Week 6: Questlove's in the house

This week has been the toughest crunch I've ever experienced on this course. I put so much on my plate with this character because I really felt I wasn't pushing myself in previous projects, so I made this stuplidly detailed character that was far too ambitious for a 3 week project. 15 days if you don't count weekends. I generally don't tend to work on my uni projects over the weekends, and this past 2 weekends I would have really liked to work on this project but I've been far to busy with personal and family matters.

There was still a fair amount of retopology to be done at the beginning of the week, and at this point I was really starting to get behind schedule, despite what felt like neverending hard work. This week I began to notice my eyes were getting bloodshot, most likely a combination of stress, lack of sleep and too much staring at computer screens, or at least, that;s probably what my parents would have told me. It got worse and worse throughout the week but it was worth it because I did actually manage to finish the project somehow. The low poly for the character totalled at 28,248 by the time I retopologised everything. I managed to keep all the smaller details that I wanted like the rivets and carabiners.

Next up was the unwrapping, another aspect of this project that I was dreading due to the level of detail on this character. This, again, took slightly longer than I had hoped and was finished including the bake on wednesday evening, giving me a grand total of one full day to texture my entire character, seeing as the friday hand in was for before noon. Below is my unwrap which I think I did a reasonable job of considering the time restraints.

So following this i had 1 day to Learn Substance Painter (which i had never used before) and texture my character. Once I picked up the Substance workflow using layer masks and neat tricks like that I managed to get the bulk of the texturing done pretty quickly. below are the texture sheets out of Substance Painter.

Following this I stayed up late thursday night So that I could create a podium for my character, Pose it, and set up a scene in Marmoset. Below are the final renders of my character. Unfortunately I didn't have time to get the barved wire alphas working as I wanted them to, so they're not on my character in these screenshots. I am hoping to make the barbed wire as a stretch goal for the 10th week before the final hand in for these 3 projects.

I got some critique from Mike Kelly following the hand in for things I could do for the final polish week. First of all I need to fix the Occlusion. furrently there is no darkining in places like the inside of the coat. thisn is because all the major assets were baked seperately so there was no clipping with the projection cages. He told me the colours need re-evaluating, the character is too saturated in places and there is too much blue which should be used as more of a secondary colour. And lastly to work on the material definition for the helmet, maybe go in more detail with the rust with use of curvature maps.