Robomaiden: modelling and confidence

In the excerpt from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother as published in the Wall Street Journal, Amy Chua writes:

On the flip side, there’s nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn’t.

While there’s a lot in her article I completely disagree with, that’s one of the lines I think is completely on the money, for both children and adults. At least, it’s very true for me…although that may be saying more about my personality than my views.

My most recent assignment at school was to concept, model and rig a character and it was one of the most frustrating school things I have done. My model caused problems for me from the start: concepting was okay (if a little bit slow), but I felt very left alone during the modelling stage and had a lot of false starts. I must have remodelled the head about six times – . A lot of the time we were left on our own to read tutorials etc, and once or twice I’d miss a key step on something minor, e.g., modelling the head. There were a few tutorials I just couldn’t get my head around which was very frustrating too. It was a good learning process, and I always knew that modelling was going to be one of those things I found incredibly difficult the first few times, and then absolutely love and speed through later on.

It wasn’t just the modelling that was a pain, though. Texturing was fine, but rigging – which I had been looking forward to for so long! – was also very difficult at first. It was a while before the Paint Skin Weights tool and I became friends, but by that time the assignment deadline was almost up and I went for near enough/good enough. There were so many ideas I’d had at concept stage that just got scrapped for favour of something I could hand up – things like the wings on her wheels, how she would move (not part of the assignment, but something I wanted to play with anyway).

Then one of my classmates helped me understand a lot of the stuff I had missed and I decided to give all the key parts I had charged over a second go.

There are still problems, still things I went over. I should have toned down (or done away with!) the texture on the Robomaiden’s skin for the normal map. You can see I very definitely stopped caring w hen I got to her ribbons. And overall, the texturing (which is usually my favourite part, and the bit I’m strongest at) is nowhere near as good as I COULD do.

But now I’ve learned a lot more about the parts I couldn’t do, and my confidence about modelling (and my own capabilities) is back up 🙂

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