After making some additional model alternations to Aqua in zBrush, I took the model into Maya and started to re-topologize it in preparation for rigging. The process was pretty straightforward though I did make some additional changes to the Maya model in comparison to the zBrush model. Hopefully this won’t come back to bite me later when I start to rig her.

Though she’s no production ready, I’m not too sure if I like the proportions of her face. There’s something about it that doesn’t quite look like the concept art? It could be the transition of an anime character into a 3D model, but something about it feels a little strange. It could also be that she lacks hair and that’s what’s throwing me of. Now that the model has the proper topology I may go back and give the face another shot. I may also add some temporary hair too, just to cross that off as a possible reason why she looks a little off.

I also went ahead and created the clothes that are skin-tight. this will allow me at least start with the body rig and then go from there. I’m not entirely sure how I would like to handle the cloth, whether to rig it, simulate it, or do a bit of both. I think I’ll have a better idea once I figure out how she should move.

For the time being I’m going to take a break from Aqua for a bit and start the work on my rigging system. After all, it’ll be necessary to make the rig. Onward!

After a couple weeks of working non-stop on Aqua’s body model, it’s finally complete! The next step will be trying to figure how to approach her clothes and her hair. However, even though her body model is done, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t things I would like to fix on it. There are many areas that kind of bother me, and I wanted to go over them briefly as I may change them later. This will kind of be like my post about Aqua’s head.

The biggest struggle with female characters is getting the right form. I had mentioned this when I was writing about why I chose her as my project, and a bit in the post about the head model, but I also want to mention it here. The female form is softer than and often not as angular as the male form. Though in theory this would make it easier, it actually makes things harder. This is because even veering off of these soft shapes a bit will make the character not look feminine and if your character is feminine in features, this causes problems. Everything had to have that soft flow for a character to look feminine. It often takes multiple passes to get it just right, but it’s totally worth the learning experience!

First and foremost I think that the body proportions are okay, but they may have to be adjusted when rigged. The one reason why anime looking characters are sometimes hard to translate directly into 3D is that they have longer legs. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it will take some test weights and pose tests to figure out if her long legs will hinder her at all when she’s in motion. Character definitely do not need to be anatomically the same as an actual human being, but it may take some adjustment in other parts of her body to keep that anime feel, but also give her a wide range of motion. There’s also this kind of back and forth between modeling and rigging, which makes it kind of fun if you do both. You get to see how your decisions in one of the other can affect decisions down the line. It’s always good to keep this in mind because, if you’re working on a team, you want to be clear about what you’re doing and what your co-workers are doing.

Second are Aqua’s hands. As much as I’ve struggled with modeling heads, I also struggle with hands, though hands have more of a measure to them then heads do. The struggle with hands is that I often want to model from reference, and the best reference I have is my own hands. There’s a problem a though. My fingers are a shorter, but when looking at Aqua’s hands in the concept art, they are thin and delicate. So I instead pull from online reference of hands that kind of match hers. The only problem is, with thinner fingers, though they have a delicate look to them, not giving them the right form makes them look skeletal and unappealing. I have to mitigate with that and made them a bit thicker, though I do want to go back and take another pass at them, maybe try to get that delicate form in there. We will also have to see how delicate fingers will perform in the rig because thin fingers tend to have a hard time forming a fist, but that’s for later discussion.

The last thing I’ll touch on is her feet. I have never modeled feet… ever. My first character wore a long dress so I got away with just modeling “paddle feet” which are exactly what they sound like… they look like a paddle. For my Alice in Wonderland model, I didn’t have to model feet because she wore shoes. This was the first time I had to really study feet in order to model something. And let me tell you it was hard. Feet have a very particular shape to them and require a lot of preplanning. I kind of just went for it with her feet, but I would definitely like to do another pass at them, maybe with some better reference of more feminine feet. Something looks off and they don’t have the noticeable plane changes that feet would have. That’s something for later though.

As I mentioned above I will now start looking into hair and clothes. What I’ll likely do first is model the skintight parts of her outfit and then go from there. Please look forward to the next update!

The head of a character has always been something that I struggled with when it came to modeling… and also rigging, but I’ll discuss that later. The reason the face is so hard for me is the anatomy of it all. With the body,a lot of the anatomy can be thought of as bigger shapes, where the curves flow in and out in a certain way but over a bigger distance so it’s easier to control and if something is a little off, it’s not as easy to spot. With a head sculpt, it is the opposite. A small hiccup is very easy to spot and sometimes it takes reworking more than just the small area that isn’t working to get it to look right. Since I don’t have a strong background in art, I never really learned about anatomy either, so a lot of it, particularly at AnimSchool, was learning while I was working on it. However that isn’t terrible! I got to learn the concepts by applying them, which was really helpful!

The difficult thing about heads is the style of it. A more realistic head is a bit easier because you can pull from references online. There is so much reference and it should definitely be something that is referred back to when modeling anything. Reference is important! But there is something a bit harder with stylized heads, in the case of aqua, with the anime style. As a modeler, I have to find a way to make it feel like a head but also have that style in it, something that I’m still working on and will require a lot of practice. A particular thing with the anime style is the shape of the chin. I luck out a bit with Aqua because it’s a more gradual v-shape which is kind of how human faces are (depending on the face of course) but where I struggled with her was the proportions of her chin. In the original art, the distance from her lips to her chin is rather large, which doesn’t look natural when modeled in 3D, though it looks perfectly fine in 2D. So I started modeling her head by following the concept art exactly (far left head) and I started to move away from that shape because it didn’t look natural. After many iterations, I ended up at the head on the far left, which looks more like a human head but still stylized.

Now that I have a head where the proportions are to my liking, I want to play with it a bit. Can I get a chin shape that is similar to the concept art? My current head gives her a much softer and shorter chin. Can I get it closer to the art without her looking like an alien? This is something I’ll be thinking about as I move on.

With my coursework at AnimSchool complete (yay I graduated!) and my job also complete, I decided to start a new piece! I want to improve on the techniques and concepts that I learned during my time in AnimSchool so I decided to pick something that would really challenge me. My new project will be making a 3D model of Aqua from Fire Emblem Fates. The end goal is to turn her into a workable rig.

I’ve been a big fan of the Fire Emblem series for a long time because the games are kind of different from some of the other strategy games. The character designs for the games are also rather beautiful and I’ve always loved the costume design.

The reason I chose Aqua in particular was because there were many elements to her design that I knew would give me both a challenge and a great learning experience.  Aqua’s dress is loose and gives me both a chance to model fabric and also rig it. She had long flowing hair that could give me a chance to learn how to sculpt and rig it or learn how to use the xGen system in Maya. She also gives me a chance to practice modeling female anatomy, which has a slightly more subtle shape to it. I’ve struggled with it in my past classes and I wanted to get a better grasp of it.

So we’ll see how this goes! Hopefully the results are good!