Rhia Crouch's Blog

Looking back at my Minor project I can see that this has really tested on a number of levels and has made me face things that I would normally not want to do. It has also made me see how much work I have to do to reach my goals. My main aims for this project was to have the two characters in my animation fully rigged and textured but I seemed to had over estimated my working abilities, as there was a number of times that I had to go back to something to make it better after getting feedback on it. The main thing that this happen with was redesigning my characters. I was happy and willing to get the feed back and act on it but after some time I was starting to feel that I wasn't going anywhere with my work and was wasting time fixing the smallest of details. I was hoping to have them done with in two weeks but it took much longer. After I had finaly landed on a finished for my characters I had to start thinking about how I was going model them in Maya. I haven't been that co...

Minor: Moon and Sun Turn Arounds from Rhia Crouch on Vimeo .

Putting together my Art Of for my project is abit of a challenge for me as when I try to plan out the pages I can't seem to make them look nice. I also seem to have trouble with trying to get across the feel and art style of my project even when I'm using the simplest of styles. For each chapter of my Art Of I am going to use a title page. As shown below I have used borders that relate back to the colours of the characters as well as using the a faint wood texture with the text in the middle. The pages that I seem to be having the most trouble with are the ones that show the designing process that I went through for the characters. I seem to find it difficult planing out the pages so that the images are not squashed as well as not being overloading the pages. Below are some tests that I have done.

I'm not too sure if I have gotten the UVs right on Moon as some of the seams can be seen, but as she is going to mostly be blocks of colour I don't think that it should matter.

Finely finished Sun's model. It took me abit longer than I wanted as Maya decided to freeze on me when I was cleaning up the screen and delete the crown and arms so I lost time finding an older file and fixing it. I've also decided to leave out the Sun's collar that went round the neck so that I don't have any more trouble and can move on to the next step. I am happy with the way that it has turned out and am happy that I have been able to model two characters.

Arms are slowly coming along.

Starting building up Sun's body now. Seems to be coming along alot faster than Moon but I think that's because I know what I need to do this time around.

Finally finished modeling Moon. It took me a little while as I had to work out now I was going to create some of the shapes that didn't look like they came from one of the standard shapes that could be used in Maya. Overall, I'm quite happy with how this has come out.

Moon's body is nearly 100% done, I just need to fix the tail dress so that it stops cliping through the tail and bending at an odd angle as it goes round. I also need to extrude it out so that it is a better shape as well as finishing the pin.

After a few days off for the hoildays I'm back to modeling Moon and she is coming along. Her tail was the easiest the thing that I've modeled so far and I'm happy with the way that it is able to keep the shape that I wanted for her. The fingers did give me some trouble as I was trying to keep it to the drawing but also fix the probmles when trying to match them up. I also had to work out a way of showing the joints in the fingers and what would be the best way of rounding off the tips of the fingers so that they didn't appear bumby. Overal, I think that I have done rather well but I feel that there might be some things that might need fixing. I hope to have Moon fully modeled by the end of the week as I just need to create the other arm and make the tail dress and pin. I'm still abit unsure if I need to make a hole in the body of the shoulder joint to sit in as the model seems to do just fine without it, I might have to do a side by side comparison to see ...

Moon's body is slowly coming along. Just need to work on the fingers and create the hole that the shoulder joint will go in to with the body.

Finely finished modeling the Sun's head which took me longer than I would have liked because of the shape of the hair and crown, along with facing a number of problems that cost me time. However, I am happy with the way that it has come out. On the other hand I'm not happy with the renders that I'm showing here as for some reason when I use Arnold Render at home the saved images come out alot darker than what is shown in the render view. I can't seem to find what might be the problem that is causing this so I have had to use a Sky Dome light for the time being, as it shows the model a lot better, untill I can re-render it.

Modeling the Sun's crown seems to be taking me abit longer than the Moon's due to the complex shape of it. However, I have managed to get the main body of it done but still need to fix it up abit more and add some more details to it before finishing the head and moving on to the body.

It took me abit longer to model the Sun's hair as it was a bit more complex with the number of points at the bottom but I'm happy with the way that it came out. I did find myself thinking alittle differently with this one as the under part of the hair would be visibal form the front so I had to think about if this would effect the way that I made it. I might go back and edit the tip of the points to see if I can find a better way of doing them so that they don't look so square.

Fix up the crown a bit more so that the moon is no longer merging in to the band at the front as well as adding some volume to it so that it doesn't look like a set of flat disks.