#honeydoo

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A2 - Finalisation and Turntable Render

Here is my rendered turntable of the final version of my Honeydoo model, including a wireframe render. (Use this link if it doesn’t appear above: https://youtu.be/DOnKmIxNraQ)

I used the PDFs provided by Thomas in his Advanced Animation Production, composition workshops to help me get it set up. Although I was unable to get render layers working properly, which is something he too had trouble with.

I’ve made adjustments to the mesh, especially around the hair in order to make it appear less like a helmet. I’ve attempted this by making her ears slightly visible, making the overall shape of the hair less ‘perfectly round’ as well as basing the side profile on that of actual afro hairstyles (see reference far below).

I’ve also updated her hands so that there’s an extra loop at where the fingers begin and I’ve moved the thumb down to a more natural position. 

Ideally, I reckon they could use a lot more edge loops for extra definition, however since this is smoothed version (for sculpting) from the low-poly model, it might be best if I just did this by revising my low poly model with what I’ve learned from my first sculpt-modified version.

I’ve also made attempts to create an updated version of the model with additional detail, especially on the shoes. The arms have also been slightly updated to appear less sausage-like.

Unfortunately, I decided not to feature it in the turntable due to complications involving the UVs and having to painstakingly redo the texture, as you can kind of see with the texture on the shoe.

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A2 - Finalisation and Blendshapes

Here is my finalised version of Honeydoo on Sketchfab.

As a bonus, I also did a quick deformation test of one of the points on Honey’s mane. The pivots aren’t ideal, probably because I didn’t add enough joints, so it’s really easy to break.

Here is a list of blendshapes I produced for Honeydoo to test her facial deformation. They’re based on the 7 universal expressions, as opposed to the modular facial system I had for Perry. They’re kind of based on the diagram shown on the lower image.

I gave her a ‘default exp(ression),’ which closes her mouth, which I had originally modelled open.

Here is a video demonstrating the blendshapes in action.

I was originally hoping to just animate and playblast them like I did with Perry. Unfortunately, the blendshapes seem to glitch out when animated, resulting in the shading changing in a way that makes Honey appear uglier and uncannier (see ‘laugh lines’ and cheeks below), as well as the very tip of the nose being unable to move.

Sorin would give me additional feedback for the expressions by reminding me to make the jaw movement more obvious; keeping the upper teeth still and pushing the shape of the eyes further.

Sorin also mentioned that the eyelashes and their relation to the eyes tended to appear blocky. He pointed out that it was likely because of my decision to make the eyeliner a seperate material (shared by the lashes), as opposed to sharing it with the skin.

As such, I updated the model so that the entire face mesh uses one material. Below are some renders of the seven universal expressions with my corresponding update.

When working on the renders, I noticed some issues involving the geometry when that I did not notice before, without lighting, such as shadow artifacts on the chin and odd rims around the lip.

I also wanted to point out that the hair materials seems to be considerably darker and less saturated than the mane for some reason, despite sharing the same material. It later turns out that the wrong hair material was used and there’s somehow two of them in my Maya file.

Below is a collection of higher quality stills of each expression.

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A2 - Normal map baking attempt and texturing in Substance

Before I began texturing in Substance, I had the idea to save on performance by using a lower poly version of the mane and having it normal-mapped with the high poly version.

Unfortunately, it didn’t succeed, since the normal-map version ended up with having just as chunky shading as without it.

Here is my retopologised mane’s UV map. It’s in high poly, so it took a while to do, due to the performance impact it had on my computer. Hence why I wanted to work with the lower-poly version.

I had to redo it with the low-poly version, since 

Here’s my first attempt at normal mapping, based on Autodesk’s Transfer Maps editor instructions. It’s blocky and defeats the entire purpose of normals. I’m not entirely sure what caused it, but it did take a while with the settings I used, so it was a considerable waste of time.

Here is the low poly mane as it appears from behind without the normal map. It’s pretty chunky around the lower areas, with the points.

Here’s the same area with what I consider a successful normal map. However it is only slightly less chunky than what I had before.

Here is the front. As you can see, there are major seams from the underside of the mane from my UV mapping. It’s here where I felt that normal baking would not be an effective solution for improving the visuals of the model, whilst maintaining good performance.

