End of Marking Period 1 Blogpost

Intention Definition & Exploration of Ideas: Throughout this year, I want to work on things that give away to my emotions, experiences, and thoughts. To do this, I will mainly be modeling and making renders, but I also want to make gifs and animations. This marking period, I focused on adults asserting dominance on the youth, which seems to be something I feel often(probably because I am a teenager). Because of this, I turned to the game, Persona 5 which really lives up to this idea. For this marking period I was planning on just taking a character from a game I like and just making a symbolic piece around her. For this, I chose Futaba Sakura because, throughout her life, she has been deceived by the adults around her, but was finally able to fight back when she found the truth among the lies.

Planning: To create this piece, I focused on how I was going to model her, and how I was going to make that model look good. I also saw a video that used metaballs for modeling that motivated me to want to use metaballs to model something complicated like the body. I saw another video that transformed a regular object into something I could only imagine doing by using nodes for the materials. With the regular cycles materials tab, you can get some good materials, but using nodes makes the possibilities endless, so I wanted to experiment with nodes and learn more about them.

Producing:
When making the model, I began to experiment with sculpting, which, I found to be an effective method for me. I found that sculpting gave me more freedom when creating the model, which produced better results than if I were to model it, in my opinion.


I also focused on using metaballs when making the body because, like sculpting, it gave me freedom, and I got to spend less time making the body since the metaballs provided me a base mesh to work with.


For nodes, I learned some basic stuff. I learned that you can basically mix materials endlessly, which helped me make materials look nicer. Also, learned how to layer bump maps although it is very annoying to do it and does not look nice all the time.

Evaluating:
When it comes to modeling, this is a method that I have found to be very effective for me and I will definitely use it for modeling everything else throughout this year. Some things I could improve upon, however, was modeling the parts separately. I watched videos that will model a separate part of the body and then fuse it with the rest of the model. Metaballs overall worked very well and I got great results from it. However, I would like to find ways to fix the topology of the metaballs so it would work nicely if I would want to animate the model later. For nodes, it was good and I learned some new things about shaders and how to use them, but I reached some setbacks because I am very inexperienced with them and still need to learn how to use them efficiently and receive the results I want.

Integrating: For the next marking periods, I want to continue to use the same method of sculpting and using metaballs for modeling. I believe this method was very efficient and created good results. I also do want to continue doing research on nodes and various things I can do with them since I feel as though I did not really do much with them in this piece. Lastly, I liked the effects I added while editing my piece and would definitely continue to do this and learn more about various effects I can add to make my works look better.

Work Log:
Monday:Worked on Coat and Top Material
Tuesday:Worked on Coat Material
Wednesday:Fixed Materials and Camera
Thursday:Fixed Materials and Lighting
Friday:Worked on this blogpost