I open blender and am met with the default cube. It will be spared for once.

I round it off using bevel and upping the amount of segments. This will be the head

I extrude the bottom face and then realise I don't know how far to pull it so I go for just under half of the length of the face after looking at the muscle diagram.

I add the reference into the scene for ease of access, move the current model up to match position and apply a mirror modifier so I can keep the body relatively symmetrical and only have to model one side for now.

I then shrink the head, insert half of it in the reference and make it relatively match up to the proportians of the head

I get to this point and then realise "this guy isn't in a reference pose". I don't want to start again, so when it comes to it, i'll use the pose tool to put him into one

First issue. I messed up the torso. The way i've done it, I can't separate it at the legs. As far as I can see, i've got two options. Start the torso again and do it better this time or experiment and see if i can split the bottom of the torso in half. Whilst writing this I remembered a different technique I could've used, using a single edge and skin modifier. If this entire process falls through, I will go to that

The first thing I try worked so that was a relief. I bevelled the face that was annoyingly conjoined, and it created new faces that weren't conjoined so I extruded them down and now we have thighs! 

Ok so now I have this, I need to make adjustments because currently the elbows look like they are bending the wrong way, but the reference has his palms facing forward, which makes the elbows bend away from the body. But for the reference pose I need them to face inwards and the elbows to bend so the hands come toward the body. The  feet also need to be a bit bigger

To see how it could potentially look later on, I add a subdivision surface modifier and shade him smooth. As you can see, there is a massive seam in his torso, undoubtedly from how badly I created it. I'm not too worried about it, since later on i'm going to put on dynamic topology in sculpting and that will most likely get rid of it.

I make those changes and try to avoid procastinating on the next step: scultping. Before I do that though, I apply the mirror modifier and pray that I don't regret it later.

I immediately do regret it because I forgot about fingers, so I undo and put sculpting on hold. I get to this point and realise I have no clue what I am doing so I instead take to sculpting to see if that works, mostly as an expirment. I then realise that i've done the thumb in the wrong place.

I undo until I have no thumb again and try to get more reference for hands.
I have an idea however: making a seperate hand model and stitching it onto this model.

So now we're at this where I'm going to match the proportions to my hand

I've reached an issue, and i've got another emerging issue that i'll get onto in a second. I didn't subdivide enough geometry for all of the fingers, now I can't do my pinky. Currently i'm messing around with every face I have to see if i can remedy this issue.

Not even subdivision surface modifier worked, this has got to be manuel change

I shift the flat part up and do a lot of vertex merging until it looks like that. Quite frankly, I am amazed that it worked as well as it did. The thumb doesn't look quite right but I think considering this is the first hand I've blocked out ever, i'm very happy with this.

I miss the optimism I had in my last annotation. The hands are backwards. Words cannot express the pain.

As of writing this, the soul crushing existential pain has yet to subside, but I pulled his feet in and then bevelled the other side, pulled it out and leveled it to reverse his feet. Crisis averted. I am so glad I never started sculpting otherwise I would've had to start the hand again. 

Random progress update. The arms keep getting destroyed so I'll try subdivision surface modifier to create more geometry to work with,  but first I want to smooth the thigh out so that horrible lump isn't baked into it.

Another progress update. I have made probably the most terrifying face to ever exist, and I am seriously doubting if I will be able to make this mesh.

If I were making a horror animation/game, this would work quite well! The idea of a being with two faces within just one head is quite horrifying. However, i am not and this is not helpful, so I'm going to apply the mirror modifier and just have symmetry on when sculpting.

The side profile is a bit lacking so I use even more reference. He has a lot on his mind at the moment so i start by shrinking his head.

To my amazement, the head lines up pretty well already.

The proportions of the references are different. I don't really know what to think about this. i'll follow the base guidelines of the side profile but stick to the muscle man's length.

I'm in the middle of sculpting and then realise that at some point, I destroyed the hand. To quote my earlier self: "Words cannot express the pain.". I will have to make them again somehow in sculpting

Immediately after that, I put the spine in the back and it forms perfectly. I'm slightly less in pain than a second before

I get to a point where i'm doing stuff but not really progressing anywhere and I start looking for other means of improvement, thats when I think of the remesh modifier, which in this case will fix a lot of the mistakes at the cost of the model's (already lacking) quality. The picture on the left is the result if I were to apply it, however I won't yet because those legs aren't looking great.

I think i just found a really good way of doing dynamic gore

I pull his arms out because his armpits are merging and I don't want that, you can still see the armpits merging so i'm going to attempt to remedy that

I try a lot of things, none of them work very well. What I can try and do is apply the modifier (i'm happy with everything else aside from the merging armpit) and then separate them

As is tradition, I use the pose tool to pose him, and then make a very quick render of them to see how they move. 

