Character Creation: Raccoon Part 5

By Callum Brown

As our modeller had alot of problems working from the turnarounds I provided, so I decided to fix the problems I had created. I started by making the boots bigger, wider an deeper, because although in the normal view it looked good, in the smooth preview it wasn't clear enough where the boot ended and where the leg began. I then gave the hat a little bit more shape, making it a more distinctive cowboy hat. Before modelling the coat, making it stick out more, providing more room for the bigger boots to move. I also made the  collar and lapel fold our more and have a deeper rim, as again, in smooth preview it was too smooth, which would have given me a harder job in UV mapping. I did the same thing to the cuffs of the coat. Next I hit my biggest problem, Meg had the issue to start with and couldn't find the solution, the UV's in the legs, bots, head and hat would not unwrap, they weren't doing it wrong, they were just acting unresponsive. I asked Annabeth, Mike, Luca, Ash all for help but nobody could seem to figure out the issue. I ended up e-mailing Mat and he came in to help me figure out what was going on. It turned out to be problems with the internal geometry and edges. Some of the faces were pointing the wrong way, there were alot of unnecessary faces also and some of the edges and vertex's were very close together but not merged. I started by deleting the useless faces, and using the split tool and amend polygon tool to create new faces and fix the geometry and merged the vertex's. I then removed the whole hat from the head, and I saw that there were too many faces on the top of the head to match up with the hat so I deleted and the faces and edges that were left over, shaped it to fit the hat and merged the edges and vertex's with the head and hat back together. After spending an large amount of time figuring out and fixing this issue before turning by sights on making sure the model looked great in smooth preview as it was we wanted to convert our models too. However doing this usually meant the the normal view was screwed up and would not UV correctly, I eventually managed to make the geometry work whilst making it look better in Smooth preview. I lastly gave him eyelids in order to blink, and convey better emotion.