Date: August 30th 2009 (Complete PSP Character)

After a struggle of balancing my move into a new home and working on the PSP character, I finally managed to complete the entire character.
Working on this part of the project as given me more skills within Maya, learning to stay within the triangle budget was a challenge that I have really enjoyed and this has also given my some insight into how the development team works with budgets thanks to Alan and Nick.



Character Texture layout.

This is a render of my character at 480 X 270 with is the resolution of games on the PlayStation Portable.


Normal Maya render at 640 X 480 resolution.

Date: August 7th 2009 ( Mature Student )

The duration for building the PSP character should only be a week at the most, I would guess that in development they would have at least 7 hours a day to complete a PSP character project so it would take them even less time to complete a character. Due to my other commitments such as working in a full time job and moving into a new home this certainly made an effect my progress. I suppose this is the reality of being a part time mature student.

I did a few experiments with texturing the character facial details to make sure that I eliminate any stretching of the textures and to make sure I get the correct results that I want to achieve.

Date: August 5th 2009 (Blueprints)

After a brief conversation with Nick about my project, he suggested that I should use photographic references for my character, which will help me to have the correct female body proportion and this will make the characters silhouette unique.
Alan Wales (lead character modeller) states that the silhouette for any low polygon characters is very important and if done correct players in the game can clearly distinguish your character from a distance.


An early attempt.










Blueprints.

The above pictures are screenshots of some very early work in progress, which was before I taken on expert advice from Alan and Nick.

From some experience of modelling characters in the past I feel that it’s better to start modelling the head first because it is one of the most complicated areas of the human figure and it can take more time to get the topology correct.

At this stage I was not satisfied with the detail of the face, I spent too much time on the topology instead of using the time to find better blueprints.

The above blueprints of the characters head was made from a collection of internet pictures which I modified within Photoshop but the front and side perspectives were not accurate enough to model.

However my first few attempts to make to head was not a complete waste of time, it was a good learning curve and from this I have taken my modelling skills to a higher level.

The above pictures show the improvements of modelling the character head with using photographic references, I was more confident in modelling from real references because I did have to worry about the size of each facial detail.

To control how much polygons and triangle where used I continued to use the high detail mesh as guide for making the correct silhouette for a PSP low polygon mesh.