Post Mortem - Hand in Newest Article Michael Ollerton

Post Mortem

High res renders and Marmoset files can be found on the K-Drive

And its finished! After 20 weeks of work I’m happy to say I’ve completed my FMP and my last ever project for university. When I first started coming up with ideas for my project I wanted to make 4 AAA characters and an art book of its production that also included a ton of concepts. Basically I wanted to do two huge FMPs, which was so stupid I’m so thankful to my tutor Craig for spotting that when he did! I instead made 4 AAA characters which is what I wanted to do as a career path anyway, I have learnt a lot, and honestly I would do a lot differently if I was to do it again, but I’ll get into that more later.

Anyway! Here’s what I made! After spending so long on them it feels great to be finished. I’ve been staring at them for so long that to just take a step back and look at them all together I do feel a big sense of accomplishment.

Okay now the self-reflection.

What I Did?

So for this project my aim was to make four AAA characters that were all to a very high standard. I wanted to show that I could design a group of characters and take them all the way through the pipeline, starting from concepting all the way to rigging and displaying in real-time (I used Marmoset).

I wanted to this project to show that I could maintain a level of quality in all the characters so that they all look like they come from the same universe, and work together. I knew this would be tricky because obviously within 20 weeks I was going to be a lot better artist then when I started, so the last character could look drastically different from the first.

I wanted to show that I could also make these characters within similar deadlines as character artists in industry. So each had roughly 4 weeks of work to them. I felt this was an important goal because I wanted to become comfortable to this kind of time restraints, as well as to show I can work as close to the real deal as possible.

What I’ve learnt?

I feel I have a very strong understanding of what character art really takes now, where as before I just knew that it was something I wanted to pursue. I think doing this project has allowed me appreciate what I now need to learn, such as face studies, anatomy, materials and so much more. So even though I don’t feel I have learnt all the things I need to become a character artist I know what those things are so I can now start to try and learn them, which I think is almost as important. It can be hard to know what you need to know! This isn’t a great example of what I’ve learnt during this project but I wanted to touch on it because it’s very important to me, moving forward.

Something that I have learnt if I was going to do this project again I would scale it back even more. A fellow student has said something that has really stuck with me “its better to under promise and over deliver.” I feel this is great advice and the people that gave themselves smaller projects have much stronger out comes then people with much bigger projects. I feel that if I did just three characters, they would be too a much higher standard. When I recently asked for crit off the art director for total war at creative assembly, he said that I have actually done too much for a grad portfolio, and I should scale it back.

I have learnt that variation is incredibly valuable; if I were to change one thing about this project it would be to follow some of the other character artists on my course and do three characters that are totally separate projects. I have learnt a strong appreciation of breaking up big projects. Smaller projects that are different will keep my attention more and I wont get bored of them especially when the are 20 weeks long. This might be the most important thing I’ve learnt.

How have I progressed as an artist?

I believe I have developed a lot as a character artist during this project, I now feel I can approach most characters and do them justice in 3d, which is something I wouldn’t be able to say before this project. I feel I know a lot about most aspects of character art, including hair, which is something I really wanted to develop an understanding for during this project.

I have become more confident with forms and how to exaggerate them, even though I don’t know how successful I was in exaggerating forms in my FMP it’s something I feel I can now perform. With making aliens that have very similar anatomy to humans I had to try and get the balance between recognizable and different, with out it looking like mistakes.

I feel my texturing has improved a lot since starting this project. I can now work comfortably in substance and Photoshop, as well as using a combination of the two. I think I really started to figure this out during texturing my first guitar, I think I got really good results because It gave me a chance to go into vey small detail with it and I then was able to apply that to overall look of the characters.

What went well?

I think something that really jumps out at me as successful was the hair on my characters. It took me the whole project before I really getting the results I wanted. It’s still something I want to keep developing, but it feels awesome to go from have having no clue how to do it, to now it being something that gets the most praise from people. I now want to tackle realistic hair as I went for semi stylized in my FMP characters.

Another aspect that I feel went good was that I think they read well together. This was one of the main aims of my characters to have them all together in a scene. I think this was important because it shows an equal quality to them, which if they didn’t have means they wouldn’t look right together. I also think it shows that my original concept was a successful idea because it could be visualized in 3d.

One of the main things to go well was my time keeping and planning; I had a very tight schedule, which I stuck to. This meant that everything went relatively smoothly because I gave myself a large amount of polish time. I think this was a good idea to work they way I did, by working hard for smaller amounts of time, and then have a lot of time after to get feedback and refine my work based on it. As apposed to spending a lot of time and not moving on and then still getting a lot of crit but not enough time to address it.