It would probably be better just to add more edge loops, that go around the back side of the mane, though that might cause complications on the front and sides by adding heaps of detail that might be difficult to manage or even also impact performance.

Here is my texture in Substance for Honey’s head/face. The brown, ‘insect’ part of her antenna transitions from skin on her ears. 

I also redid the eyes to be larger from previous, since I felt that she might look more appealing from the side if her pupil was more easily seen. The eyeliner shares the same material as the lashes and is assigned directly to the faces themselves, as opposed to being part of the face/head texture.

Also note my updates to the eyebrows’ thickness, so that Sorin doesn’t have to bring it up as much in the future.

Here are the shoes. As observable, I feel that the lack of detail turned out to be much more consequential than I anticipated. Since they didn’t look as appealing as I hoped, appearing relatively flat with just the texture.

I wasn’t completely sure how I wanted to handle the 3D detail of the shoes, hence why I didn’t really bother with them in the first place.

Here are the textures for the rest of the clothes, front and back. The skirt has its own separate material and UV map. 

At some stages, I had to make tweaks to the mesh as well as the placement of some of the materials. Thankfully, Substance was able to maintain my progress when I updated the mesh during those incidents.

However, if I were to do anything that changed the UVs, Substance may not be able to keep my texture, even though I knew that a representative mentioned that Substance is able to retain progress as long as the brushwork was done in 3D.

At this stage, since it’s up to par with my reference sheet, the model is generally finalised, although I may consider making further tweaks to the hair somehow, since some people still find it easy to mistake for a helmet.

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A2 - Sculpting finalisation and retopology

After taking into Andrew’s advice on always enabling tessellation and having gentler use of the smooth and bulge tools; as well as being gentler with the grab tool in general. I was finally able to sculpt a mane that (although resembled some kind of weird starfish, sea creature) I was pleased with because it stayed true to my reference sheet.

So I brought my sculpted model, at the lowest division setting, from Mudbox back to Maya to retopologise the mane and make and final tweaks before sending it to Substance Painter for texturing.

Here is the very start of my retopology process, using Maya’s quad draw.

As you can see later into my sculpt, I hid the body mesh so it didn’t get in my way. I would later hide more and more of the meshes, such as the hair and the teeth as I worked my way into the centre.

The points/fluffs were going to be tricky, especially in regards to handling the topology flow and their relationship with one another across the mesh.

As you can see in these two images, I began running into major issues with the centre edges merging into each other and Maya’s symmetry feature becoming unreliable. This is when I attempt to relax the edges along the geometry or add additional edge loops near the the centre-most edge.

Note the faceless edge at the centre of where I deleted them in order to fix them.

Here is the topology as it appears again, with the hole filled in, smoothed. When unsmoothed, the mesh appears perfect, but it is revealed there are overlapping vertices.

Here is a video showcasing the symmetry ‘merging’ issue in action. 

At one stage I managed to work around the issue (see lower image) by temporarily disabling symmetry, relaxing the area a bit and then re-enabling it, followed by mirroring the mesh so it’s truly symmetrical again.

Unfortunately, as I continued working on the topology, that’s when what’s depicted in the video started occuring again.

Here is the topology continuing through to the back of the mane.

Here is it progressing into the rear underside. Note the two bulges I accidentally left from sculpting. These would not be reflected within the retopology.

Here is my progress towards retoplogising the ends of the points. As shown, I began facing difficulties involving triangles and n-gons when trying to solve them. 

The usual solutions were to add more edges (which can make the model more resource-intensive and harder to work with) and to redirect some of the edges to make more of a proper loop.

Here’s an example of the topology on one of the fluffs, near Honey’s neck, showcasing a half-loop.

Here is my first completed version of the toplogy. I wasn’t pleased with how one of the points didn’t take its full shape properly, so I went back to retopologise it. Mainly with the addition of more loops and edges.

As you can see the geometry is very tight after adjusting the topology. Potentially more so than what’s preferable, but it’ll probably have to do.

Here is an overall view of the mesh, with a smoothed version of the retopologised mane, before I export her into Substance for texturing. 

I had to re-UV map her body, since Mudbox eliminated her UVs for some reason, despite not really changing any of the topology there.

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A2 - Last minute additions and initial sculpting phase.

Initially I was planning on modelling Honey’s ears/antennas in Mudbox, via tessellation sculpting. 

