Week 4: Weekends are for working...

We've been pretty much ploughing ahead in the modelling department , smashing (almost) our personal deadlines.

Pretty much everyone's been in full modelling mode this week, which has included the characters, the landscapes and the assets! Our deadline to complete these is by Friday, but we're all nearly finished (winning).

Trollilcious - thank you Yannis

Ritchie's Goats looking gloriously goaty

Amit's also been working on a few facial tests to assess the best way to get expressions and movements out of our characters, and so far it looks like blend shapes are the main contender. He's also done a test render for one of the mariachi's!

In terms of the assets like the rocks we're definitely keeping in mind bump mapping etc to give the illusion of indentations etc, but for the couple rocks that will be in shot Natasha brought up a good point, that by modelling in that little bit extra level of detail we can get some good lighting and shadows etc.

Natasha has assets coming out of her.. assets...

We've also been talking about keeping these models quite simple and stylised - especially in the case of the Joshua Tree which could get quite tricky. Cristina and Yannis suggested blocking out the silhouette in simple shapes - with the buds being more hexagonal - we could texture these to appear like they have spikes. It'll also look more low poly this way.

Floral fun courtesy of Kaitlin

 Joshua Tree silhouette and low poly tree examples

We're also mindful of making sure the scene doesn't appear to busy and distract from the story of the smug pinata's

The bridge is pretty much there, and Bimpe will be finishing of the landscape surrounding it. Also she modelled the bougainvillea (like a chump) - we'd considered the possibility of mapping the texture on a plane, but as the plants are attached to the bridge and would be in shot, we thought this might be a better way to go, although we're till considering our options and thinking about the render time.

burps, bridges, bougainvillea from Bimpe

As we've got quite a bit in terms of assets, to save us rendering time (and our social lives), Phil's suggested creating 3D effects via 2D planes. So for rocks further away it would just be a case of rending out the image as a TARGA, changing the alphas and applying as a texture to a plane.

We'll most probably doing this for the assets that has less screen time. This will also lower our poly count, which has the potential to be surprisingly high.