Hand - issues and adjustments

During the process of creating the different body parts I had some trouble modeling the hand. This was mainly because I didn't focus as much on the hand when making my 2D character reference. The areas I adjusted was the thumb rotation, the thumb should have been rotated to the front and not the side. I pretty much looked at how my hand would look like in a relaxed position, I tried to follow the structure and sort of solved the issue.

Another issue I had was the fingers, in the before GIF the fingers are too curved which made the fingers look tense. I modified the upper part of the knuckles straighter and adjusted the position of each finger so it wouldn´t be in the same axis.

Nose issues - Ngons and details

Throughout the video there was an issue at 12:36 where the edges are selected and then collapse edges. But the results came out differently compared with the video. I wasn't the only one that had the issue at 12:36, others who followed the tutorial got the same results.

The results made the nose detail to disappear which looks too smooth. There were also ngons around the nose and bottom of the nose. Getting some help, we used multi-cut and merged the vertices to get the quads.

Nose - Fixes

I adjusted the nose shape by using my reference of the actor Godfrey Gao, the nose looks a lot better than before. The nostrils are a bit larger and not as thin as it was on the image above. I made the nose wider and moved the nose tip higher. At the end I used the creased tool to define the eyes and lips. I really like this tool as it brings everything together.

High boots - Tris

There were three trises on top of the boots, I was really struggling with this part as there was always a n-gon or tris left. After spending a long time fixing the trises I put a quad in the middle with multi-cut tool and connected each corner with the quad.

High boots - Final

For the boots I extruded the faces from the feet and tried the get the high boots shape. It was quite difficult since I didn't have good reference for the shoes. For the boots reference I used my own boots as a reference. This allowed me to get an accurate perspective and shape. At the end I used the crease tool to define some areas such as the sole. I decided to skip the shoelace as it might cause some issues, I would have to create holes and then add the shoelace. And I’m not sure how I would connect the shoelace with the actual model. But if it were for a game the shoe laces would be a texture using baked maps.

Shader - Filter Type

I inserted the hair textures which came out very well, I had to duplicate a few cards to fill in the bald areas. The filter type (Shade > Colour > Filter Type) it was set to Quadratic, this made the hair have more bald areas and made the hair look less realistic. I experimented with the different filter type options and found filter type: off which gave a more realistic and less gap between the hairs, it also made the hair look smoother.

Before the final hair there were a lot of misplacements, the adjustments I did was rotate the hairs, scale them larger and smaller and make a couple of hair stick out more.

Painting skin weights

When doing the rigging the largest issue was the shoulders and clavicle (image above). This was affected because of the loose clothing my character is wearing. I set value to 0 and removed the painted areas in the lats.

On the left before image the arm is folding inside the shoulder which deforms weirdly. I painted the skin weight where the highest value is on the deformed area, but I had to smooth it out a lot since some areas might deform weirdly when the arm rotates. It also made it more difficult since my character is wearing a loose jacket.

Reference Material for Move List

To get a better idea of my character movements I looked into animation examples and video games such as Sekiro. I will include some samurai movement such as attacks to give my character more personality and put him in some action. I also looked into movies but found it quite difficult as the attacks where covered by the actors most of the time.

Below is my Move list, I added some GIFs on the left side that could be useful when doing the motion captures.

Explanation - reference

Standing - Heavy breathing, shoulders going up and down

Crouch - Example how low the character is going to crouch but different placement for the feet

Jump Kick - Similar Jump Kick but less off the high kick

Jog - Quite similar for the jog and sword on right hand

Attack - Start pose is standing, right leg will be forward and the swing will start from left to right diagonally

Importing prop

Before doing the trim I imported the prop which will be for the attack and jog action. I downloaded a free sword asset from turbosquid and rescaled it. The blade length is from the hand to the floor, this is the real life scale as well which is around 80-90 cm.

I adjusted the start pose and copied the full body pose control from start to end. I struggled a bit with the x, y, z and rotation options in the pose controls as I find it quite confusing. But I played around with it until I got the correct start and end pose.

There were some issues when the character was jumping in the air but using Zero key will go back to the original frame.

There weren't a lot of issues with this jump kick animation, it was mostly the noises around the feet.

With the same issue I tried to use an old method to make my character lock in place, this is the exact same steps as the walk cycle. The old method is something Jacqui showed me 1 to 1. I didn't manage to make it work but gave it a try.

Although I got the same start and end pose by copy/paste in pose controls. But once I tried to fix the translation in Z hip to create an ease in and ease out, I started having issues. The character was in one position, but the feet was floating forward, I tried to adjust the feet translation, but it didn't work.

Even if I didn't manage to make it work, I sort of got a better understanding of the curve. However, I will be using the demo file Jacqui sent me only if I couldn¨t make it work.