Thesis: Herbert Rough Texture

The past few days have seen me getting my characters ready for texturing and rigging. While I still need to polish these up, I definitely feel like I'm on the right track.

Here are some shots of Herbert with some new textures, combined with Maya's toon shading.

Siren: 12/11/13

Update on Siren.

Grimble: 12/11/13

A quick update on where Grimble is with a few renders.

Herbert: 12/11/13

Here are just a few pics of Herbert to update you on where I'm at right now.

Thesis Preview - Siren

Siren is the fourth character in "Human Show". She is a domineering and deceitful repurposed companionship bot. I'll save the backstory for another time.

I've had a lot of trouble coming up with designs for Siren. She used to be a boxy little robot with treads for transportation and arms that dispensed human-grooming items as well as weapons. She had a friendly demeanor that hid a controlling and maniacal personality. She was a repurposed war machine (which I still think is a pretty funny idea).

However, when I went back to the drawing board regarding character relations and backstories, I decided to switch things up a bit and change her history. When she changed to a repurposed companionship bot, I decided she needed to be more human in shape. She also needed to project her menace in the design of her body and posture.

What a challenge! On one hand she had to be alluring, and on the other she needed to fit the style of my other characters. She needed to have feminine characteristics, but a commanding presence. In many ways she has to be more human than my human characters! I'm still in the process of pushing her design, but I'm at a much better spot than I was.

Here's a little look into where this character is and where she has come from.

This is where I'm at currently. I have a basic framework of choices that I'm pushing in different directions. 

This is a color key for a design that I was happy to have come up with recently (you can see it in the first image, on the left, although without any hair). The red dot indicates which color scheme I prefer.

These are some thumbnail silhouettes I did to experiment with different choices. You can see how different ideas began to combine to create the design I have now.

Some early struggles with combining the style of my project with a much more human silhouette. Also, with trying to reconcile robotic mechanisms in a simple way.

One of my first tries at the new direction I was taking. This was essentially an attempt to understand the female anatomy I was shooting for in a mechanized way.

 This was the design for Siren I had about 6 months ago. I was happy with it at the time and it served the purpose I was gunning for at the time, but I'm glad I switched directions.

Another look at old Siren, with weapons deployed.

Thesis Preview - Color Keys

Using Photoshop's great masking features and Hue/Sat/Brightness sliders, I've been able to quickly come up with a couple new sheets of color keys for two of my characters. One of the characters you've seen quite often, but the other one is a redesign of one of my aliens (Grimble). I went ahead and posted one of my earlier designs of Grimble to show how much (or how little) he's changed.

I also have some new ideas about "Human Show" that I'm excited to develop and share with you all. It's a new direction for the project that I'm really excited about and has renewed my passion for the project. Look forward to news on that!

 New color keys for Ralph...

 ...and Grimble. New design, too!

An old design of Grimble, running Herbert around.

Thesis Preview: Messing around with Toon Shading

Given that my early sketches of my project relied heavily upon a cartoon style, my professor recently asked me if I had tried anything like it with my models. The truth is I had no idea how to do it, beyond messing with textures. I planned on researching it later on, when I would be focusing more on texturing my characters.

However, today I was watching a video about Nintendo's Wind Waker HD and how they had to alter their toon shader to suit the HD graphics and emphasis on new lighting effects. That got me thinking about using a shader to do some of the heavy lifting for me, or at least to see what I could do with it.

Maya has a Toon option under the Rendering set of menus, so I figured I'd start there. It was really easy to set up some quick shaders and tweak their parameters to come up with some results that looked good. While I'm definitely going to research this approach more and work with my own painted textures, this gives me a good idea of what Maya can do to help me. Check out my results below. Click on the images for a closer look.

Compare these new results with my earlier render to see what a difference there is between the two.