What didn’t go well?

One of the main things that I’m not very happy with is the clothing on the lead singer. Looking back on it now I can see how I would do it very differently firstly I would try to make the clothing look more like how I was made in real life. For example I was given some crit from Blair about the skirt “Skirt looks like it should be shinier, the wrinkles look like it should be made of a thin, silken material. If you intended to make it like an actual school skirt, they don't really have that many wrinkles and have a more solid structure.” This very much captures what I was feeling, even though I didn’t know what was wrong just something seemed off.

Another aspect that I don’t think went great was my material definition; I think I really struggled to get the materials (mostly with clothing) to look accurate to how they would in real life. Overall most of characters might be a bit too shiny in places, and I think this is something that I didn’t get to fully improve upon because I had to keep moving of to stay on track. Occasionally just spending really long time on something can teach you how to accurately do it, and then you can start working on speeding up workflow.

The main thing that I don’t think went well in this project is how it looks as a collection of pieces that showcase what I can do, I think I realized a little too late that they all kind of show the same things, such as my ability to do clothing etc. I think, like I mentioned earlier that three separate projects that show clothing and hard surface and maybe an animal would be a better portfolio, for going to get a job straight away, but I don’t know if I wanted to do exactly that because it was important to me to create these characters how they were, even if its not the perfect demonstration of my abilities.

Conclusion

In conclusion I personally feel this project was a big success for me and even though there’s a lot I would do differently, the learning experience I gained from this I wouldn’t trade for anything. This project represents the summation of everything I’ve done at Uni from this point; I feel it couldn’t have gone better. The characters that I have produced were made on my terms to my specifications, which is a level of control I haven’t had before so that fact I didn’t all go up in flames has given me a lot of self confidence in my abilities. I look forward to taking what I’ve learnt on this project and at Uni and pushing it further in my personal development as I look for a job as a character artist roles in industry.

Week 20 The END Michael Ollerton

It's the final week of FMP, Before we are finished forever. Its been a long ride. I spent my final week not freaking out actually. As you probably saw in my last weeks Blog, I'm kind of finished. So this week has been relatively non stressful. I spent most of this week creating my hand in files and tiding up everything for it to be marked. I also worked on making really pretty renders of all my characters as well as creating the marmoset scenes and uploading them.

last week I contacted Blair Armitage for some feedback as she has been helpful enough to respond with a bunch of stuff that I should change and fix, so after hand in I'm going to be making a look of edits.

During this week I also contact Kevin McDowell for some crit, as he was nice enough to look at my stuff and give some feedback as well. So even though this is the end, its just the beginning in terms of how I want these characters and my own skills to improve.

Anyway here's some final renders and beauty shots for you.











I going to start working on my post mortem/ hand in Blog now. :) Thanks

Week 19 Enviroment Michael Ollerton

I spent this week trying to set up the scene for my characters. The first thing that I had to do was model the drum kit for the drummer. For the drum kit I wanted it to be a mash of a bunch of drum kits, so that it looks like it was salvage from multiple time periods. I also wanted to add extra equipment to make it look like she has many roles in the band, and her drum kit reflects that. I wanted to base some of this after the set up that the musician 'Grimes' has.


This was the first pass.



at this point I received some crit form my tutor Craig that it just wasn't scifi enough to fit the rest of the world. I started thinking about this because I wanted to mix electric and acoustic drum kits. but I didn't have anything from the characters semi futuristic time period. I decided floating drum pads would read as something totally futuristic, but are still grounded by being used along with the main part of the drum kit.




I still felt something was missing in terms of the scifi element of the drum kit design. I had the idea that parts of the drum kit would be holographic, which I think really helps sell the design as a mix of old, current and future designs for the drum kit.



Now that everything has been finished in terms of essential assets, I then moved onto the environment, I didn't want it to be too extensive just enough to stop it looking like a bunch of floating characters.

I started by quickly making some Persian rugs. I did this very quickly in Marvellous designer, the threw that mesh into Zbrush, gave it some thickness and sculpted in the details. I then retopo'd and unwrapped it, and put a persian rug image texture over it, which did the trick for a very quick rug.
I then added the a wood floor texture to a plane, and aplha'd away some of the wood panels. I finally stuck a few amps in the scene and made wires for everyone's equipment.

