Blog Seven - Organization and Hair

This week was pretty productive. I really think we tackled some important topics! I feel like it’s easy to fall into an anxious state just thinking about the enormity of work still ahead, so this week the group really wanted to set a good organizational foundation and put ourselves in a good position to really crush the layout and animating process! 

With that being said, this week's main focus was getting a new file system up and running for us to use for production going forward, while also collecting the last assets that we need in order to start layout effectively. My part in all of this was creating a tnenative schedule for the rest of the semester, and finishing up the girls' hair so they are in a state to be laid out and rigged.

Scheduling and Organization 

As I explained above, the first order of business for the group this week was getting reorganized and ready to take on layout. Up until this point, we have been doing mostly individual work and dumping it wherever we think kind of fits within a poorly made file structure, and that has been stressing me out. The longer the group ignores something like that, the harder it will be to organize things in the future, so we all decided to really dig in our heels and get out poop in a group. 

My role in all of this was devising a week-by-week calendar to set the pace for the rest of the semester. We know that we are expected to deliver a rough 3D animatic by the middle of May, but how will we get there? That is what I asked myself when blocking out when the group should have things done by. 

I wanted to allot large time slots for rigging and camera layout, with smaller time slots for asset production, compositing, and animation tests. This way, we should definitely have a rough animatic by May, with time to spare to research and develop rigs and layouts to really optimize the animating process. 

Making Hair 

After getting through all of the scheduling and organizational labor earlier in the week, I finally had time to have some fun and start sculpting the girl's hair! I used Blender for this specific modeling pipeline, and I am starting to really love both hard and soft modeling in the program.

The main things I kept in mind when putting this sculpt together were topology, flow, and the illusion of detail. I really wanted to keep the simplicity and fantastical element of 2D anime hair, while also adding the necessary details for the sculpt to look good from all angles in 3D. With those design constraints in mind, I sculpted a low-poly base hair mesh by just moving spheres around until it formed a somewhat readable “hair helmet”. Once I was happy with that, I added bezier curves along the hair helmet as if each curve was a tuft of hair growing out of the character's head. My knowledge of illustration really helped me here, because I already have an innate sense of how to stylize hair and clump it in an aesthetically pleasing way. Once each curve was placed, I turned it into a mesh using a soft triangle as a shape reference. This created a really nice and simple tuft shape for me to make hair strands with!

I really enjoy this process of hair modeling, and am excited to finish up each girl! I am especially excited to try this technique with curly hairstyles as well for Ashley's hair.