Today was the day where I would finally start modelling my spirit characters! I brought my laptop to college today, as that already had Autodesk Maya, the 3D modelling program installed on it. However, I haven't used Maya since the Gladiator project back in February before I went to Paris, so it did take me a while to get used to it again today. I was struggling with the Maya on my laptop because I couldn't switch the Backface Culling option on, something I needed to do to build my models from my sketches (I scanned my final sketches of my models at home) and a lot of the tools in Maya were missing on my laptop, something I found quite odd and wasn't sure how to deal with it, so eventually I went on the Macs at college and used Maya on them, which went a lot more successfully, as I could find and use all the tools that I am familiar with on Maya.
I am also pleased with myself for looking through my blog to remember how to make an imagebox, to use as a guideline for creating my 3D models of the spirits I have designed, and this proves how useful the learning journals can be, which is something that is often questioned by many people on these foundation degree courses at college. I wanted to aim to get as much done as possible today, by finishing the models for at least 2 of my spirits, so that I am not rushing in the next couple of weeks.
I didn't want to start on a more complex model, so I decided to start on the Water Spirit, a spirit with a teardrop shaped head and the body of a standard fish or mermaid, which was surprisingly simple to model, and got this quickly done by the end of the morning. However, I was struggling a bit with modelling the hands, and this reminded me of how hard it is to model hands, so I may come back to this later, and I might try and find a tutorial on how to model hands the best, quickest and most efficient way, to help me not only in this project, but future projects to come.
This afternoon I worked on modelling the Fire Spirit, which was much more simple and had a much simpler shape, so this didn't take too long. the design on the Fire Spirit is based on a volcano for its head and the rest of its body is in flames. This was basically made by editing a standard cylinder, and shaping the cylinder to how I wanted it to look like. However, I am noticing, because I don't want the unwrapping and texturing to take too long, I have tried not to add too many subdivisions to the models (lines that split up the model, allowing you to edit the model more.
I had a bit more time at the end of the day to start on another spirit, the Normal Spirit, which is loosely inspired by the ghosts in Pac Man, and again a very simple cylinder shape. However, Neil (B) did show me how to make cloths in Maya, to perhaps get a better looking shape for the ghost shape I want to achieve with this spirit, and perhaps a few other spirits, and I feel that this is certainly something to consider to save time and to save my models from looking to jagged and edgy. I did try this with the Normal Spirit, but felt that it wasn't really what I wanted, but I appreciated Neil showing me this additional tool in Maya, as it could come in handy with some of my other Spirit models and also in future projects as well.
After college today I had a meeting with a careers advisor at college, Hannah, as I am really considering what I would like to look into and do during and after my time at college, as I do feel like I would like to try and do something different after this course, something creative still, but something that can help people be happy. This went really well, and I feel that even though it was my first meeting with her about this topic, I feel I made tremendous progress, and she is going to refer me to some people who she thinks can really help me. I will also still have meetings with Hannah, to get closer to an answer for what I would really like to do when I leave college, and I hope that I will ind something I really enjoy that I could do for a career through this. I would also, if possible, like to try and avoid a course of this intensity that I am doing right now, because I have found doing a degree course at college quite difficult, much more difficult than I expected, and I felt that this course would have been more creative than I thought. However, I feel that since Paris, I have learned to accept my course a lot more. Maybe it's because of this project where I can choose what I do, but I seem to be enjoying the course more compared to 2-3 months ago and beyond.
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