Semester 3 Week 11

I got sick this weekend through most of the week. It's not covid or anything, but it was bad enough to keep me out of school. This left me working at home (and catching up on sleep). I was still able to communicate with the team via Discord, but I had a few questions about certain things that I wanted to ask in person. That's as good of an excuse as I needed to do something I've wanted to do for a while: standalone portfolio work.

My plan was to wait until 3D art work cools down for Find Emma, and then move on to portfolio work. I think, remarkably, we might actually complete the game within the school year, and possibly with time to spare! This might be a hubristic claim, but our current pace is actually good, despite none of the other 3D artists having work all the way through the pipeline (this isn't a dig toward the other artists. They're handling very challenging tasks like character art).

Anyway, the point is that I was saving side projects for later. But being at home, I felt like doing one regardless. A few months ago, we were assigned an art challenge involving a futuristic non-human humanoid character (there were several other criteria that I've forgotten). I began modeling a robot character, but I only began an arm before I got distracted and moved on. But when selecting a subject for my portfolio project, I remembered to use it as a starting point. The scene I'm working on now is not the one I originally had in mind, and it won't fulfill the challenge criteria, but the intent of challenge assignments is just to get us to work on something, so this counts in spirit.

The vision for the scene is of an industrial-looking humanoid robot wearing a sweater and his Labrador dog trekking through a snowy tundra. The specifics will be worked out as I go, but thematically, it should loosely highlight the cold, mechanical nature of the robot and the natural, warm nature of the dog, as well as the sort of venn diagram intersection of the two, being the cold, natural environment. Themes of friendship I suppose. Yeah, I'm artsy like that. This is a nice subject for my portfolio because I refuse to focus on a specific specialization. This will involve hard-surface modeling, UVing, texturing, rigging, sculpting, environment art, lighting, and clothing design and simulation (which I'll be doing for the first time); and a hefty amount of each. Plenty of work to do, now that I write it out like that.

I've done the lion's share of the modeling already, and it's looking good! There are a few small bits to add, but plenty to tweak. Right now, the tri count is at 36,000 (too high). I will simplify a ton to make a low poly version and keep the high poly one for normal baking. I learned to do this recently, and it's already a very important feature in my workflow. I don't know how I avoided learning it for so long, but better late than never.

I've begun sculpting the dog, but I've only spent a few minutes on it establishing a rough form. Anyway that's that on that.