And then realise, is it slanted backwards? It lines up with the grid but something looks off. Regardless, i shift the model into the middle and decide I'll work on the face first.

I tug around on the eye sockets until I get something that looks like this.

I also add eyebrows using dynamic topology and smooth out a forehead. Currently, i'm happy with how this is turning out.

Now for the jaw/mouth, I start by making the jawline much sharper. I also realise that this would be a great starting place for the Volraan so I create a copy of this .blend file. 

I grab parts of where I want the mouth to go and just push it in, now I have a big cavity within the face that I can make look more vicious in time.

I don't really know how to make this look more vicious and fish like yet so I give big bulbous rubbery lips that are sunken in before they 'inflate'. The result is that, I feel like i've got the foot in the door now so I begin to adjust different parts of the face to suit the concept art.

The result is this, and I notice that it's starting to look like the creature from 'the creature of the black lagoon', which I'm now realising should've been the source of inspiration from the start.

And I think I'm getting somewhere with this head!

And then I apply smooth shading. Not quite what I was hoping for. At least the lips look inflated and bulbous! ... mostly.

To fix this, I can apply the subdivision surface modifier to add more detail to the mesh, except this isn't what I actually need. What I really need is more contrast between the highs and lows, not for them to smooth out.

So I looked  at this and thought "that looks awful, but it is what I want". To do this I used the smooth tool, set it to subtract, increased the radius to take over the entire face and use it once. I have done this so that the contrast of highs and lows within the face are increased.

I spend a while smoothing out the face whilst keeping the contrast and then realise. "hang on, mouths aren't just a big hole in our face and his mouth isn't actually attached to his jaw". So I need to remedy that now. Luckily, his bottom lip is already on his jaw line, and I reckon i can get away with just making him open his mouth a lot more.

Which I proceed to do. However i'm getting the sinking feeling that when it comes to rigging, this base mesh might be pretty difficult. With that done, I move on to the rest of the model which i'm just going to make skinny and add fins in various places.

The result is this, a bit bland and inconsistent but it does the job I think. Not shown in that photo is that I subdivide the model once more just to make it look a bit less low poly. Onto UV mapping and texturing. 

I try my luck with smart UV project. 

A quick test shows that it wasn't perfect to say the least. It is genuinely one of the better ones i've had before though and I don't want to skimp out on this project so I actually need to learn how to do this properly. Or another option I have is vertex assigning different materials, which sounds much more appealing than trying to unwrap this model. The issue with that is that it is much less organic, but I'll give it a go and see how much of an issue that really is.

There is also a third option, where I use textures on this uv map (it won't have to be perfect) to tell blender where to put different materials.

Regardless, I need to know what fish scales look like and they react to light.

I have made something truly disgusting.

I also go back into the view port to reduce the poly count because the shader is lagging blender out massively. I do this by using the decimate and the result going from 200,000 polys (ouch) to 60,000 with basically no decrease in quality. And the shader still lags out so thats great.

As I said earlier, very inorganic though I think with some cleaning up I can make it look a little bit better

After manually grabbing the vertices and smoothing them out in 10 fps, this is the result. Much better looking. I also need to do the eyes 

I added a wireframe across the entire model, made it thin and and not delete the original model to add a fishnet over the entire model. 

I create the armature and its small and facing the wrong way, so lets fix that by making it face exactly the same way on as the brineman

Now its to scale, we set the armature to 'show in front' so we can see what we're doing and then we adjust the armature to line up with the brine

So now we have this, we leave it as is and then press generate rig to get this

A very small and facing the wrong way wireframe, this is not what we want. This happened because I forgot to apply all transforms on the armature first

So we do that, regenerate the rig and now we have this! We can hide the armature now because we might not need it again

Not great, the fishnet thing just seeps into the model when it moves and his eyes disappear. Though I the eyes with relative ease just by shifting them back into place and they appear to stay in the correction position. The fishnet issue is more trouble than its worth so I'm alright with leaving that as is.  I save it as a new blend file so that I can append it later on to scenes involving the brine. One thing I did forget to do was add teeth and control to the jaw, which i'll do later on, I'd rather focus on making sure every essential model is at least usable.

I start with the face because it gives me a feel for the rest of the model. I create  a plane and through a mixture of vertex manipulation and loop cuts I cut it to fit the visor. Then I preferred one side of the other, deleting the bad side and applying a mirror modifier and merging the two sides. Then I put a solidify modifier on and select 'only rim'.

Deleted that, i forgot the rest of the visor and didn't visualise it properly. modelled the visor again properly this time and made the face more detailed so i can get the form of the mask right

This is so far, with additions of mask and headwear. The couple materials are just place holder for now to visulise where the glass would be etc.

