Nai

September 2018 - May 2019

Overview

Nai is the product of the class 18’s Monday project. The project began in early September 2018, ended in late May 2019 and was then reviewed later in the year. Like the name suggests, we were given each Monday of our first year to work on the project. It was an independent project, which meant the team members were fully responsible for coming up with schedules and milestones. The teachers would check on our progress, but we had, by and large, full autonomy.

The project was to be done by a team of two. One first year student studying game design, who was responsible for the graphics: concept art, modelling, rigging and animating as well as documenting and project management. The other was an indie developer whose idea the project was. He was  responsible for the direction, design and programming and editing. He was also willing to do the environment. Unfortunately, he had other priorities with his other games under progress and so he disbanded from the project at the end of April 2019. Despite this, the model was for him and thus is free for him to use or discard in his future projects as he pleases.

The project was originally meant to be a tech demo. It was to be a boss fight between the main character and one of the high level bosses, but due to the ambitious nature of the project, the project's size was later changed to be just the protagonist. Link to her Sketchfab:

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/nai-first-model-e573d28badcc48cd87616c33b9c1286f

Process

September

The project got launched. Tom gladly accepted to work with me and splitting the tasks between us was a piece of cake. Coming up with an idea that we both would have the energy to work towards was slightly trickier and even after finding it out, there were still some disagreements. The disagreements were eventually solved by flexibility. But thus the concept art phase took quite long (of course, I had to study designing as well.) It was also left a little undone with messier final illustrations that later on made it harder to 3D model the armor. I had to come back to it in October to plan them through and I can say that I fully understand the importance of planning your design through now.

I would learn the process of concept art better in November 2018 and then practice it more during a summer course in 2019. 

October

I had started 3D modelling the character in the last week of September, but October was mostly dedicated for that. Making the face and body had me practicing a lot, but that was fun. The bigger issues lay in the mechanical aspects: I had made the head separate to the face and stitching them together had us turning the internet over in search of finding a good way to do it. In the end we solved it by dynameshing them. Making armor and hair were more challenging. There were sizing issues, lack of clarity in designs and badly designed parts. As mentioned in September, I had to go through them with better focus and use the low-poly version of my character to solve the sizing issues. The final armor looked disappointing compared to the one I had designed, so that required some tweaks in Photoshop.

November

The courses changed, so working got a lot more scarce. The month began with work on details and something that helped with them was learning the correct process to concept art. Why it’s so important to have concept art, how you should search references, what is the high concept and the mood board… And so I went in and made a reference sheet for the details: how to paint metal, textiles and the details in an armor. Another problem was the courses changing and the classrooms with it. The computer on which I had NY’s assets on got a new classroom and someone inhabited my seat. It wasn’t a change I had seen coming and so the project fell quickly behind. On the other hand, having a break from this project to study other things got me working harder on this once I got back. I also set maximum working hours per day to make sure I was getting the rest and change of pace that I needed.The main character reached it’s finished form (aside for textures and material maps). And at the end of the month, I reached rigging. I decided to study Maya for it instead of going with 3DSMax. It will be a better solution in the long run to get good experience with it now, especially when I plan on getting better at animation. 

December

Wrapping head around Maya and rigging was much more challenging than I imagined. (I knew there would be some deep sea fish.) Having no teachers around meant I had to go on a frenzy to find tutorials and further explanations. I didn’t want to just follow the first guide thrown on my way either in case the creator of it wasn’t too efficient. Eventually, I began finding more and more tutorials on how to go about things. I managed to rig the character, but constraints and weight painting would be a thing of the future.

January

Rigging was meant to be a thing for the previous month and was meant to end quickly in January, however, it didn’t go down like that. Correcting orient joints was difficult and knowing how to make the best kind of functional rig was even more challenging. It took a lot of exploring and studying. I was learning how to use substance painter and designer in classroom work. Those will become handy in the future.

February

NY didn’t get much work done on it. I got past my finger orientation problem and found a thorough beginner’s guide to rigging a character for games. I did a lot of experimental tries (creating a 3D room and textures to it as well as making animation tries) and mostly the month was spent on learning basics of 3D animation and on browsing tutorials which I found through a newly made friend, who also helped me move forward in my studies. The tutorial topics would range from sculpting cloth in ZBrush, learning about new tools and to after effects & editing.