However I decided that it was too much unnecessary effort, since they weren’t supposed to appear particularly detailed and the quad-draw process would undo most of the work I did with retopology earlier. I’ve modelled the antennas with the ends straight, like in my reference sheet so they can be curved when rigged.

Sorin made another comment about her eyebrows being too lacking dynamics, with the uniform density. Just like he did with Perrys, which makes sense, since they’re copied and pasted from him without change. 

I’ve modelled a relatively simple ear cavity, which looks a little odd with the lighting/shading, since some of the edges are probably too sharp and tight than what they should be. Thankfully, it’s mostly hidden for the sake of this assessment and I can smooth it during sculpting.

I’ve made her ear appear ‘thick’ in order to make it appear more like it can support the weight of the antennas.

I used images of Team Fortress 2 characters (lower images) as reference to help me define the form of the cavity. Originally I had the cavity ‘point towards’ the face, to be more realistic. However, the shading looked more unusual that way hence why I changed it to something simpler.

Here is the overall view of the mesh before I put her into Mudbox.

My export process is the same as the previous post, smooth, duplicate then export. However, with Andrew’s help, we confirmed that the cause of the ‘twitching tool issue’ was from conflicting ‘contact’ from exporting the mesh with separate parts. 

The alternative solution, without combining the mesh, was to use the lock feature on the parts that I wasn’t working on whenever I’m sculpting.

Here is the updated UV with the antennas and ears included.

Here is the an overall view of my first sculpting pass, in progress.

 I mainly focused on getting the general shape of my character right, with most of the tweaks at this stage being in the hair (so it no longer looks like a shoddy helmet), the fingers and the chest (so she looks more like she’s wearing a shirt). I’ve also tweaked the shoes a bit, so the proportions are a bit more balanced and convincing; using references such as the lower image.

As you can see, the mirror functionality on the tools I used, failed to maintain its consistency on the other side shown by the grotesquely broken and stretched fingers on her right.

I plan on using Mirror in Maya to fix this, since Mudbox’s mirror feature is restrictive and would require more effort to clean up.

I also began attempting to sculpt her mane, using the tessellation feature, however my first pass turned out messy. Since not only is it poorly skewed but is also appearing too detailed and thus inconsistent with the rest of the character.

I also ran into some pretty bad ‘pinching’ issues with the ends of the points on her mane, where there’d be too much densely clustered definition in such a tiny area.

Smoothing it usually made the pinch tinier and worse, while bulging tended to ruin the established shape of the point and smoothing over it sometimes resulted in it reverting back to an unwanted pinch. So it often turned into an annoying, counterintuitive tug-of-war process.

Andrew’s solution was to ALWAYS use tessellation with my tools and go over it with a gentle (low tool strength) bulge and smooth process for more control.

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A02 - Preparing Base Mesh for Sculpting

Despite the fact that I’ve gotten the base mesh at a stage where I’m happy with its appearance/detail, there’s still plenty of work to do in order to get the mesh ready for sculpting and bits of detail where I still haven’t covered yet.

Here’s a little impromptu test I did with Honey’s lip-posing capabilities. She’s a bit harder to get right than Perry, since she’s much more human-like, and has a lot more detail clustered into one little area. She pretty much requires me to make sure her lips curve around her teeth, or else she’d look weird. 

Whereas with Perry, if his lips were ‘flat,’ he’d still look relatively appealing, although not as good as if they were curved as well.

I’ve also gone ahead and revised Honey’s forearm/hand, so that her palm faced downwards by default. I felt that the way I had it on my reference drawing, although easier to model, was going to complicate rigging and posing, so it was best that I changed it to what was standard. 

This impression was based on my observations on Danny Mac’s Zbrush tutorials, since he would have his character’s hands face downwards: 

My process for rotating the hand downwards, involved detaching the forearm (as opposed to the hand itself, as not only was it more unnatural but also more difficult), and rotating the mesh 45 degrees in relation to its central pivot.

Doing so moved the positions of the edge loops, so when retopolgising, I had to add some new edge loops and delete an existing one, primarily around the upper chest, with one of the new ones going downwards towards the legs.

Initially, I thought this was going to give me more problems, with excess detail, but it serendipitously solved an existing one in the process. This is shown by the screenshot above, where the triangle from the previous post now has a proper quad taking its place, from the fingers’ new, lower edge loop.