This is the final scene so far. I was trying to play about with the lighting and colours. kinda want to recreate the lots of colourful lighting you see at a gig, but I'm not sure if its too much.

Polish Week 18 Bassist Michael Ollerton

This week I spent polishing the bassist, I began by modelling and texturing the bass guitar. My choose the recreate a guitar shown to me by my tutor 

The guitar fits the scifi tones that I wanted to come through in my characters.


I change a few things on it, in order to make in a bass guitar. and then I moved onto texturing it, I really like the white in the original reference so I decided to stick with that.


I terms of edits to the bassist himself, I received a lot of crit on my poly count thread, which was mostly to do with material variation.

some expecially helpful feedback was "What I would consider is make the materials more different from each other, maybe a worn leather jacket that doesn't shine as much as a slimey tongue, that way you can practice wider range of material production, and the final product will be much more interesting aswell! Also check as many photo references as you can, highlights can be really decieving, many materials are not defined by them, wood for example have basically no highlights or reflections to talk about, and you need to figure out other ways to make it feel like wood! Try and see how a leather jacket compares to frog skin (which also might be a good reference source for you ) and separate them accordingly!"

I find material variation to be one of the hardest things to get right so far, so this was really useful in helping me improve.

This is the current stage of this character, I did my best to apply what the feedback talked about. 

Polish Week 17 Leadsinger Michael Ollerton

This week I have been re texturing and overall tweaking the Lead singer. All the edits were mostly done in substance painter. I began by looking into what i felt was missing, having spoken to Rich Carey he said that every piece of clothing needs trim or folded over seams and the ends or it just doesn't look right. The bottom of my shirt didn't have any kind of trim which is why it looked kind of weird to me.


I pulled back the colour palette a bit, to just red white and blue. I also gave the character more trim around her shirt sleeves and bottom of her skirt. I also readjusted the roughness on the materials to try and make them look more varied, i still feel that material definition is an area that i really struggle with.


I also worked on refining the hologram textures on her skin. I made a tillable circuit board texture that goes all over her skin but is very subtle, and not instantly noticeable.
During this week I also made the holographic projector, that will be projecting the singer. I made this by following a tutorial on how to make hard surface models, as i don't have too much experience on this. The tutorial is called Hard surface Basic by Simon Fuchs and i found it very useful and really recommend it.


The main feature covered in his tutorial is how to apply complex geometry to another piece of geometry so that it wraps around it.

I then moved on to texturing the projector, and creating the holographic alphas. I textured the projector in substance, I wanted it to look very commercial and tacky like you could order it online or from a catalogue.

Polish Week 16 Drummer Michael Ollerton

this week I began by taking another stab and the drummer, first things first, I hated the top part of the clothing, and so had to re sculpt some new stuff pretty quickly. I got some ref of the style of clothing i wanted and drew it out in marvelous designer, and them simulated it to my character. I then imported those base meshes into Zbrush and had about a day just working on bring it up to the standard of the rest of the character.

Moving into substance I re-textured, pretty much everything. Again trying to apply what I learnt when texturing the guitar I did a new pass. I made the denim jeans on this character by following Del walker Vertex Magazine tutorial on how to make jeans. It's a little bit date because its not for PBR but its still applies really well.


Because I made new clothes this meant that I have to re rig the drummer again :( Not much to say on that front aside from that I did it, and I went okay :) This time i was able to rig in max because i now knew how the easily add extra bones and correctly parent them.

Polish Week 15 guitarist Michael Ollerton

finished the guitar and making a start on the guitarist rig. This week marks the beginning of my polish stage. I'm fairly happy with my progress so far as I've manage to more or less stick to my planning.

I spent the first few days of this week texturing the guitar. I feel in doing this I have learnt a lot about substance painter and I feel a lot more confident in how it works now. I began by doing a first roughness pass using a dust brush i go over the whole model with a little opacity, this give it a little surface noise that light only faintly picks up. I then move into the large more noticeable roughness variations such as finger prints. I also made a wood layer under the whole guitar and then put a mask over it and worked my way around the guitar chipping little bits out of the mask, to make it look like the wood was coming through. 

Rigging the guitarist has been a bit of a pain, overall he fits average proportions, but the string on his shut were really difficult to look natural. In the end i found the pose that i wanted and then i re simulated the strings, i feel this would have been the only way to get really good results, and if this was in engine, it would have physics applied to it, so there would be no need in both cases.

I haven't pushed the guitarist textures to much but I feel I need to move on now, or I'll fall behind.