Blogpost Falck

The production of the Club Crash game has been going smoothly this semester for everyone in the group. My specific role has been focused on modeling the main player characters for the game. 

 At the start of the semester my ongoing task was to complete the modeling for the three remaining characters. A few weeks into the semester we received feedback from visiting professors and alumni during our executive review meeting which changed this production schedule. They noted a potential bottleneck that would delay rigging, texturing and animation. 

Another team member was added to shorten this timeframe and relieve a bottleneck in production that might create an end-of-semester crunch for the students doing texturing, rigging and animation. Having the character models finished earlier will allow me to transition to working on other various models needed for the environment.

 My focus so far has been modeling two unique characters, the Gardener and the Scientist, in Blender. I made a basic character sculpt based off of proportions of the Gardener orthigraphic model sheet provided by our character designer. After I made the sculpt, I improved the body topology for better polygonal flow. I chose to save time for future models by reusing the topology for the torso and the hands. I started work on the clothing and details for the gardener, and got the clothing finished that weekend. 

 When I began the Scientist model I was able to get the body topology and sculpt made in a day by reusing the sculpt and topology from the Gardener and warping and adjusting the details. Because of the saved time, I was able to get most of the work for the scientist made in a week. The only thing left to finish is the hair. Looking back at our original schedule, I was surprised to see just how quickly I could work. What was originally scheduled for three weeks, I was able to mostly finish in one!        

Why do I enjoy the role of the character modeler? I enjoy the challenge of making character models. Each one has their own unique challenges that can affect the difficulty of that character. While it can get fairly difficult if a character design has more complex details, it’s always more rewarding to figure out how to create those details to a high quality. Now that I have completed the scientist and the gardener models, my next task is to create and model NPC character designs for Club Crash.

I would like to express immense gratitude to my professor Karl Koele for his extensive revisions to this post.