There was also one last triangle above the nose, between the eyes, that I felt compelled to eliminate as well. This was leftover from me creating half-loops for Honey’s nose area. 

There may be another more effective solution to this, but I’m currently not entirely sure.

Now that I’m content with the mesh, it was time to bring it into Mudbox for sculpting. My process for exporting is to smooth the meshes, duplicate them and then export them to .fbx, with the smoothing and tangent boxes under the geometry section ticked.

However, as shown above, I encountered numerous errors with my meshes, concerning things that I forgot to give attention to during finalisation. Particularly incomplete UVs and a bunch of unwanted duplicate, vertexes leftover from a glitchy mirroring process.

During my UV mapping process, I encountered a major issue around the armpit/breast areas, likely resulting from Maya’s attempted fixing of non-manifold geometry, which is necessary for the unwrapping process. 

This is the exact same issue I had with the Perry model and was just as tedious and messy to clean up as with before; dragging and connecting the same vertexes into place for up to 5-6 times repeatedly in order to get the geometry normal again.

The areas with the overlapping, duplicate vertexes were mainly around the chin (as seen above) and the back of Honey’s scalp. They also affected Honey’s mouth cavity as well.

Here is an internal shot of an unwanted triangle inside Honey’s armpit-breast area, that might be directly responsible for the non-manifold geometry issue, since it as also present with Perry as well.

My solution, like with Perry, is to create a vertex in the middle and connect it to exterior vertex of the mesh (lower image).

Here is the affected area now fixed, so I can proceed with the UVs.

Here is the UV for Honey’s body. I’ve made UVs for each and every single one of her meshes; from the mane and hair to the lashes and brows (the latter of which are far more simpler than what’s necessary).

Just when I thought I was done with the overlapping vertexes on the face, more seemed to reappear, especially when I had to mirror her body again in order to fix the non-manifold geometry.

It doesn’t help that they’re hard to find until the last minute, where they’re highlighted in red by Mudbox. They’re almost like a cancer in the modelling process, especially if there’s too many to be managed.

After sorting out the UVs and broken vertexes, I discovered that my export process was resulting in weird, ‘twitching’ in the tools that rendered the program superfluous for sculpting.

My solution was to combine the entire mesh into one, which I was kind of reluctant to do, since it gave me less individual control over the subdivisions. However, it’s actually not that problematic, since the skirt needs to have the same amount of divisions as the body in order to fit properly.

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A02 - Finalising the Base Mesh continued

Continuing from where I left off, I’ve begun to model the base meshes for the hair, the scarf/mane and the wings, as seen above.

Here is my solution for the n-gons inside Honey’s mane. It’s a bit stretched at the moment, but I was thinking I could get away with it, since I’ll be refining it during sculpting in Mudbox and redrawing the topology as required.

However I’ve later decided that the base mesh needed a whole lot more work done on it before I moved onto the sculpting phase; especially on the face, which I feel, and was recommended, needed to be brought up to the same standard as the Perry model. Although I originally had that in mind with the sculpting phase.

So I decided to add eyes and revise the topology of Honey’s face, based on what I learned from modelling Perry the Rabbit.

Here is a smoothed (preview), close up of Honey’s eyes, showing the work I did for the eyelids. The upper eyelid fold is loosely based on a still reference I acquired from a YouTube video tutorial series (lower image) about character modelling, when I was searching for “Pixar Eyelids.”

Honey’s eyelids are far more pronounced than Perry’s and they look more obviously Caucasoid, while I felt Perry’s appeared more racially ambiguous, despite my intentions to make both characters primarily Caucasoid.

Work needs to be done to ensure that the eyelids have a uniform slope along the vertices, otherwise if they’re wonky, they’ll look unintentionally wrinkled.

Here’s another view of Honey’s face, showing the eyelids more from the side, as well as further updates to the topology, especially around the mouth-nose area and the side/back of the head, so that it flows more intuitively. I’ve also added some additional edge loops leading to the bottom of the eye in the process, which will require moving around in order to preserve that round eye shape.

I’ve also decided to put some attention towards re-topologising her hair mesh, which is kind of like this weird, unappealing ‘helmet’ at the moment. This is to ensure the sculpting process goes a bit better with more intuitive edge flow, since I anticipated that all the unnecessary half-loops could complicate the process and limit the mesh’s flexibility.