At the end of February, my attention had mostly shifted to “Vivi” - the 2nd modelling and animation job given to me, and it was my chance to do things better than with Nai and even get some portfolio stuff out of it. The time limit was until early April, so I had to cut corners and naturally, I also felt inclined to work long hours. The first 2 weeks leading to the end of February and beginning of March’s winter break were incredibly fun: concept art phase & sculpting the shirt and hair, despite struggling at both to do them right. It was safe to say I was beginning to get obsessed with the project.

March

I had given up on environments, when Tom came back and wanted to help. So, he began drafting out examples while also putting a lot of thought into the designs as well. I had found a rigging tutorial by Winston Powell on how to rig a character and this is what I ended up following to finish up my rig - apart from weight painting. This meant getting the right amount of joints to the right places, getting functional IK systems and handles as well as learning the basics of weight painting and how to make it a lot easier. By the end of the month, I finally took a look at the model’s technical side and wanted to make sure I could import her just fine and it turns out she has some issues to her which are currently under solving. Once again, my attention was mostly on Vivi, especially when studying her would greatly benefit everything I did with Nai and other way around. I was quite obsessed with her to the point where winter break and being separate from her was more stressful than relaxing for me. Getting back to school, for the first 2 weeks after the break, I was working tremendously hard and for unhealthily long hours. I got her model done in the first week and she got her rig and textures on the second week. On the 2nd week, Sekiro - Shadows Die Twice, a game by FromSoftware came out and evened out my working schedule, granting me a mental detachment from the project. I spend the 3rd week getting the character ready for animation - so weight painting and other export tests to make sure she is set to sail and can land on Sketchfab.

Tom's environment designs

April

April was cut between finishing Vivi and starting a new VR project.

With Vivi’s animations and rigging having been hard, I finally learnt the importance of good topology and began crafting one for Nai. Since I had also not textured her outside of ZBrush (due to not yet having known any texturing programs) I figured I could texture her using Substance Painter as well after retopologize her. Doing retopologizing, however, took a lot longer than I had expected. Worst offender to this rule was how busy the other projects would keep me from coming in to work on Nai. At the end of April, Tom left the project.

May

The final month. With the VR project going on, the deadlines closing in and Nai being very far from her original plan, I did my best to work on her as much as I could and to my own surprise, managed to get her to a sweeter state slightly earlier than I imagined. She was then exported onto Sketchfab.

Something I was working on this month was on retopologizing her. Watching her vertices deform, I can tell there is a need to study modelling more, but she is fairly good now. (Forgot to delete some vertices, but their aftermath ended up piquing my interest. The side of her chest with more vertices reacts better to the cloth on top of it, clipping a lot less. I need to run some experiments to see if that is so.) 

I also got to texture her, which was achieved swiftly. Her textures got some negative critique from a friend and I do agree that I should study them more if I want to do modelling. Something I especially want to do is use less vertices and then paint the details in creating an illusion of depth. 

Up next was weight painting her. With the right settings, the default in Maya did a really good job. I even regretted some of my weight painting decisions I made on the armor as I managed to only cause clipping. After looking at other games too, I noticed the plate armor on some characters deforming with the character, so it seems acceptable to do as long as it’s not too noticeable. I also wondered if it would have been better to model her armor parts separately as previously I had, for whatever reason, modeled them so that they were tied together which caused the retopologizing process to be a lot more painful than it had to be. Something else that would be nice too, would be to learn how to control cloth.

Lastly came animating. This had been the part I had been looking forward the most and out of all the ideas me and Tom bounced off of each other in the start, the reason why I wanted to go with Nai was because I imagined I could get to animate combat. Well, that didn’t end up happening. With the model consuming more and more time, in the end, I figured I wouldn’t even give her a walk animation. I do think I could have crunched for it, but doing only 2 idle poses granted me time to help out more on the other project: the team VR game. Not to mention, I was beginning to understand that crunching wasn't a sign of dedication, but of poorly done planning. And that the first project had been for me, but thanks to it, I now better understand the pipeline of creating a 3D model.

Nai in Substance Painter

Additional Information

We worked on Nai using google documents, Trello and Discord.