Lines, Lights and Lands of Borders

I've taken the tail end of this week to clean up some loose ends with my project ahead of attempting to kick of some animation next week (or at least reference gathering). Three of these things include:

1. Finalise my toon line
2. Create her helmet
3. Figure out how to attach the shoulder and thigh pad

Now that i'm more Maya literate i've figured out how to get the outline as instructed in the Borderlands style tutorial, which includes duplicating my model, reversing normals etc etc.

Borderlands style Toon Line Test

This is quite a cool method, and the main benefit is that it renders out in Mental Ray - which a toon line won't (i'd have to render it on a separate layer using Maya's renderer - still need to test this). 

Major downside (I think atleast) is the extra poly count AND the fact that this duplicate needs to be skinned and weighted - if I was just posing her that would be fine, but I can see this potentially causing issues when shes moving - dancing especially. I can see the outline sometimes not staying where it needs to be and popping around. Which I trust the toon line won't - so long as it renders fine.

Maya's Toon Line

So after this brief investigation of both methods, I initially thought i'd go with the toon lines but i'm actually learning a lot more towards the borderlands style outline. I've just copied over the skin weights, and so far all seems well with the exception of her shoulders - bit i'm going to play with these weights a bit more.

SO the gloves, shoulder-pads and thigh-pads...

When I was modelling her Sean had initially warned me that the geometries would most likely intercept each other when they moved, but I don't think I fully understood what he meant, and I think I was more than naive in thinking I could work my way round it... so i've FINALLY decided to bite the bullet and paint these assets onto her suit.

To be honest was quite quick to do and i'm happy with the results. For the thigh pads I might raise a few verticies on the main model just so they puff out a bit more. I'll probably do the same for the shoulders too as there just doesn't seem to be a way round it.

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Also in life today we had a short rendering / touch up lighting class with Sean. A lot of this stuff I picked up from Amit for GL, but some of it was new stuff they I need to delve a little deeper into.

So far going into my final project I know that my weak spot is lighting. I didn't get the chance to play around with this during GL so i'm going to give myself a mini crash course in the next couple of weeks.

Until then, the Manics will help my re-texture away my jumping the gun shame.