Gladiator Project

Well here’s what I think is my worst project so far this term from the 3d side of my course. The gladiator. Well ill first explain why I think it went o so horribly wrong... not enough time…

I left a week for texturing the body and rigging the model. Didn’t realise how frustrating rigging would become.

This is my gladiator anyway. As we had a limited amount of 300 tris to add additional weapons and armor, I thought I’d try and cover my gladiator in as much armor as possible. Was pretty pleased with my efforts. But when it came down to putting an animation on him, bit of body were coming through the armor everywhere. I didn’t really understand the enveloping. Something about keeping bits of geometry within the envelope so they moved together.

But despite my efforts, nothing succeeded in working.

So in heinsight… I should have really spent less tris on armor and more on weapons (and made a baddass helmet).

The pose in the above picture is pretty much the only one in the animation where his skin isn’t through his clothing and bits of elbow left behind.

Up to this point however everything had gone smoothly. The first thing to do was to search through the many pictures of Heathers naked men on K drive, to find suitable ones for front left and back to model over. Then follow tutorials on blackboard for the best way to create the human form.

This project was after the van, so a jump from creating a box with wheels to modelling a human figure was pretty big, but ive become a lot more confident with the software and to my surprise I didn’t find it toooooo difficult to complete this part.

Next step was making a head separately to the body. Learnt another new technique here to add to the bag - Box modelling, yaaaaay. This worked out well compared to my first attempt before looking at tutorials. I did find it difficult however to create lips, still unsure of how to this properly.

I am pretty pleased with how the head turned out. Thought he was gonna be an ugly mo fo, so I decided to cover most of his face with a helmet. At the time I thought we were allowed to spend leftover tris from the body to use on props and armor. Turned out, we weren’t. So I had to begin the task of cutting down geometry on the armor to stay within budget.

He actually has no ears but shhhh he doesn’t need them :P

I also followed the tutorial on blackboard to create low poly hands, using a similar method to creating the head. I did have abit of trouble making these but nothing to serious and they turned out alright. Although I have learned from looking back on this project, there are lots of verts which need to be connected together. I didn’t know at the time that polys can only be 4 sided.

Texturing was abit of a nightmare, visible seems literally everywhere around arms shoulders neck, everrrywheeere basically. But I just didn’t have time to sort it out if I wanted to get the thing rigged. Ive learnt my lesson from this one. Don’t leave things last minute

Time management is crucial…