Did the neck. One thing that I haven't said i'm doing: I'm masking the base mesh and then masking it, so i work select copies of areas of the base mesh, meaning that if it all goes wrong i can start again on an area. Also helps make the model feel padded and armoured. My aim is to delete as much as the base mesh possible. 

Progress update. Halfway through the armour, nothing too interesting to take note of other than the difficulties in trying to make the materials look any  good.

Rest of the armour created, now i'm going to refine until i actually like it.

For the oxygen pipe, i created a single vertex, applied a mirror modifier, a skin modifier and a subdivision modifier to create a tube of some sort, I then positioned the pipe as is shown in the image. However it currently looks like one of those long foam pool noodles, so I need to find a way of thinning it.

After fiddling around with random buttons, it was apparently ctrl + A that rezises vertices in the skin modifier.

I find the horrific site you get by hiding the visor quite funny

Good and bad from the rigging result. The good is that everything works, the bad is that the good was actually conditional: everything works unless you are an oxygen pipe, in which case (what i think is causing this anyway) there is no mesh to work with because currently we're seeing the result of a bunch of modifiers, when the rig is trying to move individual vertices and then mesh doesn't actually exist yet. A simple fix (I hope) is to just apply the modifiers and re attach the rig.

And it works now! There is also another issue I may run into, because the model is made up of many different meshes that overlap in some cases, I may run into clipping. This is an issue i've had in personal projects. Usually its fixed by using one of the control points in the rig (even if thats not really what i think their used for) and shifting the mesh around until there is no more clipping.

What i'm most surprised works first time is the head, I've had issues before (quite recently as of writing this in fact) where anything on the head doesn't move with the rest of it properly. I also thought the same with apply to the oxygen tank but that also doesn't seem to be distorting, which is very good because... well if your oxygen tank distorts, breathing is going be just one issue that'll create. Regardless, our little player here has a functioning model that can be used in animation now!  

I managed to make a minotaur... not quite what I want

first attempt at the jester crown... yeah, no.

Second attempt, masking the face so that doesn't change, using dynamic topology to build up the face to begin with, then using snake hook to pull it out into that shape. I like this as a base so i'll work with this

Currently where i'm at, the crown doesn't look quiet as spiky as i would like so i'll change that at some point. otherwise I like how monstrous the model looks overall, much more aggressive and mutated.

Chucked on a generic skin texture to use, I may make it in general a bit darker

had to leave for a bit, came back and hated the crown so i stuffed it back into the head with the snake tool, then I smoothed it out to see that result

Used a mask extract from the mouth to the eye brows, pulled them out and thinned the lower part to get this

Changed the gills as well, finished the crown off, happier with it now. 

added texturing and I had to suffer through UV unwrapping (which i just used the smart project with the angle setting cranked up as high as i could get it)

Giving up for today, i'll try again tomorrow

Came back and changed some stuff: the eye shape and colour, the material for the crown and shoulder pad thing. I'm going to cut my loss here and treat as "not everything is going to come out how I want it to". Besides, what this FMP is all about is animation...which i've yet to get to.

I just thought i'd slap on some more armour and call it a day for this model

When rigged, the model works fine apart from occasionally becoming a unicorn like that, which only applies in certain positions, not sure what causes it but I think I should be able to work around it. The poster things I do with these models is to test the rigs out and see how they react to lighting. So although I was going to skip this one, I won't because I want to see how much of an issue this unicorn horn is.

I've barely even started and the crown is deforming improperly.  My guess is that it hasn't had enough weight assigned to it, but weight assigning with riggify is really awkward, so instead i'm going to add a bone to the head which won't really control much, but it'll add weight to the crown for that bone, which is dependant on the head bone, therefore essentially replicating more weight on the head bone.

i am just messing around at this point, seeing what works and what doesn't. Obviously i'm finding more of the former.

I accidentally got curious about an addon I had installed and pressed something i shouldn't have, but I actually wanted to do a progress update, so don't mind the washed out colour from a lack of responding. The eyebrow/eyelash thing was done by using a skin modifier on a single vert but I think it looks gross

Trying a hair simulation

I've never used the hair brush tool before, but it seems pretty intuitive. It feels like using a comb.

I get this as a result. Though I don't really know what i'm looking for specficially

Its obviously not retaining its shape so I make it stiffer and press play to see that! Much better. 

Changed the eye colour to purple, might need bigger pupils

I fiddled around a little bit more with the eye and eyebrow but needed to render something to see the result. This is the resulting render of what i'm happy with

Finished up the face, desaturated the gills a little bit and gave them basic clothing. I'm at my wits end so it was very basic. Also connected them to the rig which was retained from the volraan.

