As a country with a 5,000-year history of changing dynasties, China’s cultural heritage and artistic and cultural level can be said to be at the top of the world. Compared with other countries with a shorter history, the complexity of traditional Chinese culture is very difficult to easily pass through modern times. way to present. This was the first challenge I encountered after starting the project. As early as 4,000 years ago, the ancient Chinese had made countless wonderful fantasies about the moon. The most well-known ones are the stories of Chang’e flying to the moon and Hou Yi shooting the sun, which are related to the sun and the moon. The legend of Chang’e flying to the moon first appeared in folk groups. They imagined that there was an equally beautiful girl living on the beautiful full moon, and they also began to conceive how the girl landed on the moon, so they began to talk about ” Chang’e” concept. They said that this beautiful woman must have been on the moon to protect her husband, because the moon at night looks very lonely in the dark night, and she is full of misses for the earth. She chose to exchange all her afterlife with God for her lover, living alone on the moon in exchange for her husband’s health. Such a tragic and beautiful story was circulated among the people, and at the same time, people’s sympathy was also flooded for this woman, so they called the day when the moon was the roundest and brightest in the year as the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is the Moon Festival. , In order to commemorate this woman’s ascension to the sky and to make her less lonely, people will make non-perishable desserts-moon cakes on this day to satisfy the cravings of the girl in the sky.
So far, the image of such a miserable, brave and beautiful woman has remained in people’s hearts for thousands of years, but the only regret is that the spirit of dedication and beautiful character cannot be well conveyed to children who are not yet mature. The reason why I chose to design the characters as little girls not only retains the original beauty of women, but also makes the image of Chang’e more acceptable and understandable to children. The lovely proportions and facial expressions of the characters and the traditional Chinese costumes make my works gradually perfect.
Just as the story of Chang’e flying to the moon has many folk versions, there are so many elements related to the Mid-Autumn Festival that it is difficult to choose. This includes the design of ancient Chinese court costumes, paintings related to the ancient Chinese moon, and the depiction of the main characters in the story. There are many different versions and interpretations of these necessary elements. Therefore, for the purpose of making this project, I chose the most widely circulated version in the world, and integrated the design concepts of the full moon, ancient court women’s hairstyles, and ancient skirt design to complete the final design draft.
In the process of modeling, in order to better realize the details in my design draft, I spent more time than others on polishing the details. There are also some problems that are difficult to achieve, such as difficulty in low-quality I have to make a choice between high-quality human hair modeling, or the complex headgear structure is difficult to present, and finally it becomes the fusion of multiple model groups and the resulting increasing workload, which makes my time spent in a straight line. rise. In general, the simple and time-consuming work ended up draining my energy and patience, but all I needed to do was overcome this mental hurdle and get down to the tedious stuff.
The modeling of characters is far more complex than I imagined compared to those non-living creatures with regular shapes. Especially the representation of the facial contours of the characters, what amazes me is that although I can work my hands to concoct a human head in a three-dimensional world that can look like a real human head, when all this is converted to a computer, it will become Totally different, like starting a new art study from scratch, fortunately my interpretation of the human skull and facial muscles has reached a certain level before this, which makes my work during modeling a little more handy . For example, there are huge differences in facial fat distribution and musculoskeletal development between human cubs and adults. In order to better create a child’s image, I try to fill the model’s facial fat as full and round as possible to achieve a cute effect; For another example, when making eye contours, the eyes of young children occupy a larger proportion of the face, and the overall effect is rounded.
While the time I spent on this modeling step was arguably necessary, it also had unpredictable negative consequences for me. When I started to work on uv, I realized a serious problem, that is, the complexity of my model directly led to the unexpectedly large workload in this step of uv painting.
With the modeling and the details of the model surface finished, I also ushered in the final finishing work—- character animation. Before officially starting to make animation, it is necessary to establish a skeletal system on the completed character model, in our general understanding, the skeletal system is made of a number of tedious procedures, which includes complex knowledge of the anatomy of the human body structure and the understanding and analysis of human joint activity and corresponding application measures, fortunately, maya modeling software comes with a perfect skeletal system and a very convenient adjustment system for the user, so I didn’t encounter a very difficult problem in this process.
However, while modeling a character with a skeleton is not difficult for maya software, it also takes a certain amount of skill and patience to apply it perfectly to the unique work I designed. For example, the difficulty of this process is to adjust the range of motion of the modeled joint and the range of motion of the peripheral skeletal muscles that are pulled by it, including adding relevant animation effects to the connected clothing ornaments. The reason why it is called difficult is because setting these parameters needs to be integrated into our personal understanding of dynamic performance, including the interpretation of the human body’s active state, the analysis of the movement pattern corresponding to the material thickness of the physical cloth, and the understanding of the dead angle of the action and the impossibility of motion.
The most troubling thing about this is the animation involved in the material of the clothes, because the type of clothing I set when designing the character is a classical Chinese costume that has been precipitated for 5,000 years, and the exquisite design and indispensable historical background contained in it will become the most difficult card on my design road. Chinese traditional clothing is not only limited to cumbersome and gorgeous accessories, but also reflects its historical significance is the beautiful pattern embroidered on the surface of the cloth, the best embodiment of which is that in ancient times, in order to make a valuable and identity value of the cloth, the Chinese ancients will use thousands of years to spend thousands of years on a piece of cloth to carry out millions of embroidery actions. This shows the importance of cloth design for traditional Chinese clothing. And what my design needs to reflect this time is these two points, elegant, and noble, but not losing cuteness. As a result, my complex costume design added a huge challenge to my skeletal system detail adjustment project. But this is not a point to complain about, because since my modeling and detailing are complete, these seemingly difficult processes are just patient consumables, so as long as there is enough time and energy, this step is not a difficult step.