At the end of last sprint I really wanted to focus on improving my pipeline. I think I've achieved that very well, I put all of my energy into that this sprint and I am pleased with my results. However, I took on too much work this sprint right out of the gates which was unfortunate, and I need to be better at communicating the work I can do in a sprint to my producer. I also hope to complete more work next sprint however, as I feel I am not contributing enough characters per two weeks.
I started this sprint by fixing an issue with our main character, where the hands didn't line up properly with the rig we used from Mixamo. This didn't break anything, however it looked weird and my topology wasn't build for this type of stretching around the thin wrists. We thought it was important to fix this, especially for the main character. This took a surprising amount of time, and I wish I could have fixed this early. I had never dealt with this issue before in ZBrush. Using Maya, it is a simple process I've done before, but this was a new experience that I learned from. In the future I likely will do this faster, and I've changed my workflow so that this issue is no longer as difficult to solve in the future.
I've done this by breaking characters into more pieces. This also sped up my workflow for our wizard, where all work completed was moving much quicker down the line since I had tackled the clothes early. Working on an entire model is much easier for me and I've already begun work at an even quicker pace at our next character, which is an NPC.
However, this NPC was planned to be completed by the end of this sprint, and I am not even done with the high poly. While it is going much quicker, I still have trouble keeping a consistent pace of work throughout the week. I alternate the days I work on this class too much and should frequently be putting most of my attention here, I hope to improve on this in the future by micromanaging less in other existing projects I have.
Overall, there is not much to be said on the actual process to build the wizard character. Things went smoothly and my leads (as well as myself) are happy with the final product. I chose to model our clothing for these characters, which is a relief as learning a software like Marvelous designer to build our clothes during this intensive project would be even more time consuming. Luckily our art style allows for a hand-built set of clothing. This is only for now however, and this might change in the future.
My art pipeline however has improved drastically throughout this sprint. I now avoid pitfalls that I used to fall into before that would eat up a lot of my work. I work quickly, efficiently, and focus on important, general tasks, rather than specific things like a piece of clothing's texture, or someone's hairline. Instead, I now take all of these things into account at the same time, by practicing a process of sculpting that builds the character from its most general shapes into their more characteristic, parts. Additionally, I am becoming much stronger at retopology techniques and unwrapping efficiency, which are all skills I'm sure will never fail to be improved upon.
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