Hair simulation is having a bit of mare staying attatched to the face.

I managed to get it to move but I had to weight paint all of it red.

It follows but doesn't simulate because all of it is painted red, not great but not quite a tragedy,

I start off by importing the player character. The plan is to set up the shot and then tweak it so it looks aesthetically pleasing

Progress update: Player character is imported, not posed or animated. Ocean simulation is in, again i imported the materials from before. The buildings were made with a mixture of brick texture and noise texture. Sun is formed by the nishta system in blender and the grass is a hair simulation.

Just wanted to mention this rock texture. It was suprisingly good.

On a much more practical note, I really don't want to do a tree, its a lot more effort that what its worth since I don't know any cheep work arounds... unless I quickly steal an image of a tree and then use that instead.

Again, i forgot how big of an impact ocean simulations can take on render times. I better have gotten the motion blur right otherwise re rendering this is going to be a pain.

Thinking about it, this would work great at the end of a trailer? With the title card above the player's head. I hope it still fits within the current timeline. This thinking has lead to me to believe that it might be best to instead put this at the end and after recieving some verbal feedback that suggested it was too fast and could be slowed down for a more dramatic effect, that would work best.

Currently all that has been rendered is a series of images and we need to turn them into one video. To do this, we'll use DaVinci resolve (its my favourite editing software) and drag and drop the folder containing the images into the timeline, this will put them together in an image sequence video. We can press play and it will play the images at 24 fps because that is what the project fps is set to. 

If I had all the time in the world on my hands, I would have rendered every pass separately and then performed post processing on each of them. I don't have that much time so i'll just do what I can here. I say that, but I might actually leave post processing until after all of the shots are done so I can use them for an effect (whatever that effect is) whilst editing. So for now, we'll just render this as is. Sound will sourced and added during editing as well.

I don't know why the text's vertical space has done that, but I couldn't figure out how to stop it. 

I currently have the idea of going through a bunch of high rise buildings. so i'll lay those out

used two array modifiers to set this up

Made...this? The idea being that there are funny shaped windows everywhere? I'm not really after cohesion, i'm just after an interesting visual.

Current result, made the floor really wet and shiny with a brick texture.

The current shot, player character is imported along with a single volraan

Did a bunch of aesthetic stuff including: adding a  scatter volume to the world for the gradient affect on the top right, adding sandscapes and also fiddling with the lighting. then added camera movement and effects to end up with that as the result

Same here

With those two done, I head back to the bulk of the scene.

So I load this up, make a few minor changes and then realise I've yet to model the harpoon gun, so I get to that.

I start with a cylinder on its side. If we look at harpoon guns they are basically just short muskets that use compressed air rather than gunpowder. The wooden look makes them look much older as they resemble flintlocks which isn't quite what we want, so i'm thinking that if we do something much more metallic it'll look more fitting in our setting. We need four essential things to get a harpoon gun. The barrel, the trigger, the air compression mechanism and the actual harpoon itself. We also want to consider who is making this harpoon gun: people who have no issues with being underwater so how would that influence things?

I start off with this, a barrel and air compression chamber connected by rings. The barrel is a bit massive so I might have to make some adjustments to that, though the entire model will be scaled when put in a scene so its not that big of an issue

Started working on the stock, got to this point by using the skin modifier with subdivision and blender decided it didn't like something and crashed. luckily it autosaved so before it crashed again I saved and took that screenshot.

the design isn't very human, and it looks really uncomfortable to hold

Much more comfortable. However now that i'm thinking about it, holding onto the pneumatic chamber would be really painful, as compressed air chambers can get extremely cold when used, so a separate thing to hold would be nice.

The plan is to have the blade rotate into place.

Did this rope by using a cylinder with the hook modifier. I thought it was cool. You can also see I went back on the double pnuematic chamber idea... it just looked... wrong

Lacks camera movement and any sort of gore

Added camera movement, realised I wasn't previewing in the same framrate as the it was beign animated in, so I had to slow the entire project down. I'm also going to do something weird I think, I would usually animate everything in the same blend file, instead i'm going to render just this shot, then duplicate this blend file and start with the rest. This is partially because of the time stretching  but also the next shots are going to be really intense on processing so it'll be best to be as optimal as possible.

Finished shot, I spent far too long on this but i'm very happy with it. the animation could be cleaner but considering my lack of reference and how awkward the harpoon is to use i'm happy with it. speaking off, the harpoon gun cannot be moved whilst the harpoon is currently being fired, otherwise the harpoon itself moves with it, meaning it'll fly all over the place if that does happen. This is fine for almost every shot other than this one where it'll be obvious.