To Give a Daydream Shape: An Exploration into 2D and 3D Art

  My scene originally only had the clouds on the bottom. Reuben told me I could add more clouds to fill it out a little more! Bryn recommended that I should scale the character up and vehicle up, while I do see the merit in it, the cap of the mushroom would just get cut off. So I didn't follow through on that unfortunately.

 I'll be frank, I hadn't slept cause I was modeling and rendering this throughout the night. This is kind of timetravelling but I just had to take a nap! Heres how the final ended up looking (ignore the poly count, I tried to keep it low as I could I promise) You see the vehicle? I received it about a day or two ago so I kind of had to rush things a little since I also had to put it into my scene and make adjustments if needed. ~~~ Our story starts here! I received this and was given the okay to make a couple adjustments to the overall form of the vehicle. Thankfully the vehicle was really simple! I took a cylinder (and followed the 8-side rule of course!) and made it into a kind of flower pot shape, finally detailing the top and bottom with the Bevel Edge tool (I've been addicted to using it, its a little scary) I then selected the middle faces of where I wanted the detailing and transformed it into the model. Ta dah! Simple. For the rope I took a cube made it long and dup...

 Google Drives  Microsoft OneDrive was used a lot while working on this project. I used it a lot for myself personally when I needed to work between devices. Goog- I mean, Microsoft OneDrive was just so helpful when I needed to share my files with my group members. And it was really organized as well, as we could just sort each section of our models into different folders. It gave all of us access to all of our needed files without compressing or tampering with the file format. And is also just a really good way to archive old incremented saves of Maya files if youre needed to free up space on your computer.

~~~ The model is looking really good now. What is working well?     Attatching the head went really smoothly. It had exactly double the faces, so converting it to keep a good topology and avoiding n-gons was really simple. My groupmate followed through well in making the head and following the 8 side rule for the neck! Bravo! ~~~ Modelling the hand was pretty easy, though I struggled a little to keep a bit consistent with the style of the body. Attatching the hand was a little trickier, I had 17 faces to work with (whoops!). It wasn't too tricky to fix up though, I just had to do a 5 into 3 conversion though, and just tried my best to hide it. My model was a little annoying when it came to trying to match up the hands evenly due to its asymmetry but we managed to make it work. What is causing issues, how are you addressing them?     Haven't heard from the teammate in charge of making the vehicle yet. I will be contacting them to try to expedite things but I am a litt...

  Lucy told me that I should keep the style of the character in mind when I'm making hands. I was leaning a lot on the realistic style of the tutorial, but the cartoonier proportions of the character. I ended up reducing the amount of edge loops all throughout to adhere to that and keep the poly count low. Caitlyn told me that I could think about removing a finger if I wanted to push the cartoony proportions a little. It was a nice idea, though I didn't think it really fit with what my group would have wanted.

  Before working on the suit jacket, I made sure to ask around and see what people thought. Kai, a friend of mine who has experience in 3D modeling, said that extruding outwards like I originally planned would make it look too bulky. They recommended duplicating and shrinking the middle part of the shirt and removing any nonvisible faces to cut down on the poly count. This was a great help as I had already done the work and was overall more efficient than what I was doing before. I showed what I had afterwards to Orlando. He didn't really have much to say about what I already had but he ended up showing me a suit jacket that he had. He pointed out the thickness of the cloth that I was trying to replicate. I plan on making some minor changes with the visible edges, but won't think about it too much due to the layers on the clothing.

 Soft Selection and Sculpting tools. I've been using the soft selection a lot of my making of clothing. It basically lets you do a little sculpting with the geometry to make things gradually falloff in influence around a selected part, rather than just the selected part itself. So you can just move or scale or rotate whatever you need and have the surrounding components move and deform smoothly and not get too weird looking. Press B to use soft select in maya. B + Drag to change the size. Sculpting tools, I'm not too sure how to use them fluently yet. But from the little I know, it just tries to emulate sculpting (wow who could have guessed). I checked out the sculpting shelf on the top and had a play around. From what I've seen, the vertices in the selected area of the model are repositioned, and the attatched faces are moved along with them. Best practice would be to have the faces on the sculpted elements be an equal size so any scuplting made is consistent and hold deta...

  ~~~ I ended up with this after doing a little bit of work on my model. Following the Joan of Arc tutorial, I duplicated the foot part of my model to do the model for the shoes. It was here that I got addicted to using the bevel tool keep the lines on my clothing items straightened, as well as to make any long instances of bumps or dips in the model that might not be as suited to using a bump map for. I used a colors when making my model to visually isolate parts to find any weird clipping that might occur! It worked a treat, I did this by assigning them materials that I have set up in the Hypershade window. Ambient color to max to prevent any weird looking lighting and just whichever color contrasts well from each other! (I like pinks and blues a lot) ~~~ Working on the pants and shirt now, and I originally tried to start it by duplicating the neccessary parts. However, I struggled to work backwards, therefore I just started from making a new model. I started with a cube, made th...