Fighter Kites - Progress Check No. 12

This week was extremely productive in advancing our animatic with improved shot composition. With a more coherent animatic, the shots and length of the short becomes more visible. I think something that would help us would be a bidding sheet including all the layers of production. That is going to be one of my goals for next week.

I also finalized the character base model this week. Something that slipped my mind was how our character might want to open her mouth during the short and so teeth and a tongue would be useful!

I thought I'd include a cute little render of what happens when Maya decides it's done for the day, too haha. Anyways, I had a mouth bag before which, after completing the teeth, I realize I need to adapt a little bit.

Otherwise, eyelashes and hair are the final elements before being able to shade this asset. Aelma, my teammate, finished modeling the clothes this week and all I need to do with those is a final nCloth pass with them over the updated character. Then this can get passed off to Krislyn for rigging.

One thing I focused on when doing the final facial pass in ZBrush was her neutral expression. In Maya, she was very scared/surprised which would make it a bit more difficult for animating when her face would have to be relaxed before every shot. Before starting the character model, I was worried about taking the wrong path with how to approach the entire project. I had two choices: start in ZBrush or start in Maya. Now that I'm wrapping this up, I can say that I am so pleased I took the Maya first route because I ended on such a fun note! Being able to add the final, 'beautify-ing' features is like adding the whipped cream on top and I'm having an absolute blast. Next week is UV week as well, so Ahki (the main character's name) will be ready for shading and rigging together.