Modelling My Character Part 3

I realised that I could not UV map all my components individually, so instead I reverted back to the grey lambert material, and combined all the different body parts together and merged vertices so that I could unfold and uv map the whole body as a whole.

My character's hands

After seeing Hayley's version of her model, I really loved the way she made the hands for her model, so I decided to be a bit more ambitious than my original designs, and make some hands as well! This was not too complicated as I was able to duplicate the fingers of my model and use them, it was more of a case of making them look realistic so that they would emulate a real hand. Once I had made the fingers, I positioned them like in the second photo, in the places that I wanted them, and then used the brilliant snap to vertices tool and then merged the vertices together, so they would become all one mesh. I also added finger nails to the hands because instead of having mittons, I am going to use their colour for nail polish (or I am going to try!).

However when I went to planar map/project my model's mesh, this happened. I was extremely disheartened and confused at this point because it had taken me so long to make the hands and I was so pleased with them. What I figured out had happened, was that when I mirrored my geometry again, some of the vertices had all snapped as one, like here:

So what I had to do to avoid this, was go into the mirroring setting and unclick 'automatically join vertices' and once I re-mirrored my model, I went and joined the vertices myself, which thankfully avoided that situation.

I also quickly shortened the length of my characters dress and made her legs a bit longer, because I was worried about the rigging process and how I would rig her legs. Also when she goes to throw the ball, I didn't want her dress to move awkwardly with her legs, so to avoid this I made her legs more longer and visible. However after I unfolded my mesh, I got much more of a cleaner version than all the previous ones I had achieved and this made me very pleased. 

These are the processes of how I went about making the texture for my model. Hayley and I agreed to just stick to plain bold colours which saves us a lot of hassle so we can focus more on the animation and the environment which I am having a lot of fun creating! This was also a case of trial and error, once I saved the jpeg of one texture, sometimes something didn't look quite natural, so I went and altered it until I was happy with my final versions.

To get the colours of my character, Hayley and I agreed to use the colour picker tool and use the colours from our combined designs. This means that whilst we are both apart, we can still have very visually similar characters because we are working from the same designs.

 These are the rendered versions of my model almost finished, without the eyes. I am very happy with how she looks and I think once I add the eyes and start to rig her, she will soon enough start coming to life!

I am almost very proud of myself for giving her such an intricate detail as nail polish! Though it is nothing extravagant or a feature you will see a lot, I feel a sense of achievement knowing if I keep trying at something, I can do it and I can also find solutions to problems which seem daunting at first (like the joining of the vertices). So so far, she is a success!