I wanted her hands and feet to be bare to resemble a gorilla more.

Gorilla Suits

I wasn't satisfied with my design and wanted to take it further by putting Pocahontas in a gorilla suit. Below are images of children in gorilla suits and of actual gorillas to get an idea of how it would look.

Here's an idea of what her suit would look like. I wanted it to look handmade and patchy, as the idea is her grandmother made it for her. So the belly would be covered with different materials and patterns similar to the images below.