Blog Eight - Finishing hair and Sets
This was definitely another week of going full-steam ahead! I had a lot of anxieties about where production was at and what our plan was for the rest of the semester, but after communicating and organizing with my group I feel a lot better on where were all at! The hope now is to have all of the sets laid out and ready to be laid out next week, so we can really hit the ground running and be on track to have a usable 3D animatic by mid-may!
A huge part of this week was allocating duties and responsibilities to really make sure we can lay things out come Tuesday, and my responsibilities were threefold. First, I really wanted to finish the hair to have a complete model of the girls, then, I was tasked with making sure the girls were rig-ready and had clean topology, and making a main foyer room interior for layout.
Finishing the Hair and Retopologizing
This weeks first order of business for me was to finish up Macy's ponytail! This was definitely “heart work” for me, as I have really come to enjoy the process of modeling the girlies hair through the pipeline I developed! Instead of using real geometry that’s hard to move around and rotate smoothly, I used curves attached to a soft triangle shape as its bevel. This combination gave me the stylized chunks of hair that I wanted with the control I needed to make each strand look smooth and connected to the scalp.
For Macy’s hair specifically, I was really inspired by the character Maria from the movie The Book of Life, specifically her gigantic curly ponytail that I envied terribly as a child. I wanted to lean into each girls hair being super voluminous and not necessarily realistic, which gave me a lot of liberty to make their hair look super bouncy and flowy, and im super excited to see these models moving around and rigged! Maggie took the liberty of doing Ashley’s hair, so that was the end of my hair journey for the week.
After finishing Macy’s Hair, I moved on to finalizing the girl’s topologies so that they are all rig-ready! Not to pat my own back or anything, but I took a lot of time to model the girls with nice topology, so I really only had two glaring issues to clean up. The first issue was a pretty nasty five-point star underneath the chin and at the top of the neck, which is a very high-deformation area. This was luckily an easy fix, but the other issue was a lot more intensive. Each girl has a modeled “base eyeliner” that I extruded directly out from one of the eye loops, and this was not a smart move with topology in mind. To fix this, I simply ripped the eyelashes from the eye loop and did a lot of vertices merging to make things all smooth!
Foyer Layout
With the girls in a good spot, I diverted my attention to making sure we had all of the sets we needed to start making an animatic. I took on the task of making a main entrance room in the castle, like a foyer of sorts. This flexed a very different modeling muscle in my brain, which was a fun challenge! I knew I wanted a grand staircase leading to the upper rooms of the castle, and I wanted to adorn the place with a lot of arches and pretty pillars. The grand spiral staircase proved to be the most finicky to get right, especially the banister. Curves don't like to keep a uniform thickness when bent harshly, which works wonderfully when making hair, but not so much when you want to make a wooden banister. This took a lot of finagling to look right from the angles we needed, but I got there! Once I got a layout I liked, I inserted the gorgeous assets that Cosette made to really make the place look like a set! The fountain and banners really add to the aesthetic of the place, and I am so excited to see it all textured!
