So the semesters ending and so far so good, I can definitely say that this years finals week was probably one of the hardest weeks I've ever had to push through. I thought the semester conversion would have made everything easier but some how I still had to stay up for 4 days in a row (8 hours of commutative naps a bunch of red bull and a jar of peanut butter gave me the strength to do it haha). In the end it was an experience I will definitely look back on my crazy college days and be able to talk about. I have a feeling that the industry isn't too different from this insanity.
One thing that I did learn staying up a few nights working on this was that I didn't actually mind it, I find that things come out better when you enjoy doing it and when there is a passion; I'm pretty glad that I feel this way about 3D work as well as going to the gym since I feel that they go hand in hand sometimes. When weight training, it helps your posture which I feel working long hours on the computer will destroy and just going will relieve stress and build the endurance to work longer. One more perk that comes with working out is understanding your body and muscle anatomy and movement. So yea I found that balancing out the mental aspects of my life with physical activity has been really beneficial. A balanced out social portion goes a long way as well; I found that not taking a break from those two to just have a little fun and happiness will cause a burn out where all motivation to do anything will be sucked dry for a few days or weeks.
but anyway enough about my philosophies, ideals, and life, here's the progress I'm posting up for this section of my blog; I will hope to have a more steady and accurate week numbering, resetting when spring semester arrives. Also I will try to keep track of my hours better because lately it's been just wake up and go to class or grind out as much project work possible.
So for my thesis I made great strides doing my design sculpting on my acceleration exoskeleton, I'm still new with hard surface sculpting but it's still coming along. There's still a long way to go since this is just a work in progress but I'm pretty happy with how far I got with this project this semester while balancing my other class projects.
I focused a lot on the silhouette, exaggerating where I can to give more visual interest. I didn't want the suit to be too bulky so I tried slimming out some key points including the lower leg and waist areas. I'm still pushing the design of the cybernetic ninja influence and so far my audiences get that feeling. One of my critiques was that the model looks a little front heavy so I will try and make it more balanced since I don't want the character to look like he's having a hard time standing or would just fall over.
Before I made the suit I spent a bunch of time working on the forms, proportions, and gesture of the body which I think helped it along pretty well in the long run even though only the head will be showing. Another critique I had was that he was looking a little stubby, so I'm going to go back and recheck the proportions; with the use of transpose master in Zbrush it shouldn't take more than a few minutes.
For the hair I used fibermesh and it came out pretty good, some of my friends actually asked me if I scanned my hair to make this. I did this work flow actually a few days ago on my werewolf exporting the .obj and putting on a hair shader which gives me really good results without slowing down render times. I still plan on trying out nhair probably by converting the strands into curves and placing the hair system in and seeing how that will look compared to the results of this hair since I think it would look really nice in the final renders if I can have hair blowing in the wind.
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