Kit Topology Issues
Working on Kit in Maya I have come across quite a few issues that have hindered me from progressing.
After starting to map out her UVs I realised that I hadn't created a mouth bag for her that would be essential for animation. So I stopped working on her UVs and started working on her mouth bag - but when I was looking closely at her mouth, I found that I was unsatisfied with the lack of detail on her mouth, nose and chin.
I started working on making her nose slightly more rounded, giving her a more defined chin and creating lips for her. The problems that arose from that were that to create these things, I had to add more vertexes and edge loops, which were making the model more complicated and the sides were uneven.
Once I got the nose, chin and mouth to how I liked them, there was the problem of evening out the topology, and deleting some of the edge loops. It took a bit of trial and error of deleting different edge loops and moving vertexes to make the topology cleaner while still maintaining the look of the facial features that I wanted.
Then using Mudbox, I checked for issues in the topology before moving on to create the mouthbag. There were 3 problems with the topology, all on the same side. To try and remedy this problem, I deleted the half of the character that had the topology issues and mirrored across the half that had no issues. As my character is symmetrical, I thought this would be the end of the problem.
However, after opening my current model in Mudbox I have found that there are even more issues now than before I mirrored the model. I think this is because some of the edges have crossed over and some of the vertexes have merged - creating some messy topology.
Now I am going to stick with this model - as it is better for my character to be symmetrical and will make other tasks easier later.
So I am going to have to look at each issue indivually and fix them before moving on. I also need to seperate the fingers, since at the moment, they are closed - making it difficult to colour, texture and animate later.
Throughout my time working on this Unit, I have found I often come across issues that are tedious work to adjust and fix, just to move on to the next step and have to deal with another lot of issues again. I feel like my characters won't be at the level that I wanted them to be by the end of this unit - I have created models, deleted them, started again, come across many problems, including many issues with maya crashing, or a tool not working, or the computer being very slow; problems that have arose both from issues with the hardware and software itself, and my inexperience with maya, sculpting and 3d modelling.