Same applies for the mane-scarf mesh, which is a bit uneven at the moment.

Here are the back views of the same mesh.

I later modelled a mouth cavity, with altered copies of the teeth and tongue from my Perry model added.

Originally I had a whole lot more edge loops inside Honey’s lips, but I later removed most of them, bringing them down to the same amount as Perry’s, since they made mouth-posing a lot harder and more distorted.

I then modelled some eyelashes for Honey, based on a flat-plane, referencing the relatively simple, Grandma’s House Lucy eyelashes to get an idea of how to produce them. 

Clipping issues can easily arise from having them make close contact with the eyelids, especially when they don’t have the same amount of edge loops (which I might update) and when they don’t have the same colour as one another. 

So I began to colour parts of the mesh accordingly to get an idea of what Honey would look like without the plain old, grey Lambert; adding eyeliner with the inner-most eyelid faces in the process. Something that helps with the clipping issues on the eyelids a bit.

Here is an upper-body shot of the mesh with corresponding, single-colour materials and the updated hair/mane base meshes.

Same as above, except full body shot.

I’ve also updated Honey’s back topology a bit as well, deciding to add ‘elbow loops’ (circled in red), just like how I had with Perry later on (circled in blue).

Folds/circle loops for where the wings come out have been added as well, so they look more organic.

Ditto with the elbows above, except with the kneecaps. The extra geometry could be useful during rigging. I may need to add an extra loop or two, like I did with Perry’s in order to achieve more of a kneecap-appearance. 

Finally, I’ve decided that the base mesh needed a skirt to go along as well. Something that I was also kind of planning to do in Mudbox, but I ultimately decided that it wasn’t the right program for that kind of work.

Meanwhile, Andrew during this week’s tutorial recommended to solve the extra polygons on the thigh with a single triangle. As opposed to the half-loop that I had before, due to how unnecessarily odd he felt it was and because he felt that it was in a relatively obscure area.

It helps that I have the dress to also hide it as well.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about how I was going to approach properly sculpting/modelling Honey’s mane. So I looked back at an older model which I’ve known for quite a while as a reference.

It’s a model of the anime character, Renamon, produced by KP-ShadowSquirrel; who has a similar mane, if not inspired that of Honeydoo’s. Upon inspection, it seems that ShadowSquirrel has modelled the mane in a way involving layers of closely overlapping, slightly modified duplicate ‘shards.’ 

This is something I’ll need to consider when sculpting/modelling Honey’s mane, since starting with a simple, flat base mesh may not be enough or it may even be the wrong approach in the long run.

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Assessment 02 - Updating the Reference Sheets and Finalising the Base Mesh

Here I’ve updated my reference sheet for Honeydoo to have her wear clothing, as well as feature my new ear-antenna design as well.

As such, I’ve begun updating my base mesh to feature the clothing, such as the converse-high tops, socks, as well as a pair of boxer shorts underneath her skirt; complete with detail loops and creases. Same goes with the sleeves of her shirt.

Previously, I had an ‘insect abdomen’ tail on her back. But I later ended up removing it because not only did I feel that it may detract considerably from the human aspect of this assessment but also make modelling her bottom a lot more complicated, especially since I extruded it way too low and pretty much on her butt area.

I later updated this same area with a much less pronounced butt, since she’s supposed to be wearing boxer shorts underneath her skirt.

I also began to define her face/head a lot more as well, using Autodesk’s human base mesh in Mudbox (mid-image) to determine how much detail I need before I start sculpting.

While I did start out working without much reference, besides the Mudbox one, I did eventually reference from my existing Perry model, so I don’t have to figure all the topology out myself. However, because I started out without referencing Perry, I feel that I’ve got slightly better results, such as reduced polygon stretching around the mouth.

One of the aspects that give me a hard time would have to be figuring out how to do the topology of the area between the thighs properly. This is how I’ve currently got it, with the edge looping back around and being supported by the lower ‘corners’ of her trousers.

It’s probably not very accurate this way, but my main concern was ensuring I can get as much of the topology as quads as possible. I’ll probably have to redraw the topology after sculpting anyway.

My next step is to probably make a base mesh for her mane/scarf as well as her hair.