First year at USW

This entry is a summary of my first year of digital modelling and how badly it went in hindsight, now that I have learned so much more.
My first year at USW studying Game Art, I began digital modelling for the first time. My 3D modeling projects were as follows:

• Star Wars landspeeder vehicle
• Street furniture - a postbox
• A lorry based on given schematics
• A local building
• A human body
• A realistic human character
• A mythological inspired creature 

The landspeeder exercise was mostly to throw us into the deepend of digital modelling to discover what skills everyone had. Naturally, it went terrible for me as I had no experience. I took the time to read the given tutorials to learn the basics of this new software - 3DS Max.

The Postbox, I feel, was a success. I modeled it from personal photo reference. The form was accurate and the texturing believable, to an extent. I used photo-manipulation to make the textures, with a mix of flat colours and sporadically drawn flecks to mimic the dirt in the photo reference.

There were visible seams in the texturing and I didn't know anything at all about rendering and light setups, so excuse that too.
Not bad for a first attempt right?

For the lorry; I tried to follow the schematics but as I have such little knowledge of mechanics, or vehicles in general, it was difficult. I aimed for perfection and still struggle to accept that not everything has to be exactly accurate. I attempted to model the underneath of the van and make the wheels functional, however, it was all as one object as at the time I didn't realise that I could use different elements to combine in to one object.
I tried to use photo-manipulation from a variety of different vehicles all mashed together to get the front of the van looking realistic. It was a mess. The glass window was difficult in particular. At this point I had no understanding of normal maps, materials or shaders.
Although I am proud of the logo (clearly a Lidl rip-off).

For the building project I chose the Golden Cross Pub of Cardiff.

It went terribly. I took my own photographs as reference and used these to build the model. I think my biggest error was trying to build a lot of detail into the one object rather than adding, for example, the windows, and detailed brickwork towards the top of the building as separate elements. I tried to build one "panel" of the building, as 8 are almost identical, and then duplicate it, however, it took multiple attempts. Several times I found un-welded vertices and n-gons that needed cleaning up, which at that point had to be cleaned up 8 times.
By correctly modelling a panel the first time, using separate elements, it would have saved a lot of time, and looked a lot better, which would have ultimately allowed me to have the time to texture the model, which I didn't do in time for the deadline.
Another issue, I realise in hindsight, is not using magnetic snapping. I'd freehand extrude and move lines or vertices and estimate where they should be. This led to a lot of errors too.

Another improvement I could have made is unwrapping elements before duplicating. Everything seems so obvious now that I am looking back at it. D'oh.

The human character I enjoyed! I've always been interested in portraits and have practiced a lot of life drawing through both the foundation course and the Visual Studies module of my current degree.
There was a low poly limit for the brief. Obviously there is a lot of room for improvement, but this was my first attempt at organic modeling. The topology is good, with more polys I'd follow the muscle groups more closely and have a cleaner flow of polys.
The first head wasn't good enough. I developed it more before using this basic body sculpt to create the realistic character.

My first character was based on research at Cardiff Castle of mostly European armours and weapons from various time eras and wars. I ended up with a rogue-like character, wearing leather, and duel-wielding German inspired daggers. There was a lengthy designing process, I tried to explore as many possible directions with the character as possible.

I really enjoyed the character design, as my first character it was difficult. This is how it ended up! Including the diffuse map for both the character and the weapons.
I used a mixture of photo-manipulation and digital painting to get the effect of leather. I wasn't very happy with this at the time, let alone now that I have more experience.

I set up a rig for the first time. I had little knowledge of rigging, I had a very basic understanding of it, and set my mind on being able to pull it off, at least once.

A lot of this project was difficult, but led onto the next character project which was my most successful and most enjoyed, which I will write about soon!