Year 2 Specialism Project - Emily Annear

  Now that Guinevere is complete, I started on the Arthur model. This has been a lot easier that the Guinevere one as it, as seen, has much more angular shapes. In my pervious post about the Arthur model, I had done most of the body - excluding the hand and head. These are now complete although they were the most time consuming parts out of all the entire body.  The hand was difficult as I wanted to keep the detail of the gauntlets that I designed him to have. I had to also make sure that it was thick enough to look realistic and also strong enough for when it comes to making him into a 3D print.  The head was certainly the hardest part as it was the most rounded part of him so far. I needed to make sure it was still realistic. One thing that I found after completing the head was that it looked too narrow when comparing it to the body. Therefore I increased its width to make his proportions match.  Now that Arthur's basic shape is complete. I will now go back over it...

  One part of my proposal is to print the characters as 3D models. In order to do this, I have to do is to make sure that each model was ready to print.  With Guinevere complete, her dress's skirt was extremely flimsy and would easily break when printed. This meant that I had to add supports to the skirt. Firstly, I thickened the skirt using shell. This was already a challenge as I had to seperate the skirt from the torso as when using shell, it would apply it to the torso as well.  In order to stop the whole model coming apart when being printed, I increased the length at the top of the skirt so it clipped into the torso so they were fully connected.  Along with this, I also had to alter a few of the vertices due to some looking out of place after shell was applied.  I wanted to add as much support as I could to the skirt so it wouldn't break. Therefore I also added rings around it to add that extra strength and to (in a way) replicate a hoop skirt that women u...

Now that I'm close to completing Guinevere, I have now started working on the Arthur model. So far I have done half of his body which I will add symmetry too once this half is complete.  The hardest part so far for this model was around the knee where he has 5 connections on each section. I had to do a lot of insets, extrudes and welding in order to make this work. Once I got the lower set done, I was able to do the higher set quickly. I've also had to keep resizing the lower arm as well to make it look more believable yet still muscular to make it look masculine.  I will now go onto completing the arm and head. After that I will be applying chamfer and adding additional edges to where I want him to be smoother like on the arms, neck and knee connections. I won't be applying Turbosmooth to the Arthur model as I want a lot of him to stay angular and more robotic.  I will also be adding any other necessary details to him to make him more interesting.

When looking at the Guinevere model, one thing that was very noticeable was the oddly shaped neckline. Because this didn't match the typical design of a medieval dress, I felt like it needed to be fixed. In order to fix it, I had to completely re-construct the neckline area as no matter what I tried to fix it, it didn't straighten. I removed the polygons around the neck and found that there were hidden polygons which were the reason behind the strange shaping when I turbosmoothed the dress.  With the hidden polygons removed, I began to work on building the neckline again and this time got the turbosmooth to look correct. 

Merlin's model sheet was the most difficult to do. I want his model to be hunched over and I had to work out how to straighten his body from his concept art in order for me to model him. When looking at his concept art, his arms are significantly longer than a normal person would have so I also had to work out how long to make him arms I also had to increase the amount of detail around his knees to make him appear more mechanical and to also give him more support for when he's made into a 3D print. I tried to keep the design as close as I could to his concept art as possible with his shape and size along with the many features that he has like his hat, gears and chimneys.   

  My Guinevere character is now practically complete. Since the last post that I did on her character, I have completely finished off her head and added the pipework that goes down her torso.  Her head was certainly a challenge as I wanted to make it as realistic as possible. The hardest part for me to do was probably around the mouth. Whilst I was making the head, like with the rest of the body, I kept going back to Turbosmooth to check if everything looked okay. As I kept checking, the mouth never really looked correct. It took my a lot of time to get it to it's current state. The pipework was also more difficult than I thought it was going to be. Because the dress was enlarged from the body, it meant that it no longer matched the model sheets. This led to the pipework now being moved out further as well. I still kept referring back to the model sheet. Also to make it similar to the model sheets, I followed the breasts and allowed a large enough gap between them for the pipe...

 The last character that I created it's concept for was Merlin. Merlin was substantially harder to design than the other two as for them, I had ideas on how they would look. Merlin was the complete opposite.  Because he was a mix of android and transformer-styled robot, I found it difficult to find the balance between the two. I had to create a few different designs but never landed on one that I liked. Eventually I decided to go back to the start and look back on reference images and any other images that I could to get inspiration.  I wanted Merlin to have an old appearance so looked at "old robots" on Google and saw a few that I thought would be good as inspirations. I also liked the idea of having him either hunched or bent over. One of my mood board images had a robot with a similar posture which I wanted to base Merlin off of however when I drew from it, it didn't look how I was imagining him to be. Whilst I was looking for more inspiration, I came across anothe...