Presentation Shot Test

Beauty Shot Test

Instrument Rough Model

I’ve been second guessing the overall design of my character, so I built a quick rig and posed her to see what kind of silhouettes I could get.  The rig was pretty sloppy, which made it difficult to pose her correctly (terrible deformations!) , but I think this was worth the time because now I have a better idea of what needs to be changed.

I started off building a guqin/guzheng hybrid, but it was looking really odd, so I decided to go back to a more conventional guqin.  I was thinking about adding some guzheng-ish frets though to make it look like she could play the instrument horizontally or vertically, but that also means I’ll have to add some finger picks too.

My goal is to start baking my maps this weekend!

I’m going to have to call this body/outfit “done,” even though it’s not, if I want to finish this thing on time….which I probably won’t   Her head positioning and neck are really bothering me, so I’ll be fixing that as well as some other proportional issues, but as far as detailing out the high res goes, this is pretty much it.

My entry probably isn’t the most exciting of WIPs (especially in comparison to a lot of the other killer work being done for this competition), but I think things will come together more once I get to the texturing/lighting stage. I’m planning on relying on other things aside from a heavy normal map, but we’ll see how well that goes in the end.

The sculpt  on her hair is just temporary geometry to make it easier to build the low poly alpha hair.

Lately I’ve been struggling with the design of her instrument.  It’s pretty hard to think of a cool pose with her sitting down playing a guqin, and having her play such an instrument vertically doesn’t make any sense, so I’ve been thinking of changing it to a guzheng, or perhaps some sort of guqin/guzheng hybrid.  I suppose I should do some pose sketches and decide then.  A guzheng might also give her a stronger presence, which may fit the theme of the contest better.

This isn’t the latest iteration, but I forgot to post this the other day.  Progress is going pretty slow, but at least concept wise, I think all that’s left is to re-design her instrument to make it a little more fantastic and unique looking.  I figured I would work out all the little details when I get further along with the model (though I can see this backfiring on me in many ways).  Still a long way to go!

I know I haven’t been posting much, but I’ve been pretty busy with other things.  I’ll be posting something about what’s been keeping me preoccupied for the past several months within the next few weeks.  In the meantime, here’s my Dominance War IV entry.  Hopefully I manage to finish it this year!

I decided to join the Chinese forum HXSD this time around instead of going with 3dTotal again. I was mainly attracted by the fact that their forum logo and colors fit the kind of character I wanted to make better than other forums. My Chinese is pretty bad, but fortunately the famous Fan Yang is kind enough to help me out with translating (even though she should be entering the competition too!). 谢谢您姐姐！

You can see my thread here, but you have to be registered and logged in in order to see any images.  I’ll be posting updates here as I have them