Rigging
Modelling
Maya vs Blender
I started Following lesion modelling in Maya but after struggling to quickly and effectively get the shapes i wanted I moved over to using Blender for the most part. I found moving between software’s helped me stay motivated when tackling a problem and prevented me from hitting a block when face with frustration.
I started to create the Shade of my character by extruding and subdividing a cylinder. tracing front and side profile images I had drawn in paint tool sai. creating holes where the eyes would be, making sure the edge flow round the eyes flows around the eye. If i where to do this again i would work off a edge smoothed cube as the cylinder object has an irregular number of sides (over 4) on the two apposing faces.
The normal on the tip of the beak where also inverted so selecting a reversing that the shading was fixed.
Refining Character Design
Using the 3 thumbnail designs I chose from the Selection of 20. I then went on to apply the colour theory lectures to them. trying out different colour pallets created in the adobe color website. Then I will go on to tweak and refine the designs and pick the final colours from the pallets.
Character Designing
In setting out to create our own characters that we will later rig and animate in Maya or blender I created a board of themes id like to explore consisting of images taken of google and a couple doodles I made getting familiar with a drawing tablet and shapes.
I didn’t choose the bee life, the bee life chose me. Bee’s have ended up representing me in life and online in a highly creative wink at my name. So I looked at the shapes that made up the Hymenoptera order of insects, circles coming down to a triangle. I played with the descript similarities to the heart symbol and there connection to a monarch, a Queen. looking a dresses, particularly ones that i could incorporate insect wings into the design.
I selected these3 designs to develop because I felt that they conveyed more character in their expressions and appearance I also went in with the .
Web Scraping adventure 1
Over a weekend I watched Arcane the league of legends Netflix animated series and have become mildly obsessed with reading the character pages and short story’s on the fan wiki league universe site. This along side seeing this “character diagram” bellow* on reddit. I thought it would be a good learning exercise to create a interactive diagram/map of all 140+ league characters. Runeterra map
Using excel/google slides
Early last year we quickly went over data sets for unity and hope this will be a good way to revisit those lesions. I found out you can import entire html tables from websites like the LOL wiki into google sheets with ‘=importhtml(“”,”table”,)’.
Using R
Sheets was a very quick and easy way of collecting the data I wanted but from what i understood at the time.
Following along with these tutorials by
Dataslice I eventually got my web scraper to collect and combine the datasets I wanted into a table. next step
At this point i would like to fine tune the xpath’s to clear up some of the data. for example in the row created for “Akshan” it recognises ” Gun ” as a background for the character.
Edit: the wiki has since changed this and “Gun” is no longer present on the page.
next steps will be to learn how to utilise datasets in game engine and recreate the map.