Introduction

I am now in my third year at Ravensbourne studying Animation Production and this term I have two briefs to fulfill. This blog covers the unit titled 'Advanced skills'. The other unit that runs along side it is a group project where we make a short film. 

The Advanced Skills brief states that I am to choose and focus on either my main role within the short film that myself and my group are creating or a new area that I will benefit from. I am required to carry out an advance level of research and experimentation within my chosen area. This research should be seen as a deeper learning activity. It is essential that I reflect and critically analyse my progress, this blog is exactly the place where I will be doing that.

The area that I am going to carry out advanced research for is Organic Modeling. Organic modeling simply means modeling living things such as a creature or a human. Looking at Organic Modeling from a technical point of view it could be argued that it is modeling something that has flowing topology, lots of curves and barely any hard edges. However this now broadens the meaning of Organic Modeling and means that an Organic Model could be a car, a football, a bowl etc etc. Despite saying that Organic Modeling is generally perceived in the animation industry as modeling characters, which is exactly the area that I want to focus on.

One of the reasons that I chose to research Organic Modeling for this unit is because it is an area that I am very interested in. However there is probably a more important reason for me choosing this as my topic, and that reason is Organic Modeling or Character Modeling is one of my weakest area's. Considering the specialism that I want to go into in the animation industry is modeling Organic Modeling is definitely a skill that I am expected to have. I think one of the main reasons that character modeling is one of my weakest areas is because I have not had enough practice, I have only ever modeled one character before and it was not the best attempt to say the least. Another reason that it is one of my weakest areas is because I simply do not know enough, I know some of the simple basic stages and tools but my knowledge needs to be developed a lot further. 

This unit gives me the perfect opportunity to gain the knowledge that I need. A piece of software that is now commonly used in industry for lots of tasks especially character modeling is Zbrush. I currently have never used Zbrush before and this unit seems like the perfect opportunity to gain a good understanding of how to use it or at least learn the basics. I am also looking to develop my knowledge of character modeling in Maya. I will be using both of these software together to create a character worthy enough to go in my show reel. This means that the character I create will need to be of a very high standard in order for it to stand out and show that I am capable of working in the animation industry.

In order for me to learn the process of character modeling in Maya and the basics of character modeling with Zbrush I have bought a very helpful book from amazon. The book is called 'Character Modeling with Maya and ZBrush: Professional Polygonal Modeling Techniques'. It is written by Jason Patnode and was published by Focal Press in 2008. Below is an image of the book:

I have completely read this book and I think that it was a fantastic buy as it contains lots of important information that I needed to know, I learnt a lot from reading it. The next thing for me to do is to follow the tutorials in the book as this will solidify the knowledge that I learnt. There is a tutorial in this book that shows you how to model a Hyperreal Character, this character is a monster. Unfortunately due to me falling behind schedule I will not have time to follow this tutorial as well as the others. However this should not effect me too much as one of the other tutorials that I will be following has a very similar process and uses the same range of tools, so by skipping this tutorial I will not be missing out on too much new information. I think that I will benefit a lot from the chapters on Zbrush as I have never used it before, so everything about Zbrush is new to me which is slightly daunting yet very exciting at the same time.


Despite this book being really good there may be a problem due to the fact that it was released in 2008 and it is now 2011. The tutorials in the book demonstrate Maya 8 and Zbrush 3. I will be using Maya 2011 and Zbrush 4. This could be a problem because there will probably be some new tools in the newer versions of the software that are not covered in the book. I can counter this problem by research the new additions of the newer software. I will do this by using the Internet to look at the latest character modeling tutorials for the latest versions of Maya and Zbrush. 

Another book that I think would teach me a lot is called 'Zbrush Character Creation: Advanced Digital Sculpting' it is written by Scott Spencer. The reason that I have not yet purchased this book is because it is 'Advanced Digital Sculpting', I currently have no experience using Zbrush so at this moment in time I think this book would be too much of a big jump for me. Once I have mastered the basics of Zbrush then I think I will be more able to understand this book better. Below is an image of the book:

Once I have followed the tutorials from the 'Character Modeling with Maya and ZBrush: Professional Polygonal Modeling Techniques' book and the tutorials from the Internet I am then going to then create a character from my own concept art or maybe ask a fellow animation student if they have a character design that they want modeled. I will create this character without the help of any tutorials, this will ensure that I have learnt from the tutorials and will help to develop my understanding.