Using the drawings, I started modelling the llama. One thing this process has taught me is that I really hate modelling creatures, which is pretty funny if you know that I sculpted creatures out of clay for my Art GCSE. It’s probably from the lack of control you have with the mouse and keyboard compared to using hands, and it takes much longer to get the same amount of progress. Anyway, my first attempt ended up as shown on the right. I thought getting all the vertices to fit the outline of the reference images would be a good place to start, but that ended up stumping me more as my perfectionist brain decided that because it clearly looks too blocky, I couldn’t advance further despite my attempts.
I struggled with a few new attempts before I finally got one that stuck with me. Instead of doing the outline of the entire model all at once, I did each part of the body separately. I started with the main body, rounding it throughout so that the widest parts would be the middle vertices. I then moved onto one of the front legs and copied it for the others. The back legs are slightly different from the front though, so I needed to make adjustments before copying to the other back leg. Next was the neck and head, which I kind of did at the same time. I modelled the neck up to the top of the head and then extruded from that to make the face. The ears and tail were pretty simple from that point. All of this was done by extruding from existing faces to add to the model. The eyes were a little annoying as they aren’t symmetrical and the faces of the mesh were arranged in straight lines, so making round holes wasn’t smooth. As you can see from the left and below images, however, I did manage to get the model done. At this point, it needed a bit of sculpting to get some more facial details, but I needed to work on other areas in the project and so ended up leaving this for quite some time.
I came back to it briefly to test the colour scheme we had chosen back in the brainstorming phase. As you can see, they are very bright, much brighter than we had anticipated, meaning more testing was needed. I also worked on the UV unwrapping just to get it prepped for when I would come back to paint it in photoshop after we had decided on the new colour scheme.
Me being the forgetful moron that I am, I forgot that I needed to smooth the mesh more in order to sculpt the details into it, and that would mean I would need to retopologise afterwards to reduce the polygon count. So the UV unwrapping was pointless.
When I did eventally come back to finish the model, I had spent so much time just getting other things to work, such as the state machine, that I was in a rush to get this done in time. This led to some features being left out, and others forgotten. The derpy tongue, sculpted facial features, and UV wrapping to name a few.
I did retopologise the mesh using the quad draw tool but it needed smoothing again to get that cleaner look. There are still way fewer polygons than before I retopologised though.
Then the tedious process of rigging began. I needed to come up with the bone structure, which wasn’t too bad, but then weight painting occured. One of the joys of weight painting is finding that you haven’t actually removed all the weight from an area of skin. The default look of weight painting is the black and white shown below, black being no weight and white being full weight with grey being somewhere between. There is an option to turn on colour ramp and it shows the weights in colour. Apparently black doesn’t actually mean no weight because I didn’t paint any weight before turning on colour ramp and taking the picture below. It’s always fun to think you’ve finished the painting and then when you go to test the rotation of a joint part of the nose is moving, even though you’re rotating a leg.
Another joy of weight painting is finishing painting a joint, changing to a different one, and then when you go through them to check they’re all done it turns out they’ve all added extra weights in places they shouldn’t have. It’s a repetitive and tedious process of continually redoing the same joints until they finally acknowledge what they’re supposed to be like.
That is all that would be done for the model. I wanted to UV wrap it but as shown below, the UVs consisted of hundreds of shells in a cluster that needed cutting and sewing together, and I just didn’t have the time amongst all the other problems that kept coming up to sort it out. So any colour editing would need to be done in the Unity project where there is much less control with settings materials in already made prefabs.
I also didn’t have time to manually keyframe all the animations, which was stressful as I had looked before online for quadrapedal animations and there are barely any. Pretty much none are free either. Luckily, I found a Unity package that had some animations that I found interesting – “Free Animals – Quirky Series” by Omabuarts Studio. This thing was honestly a life saver.
For now, the colour of the entire llama is brown as I can’t separate the parts of the mesh in Unity. This, along with many other problems and quality issues, will be fixed before the showcase.