Setting some goals

It might be a little pre-mature, but of the models on the project list that haven't been started yet, I'd like to help out and eventually get these guys done.  I don't think cloud or squall will be that difficult to do, but you never know.

Wings up or Wings down?

AHA I knew it was always good to carry around my external hard drive, turns out, I had backed up all the dissidia files on my external harddrive a while back, and while looking through things today I found it.  I think I'll pick up the Ex Mode of Ultimecia.  I got a pose that I like, its close to the pose that she uses in the character information screen, but I raised her arms and made a new pose to avoid intersecting polygons, but the only question is Wings up or Wings down? Is the pose a good one, anybody have any suggestions?

GOLBEZ: the layout

Whew so worked a good bit on the Golbez layout. Overall he was a pretty good model, either that or a combination of not so many intersecting polygons and working with Exdeath and Bartz have paid off. In the end I present a 63 page layout that is ready for a test build.  I kinda cramped some of the pieces in there, but there shouldn't be any overlaps or margin issues.  As far as the cape goes, I didn't lay it out as nicely as I could, but in an effort to efficiently utilize paper I positioned them as such.  The cape is still laid out sequentially  inside first then outside.  Builders should be able to look at the PDO and figure it out.

I don't know if I'll be doing any more layouts for a while, I only loaded some files onto my laptop before I left, and the only other models I have with me are Chaos and Kefka, but I believe Zinarei wants to do Kefka.

GOLBEZ: A question about size

I was working with Golbez today and got him all good and brought into Pepakura, and I unfolded him at 1.5  I had to check to see if this was correct, because it says he's 72.4 cm tall.

That is one huge foot! His shoe takes up the entire page.  I'm wondering if this in fact the right size, and if I should scale him down some.  Due to his size and the fact that he has a long cape, this is going to span many pages of paper.

BARTZ: Part 3 working in Pepakura

3rd day of Bartz...
 After finishing the model in Sketchup I moved the model into Pepakura.  Before I unfold the model, I designated the open edges.  After you look over some other people's layouts you kind of get the hang of where you might want to put the open edges. Most but not all of the work can be done here.

This being the second model I've organized the layout for, I'm not that great at working with hair.  In started to mark some edges, but for the remainder I'm just going to have to do after its all unfolded.  After unfolding I' try to organize things as I've seen other designers do, basically from the BOTTOM TO THE TOP.  In order to ease the building process I've notice people put the tabs on the top parts of pieces, which makes sense if you're building from the bottom up any way.   In the end I ended up with a layout like this.

I have yet to identify the pieces but you get a pretty good idea.  Everything is densely organized until the last 3 pages.  On pages 10 and 11, I put the face and hair respectively.  I purposefully chose to do this so that I could print the first 9 pages on cardstock and the face and hair on paper.  I noticed Namatosa uses 120gm paper and his models always look great you should check his out if you get the chance.  I don't like seeing the white parts of paper edges on my models and I think it looks tacky on the skin, so I figured I'd try this so that I could print out the face on a lighter weight sheet of paper.  "Well why didn't you do that with the hands then?" you might ask.  Well I wasn't thinking until the very end.

The next step is to number the pieces, and test build.  I probably won't test build him until after Exdeath.  But when I do I'll post pictures of the progress.

From here I might start working on the layout of another Dissidia model, I'd like to do Golbez, he's another giant sized model though.  For the Project, I want to help out and finish all the statued characters, then work on the Ex-modes/Alternate costumes.

So many projects so little time...

BARTZ: Part 2 Fixing the model in Sketchup

Day 2 of working on Bartz...

The first thing I like to do is to separate everything, literally, as you can see below I've cut Bartz in half, this helps me isolate the areas, same with Exdeath, I just move the major components apart. Then as instructed in Kaizo's FFX process video I move the double sided parts apart for easier viewing

 As I mentioned in Part 1, there is a problem with the model if you don't take care of the legs that intersect with boots.  The "Before" picture shows how the polygon extends into the boot, for this I just selected the calf and boot and intersected it with the model. The "After" picture shows that I deleted the excess.  From here I'm not too sure how I want to handle things.  If I leave things as is, I just have to glue the leg onto the boot.  I prefer connecting pieces with tabs, I feel that it forms a stronger bond.  But during the test build I'll see whether or not this works out well.

 The intersecting polygon problem I fixed was the back of the arms/armpits.  This is the toughest part for me, but as you can see I ended up reducing some of the polygons in order to make an easier build.  I think its valid to reduce the polygons, I mean honestly did I compromise the integrity of the model?  I might as well make it easy, from the models I've built so far, the armpits are the most annoying part of the build for me.  Maybe I'm not that good at it yet, but hey this is what it is.

 One of the other big problems was the fingers intersecting the thumb, and gaps in the hand.  As you can see below I have shortened the pointer finger.  This took some amount of time, I'm still getting a handle on working in 3D and flattening the end of the pointer finger was time consuming.  But as you can see I have a hand that will hold the sword,  people probably won't be looking at Bartz' pointer finger as it is so I think its OK.  I think that if I had been working with the .smd file then i might have been able to move the fingers.  Or I suppose I could have learned how to put bones into the model and then move them, but oh well save that for another day.

Lastly I combined the two major components of the model and have the model to my satisfaction. (There were several other small issues with intersections and moving/copying textures) 

Next step is to move it into Pepakura and start deciding my open faces.

BARTZ: Part 1 Assessing the situation

Alright so here is the start of Bartz. I intend for this to be an informative journey, where both I learn and successors will also learn. After bringing the model into sketchup, the first thing I did was move the sword out of his hand, this way I can get a better look at what his hands doing.

 Now that I have the sword separated I want to inspect potential intersecting polygons.  This part is important!! If you don't look for these intersections then your model won't be positioned correctly, and pepakura will think that its OK to build the model even if these exist. I'm sure you can remedy these situations after you've built the model, but hey why not take care of them in the beginning.  As you can see in this next photo, the hand has some intersections and even what appears to be a gap. this will need to be fixed, otherwise when we build his hand it won't close just right.

 I continued searching for other intersecting polygons and found some others on his shoes.  These are minor and in the next post I'll show you how to fix some of these.  This one on the shoe probably doesn't even need to be fixed, its just that the tongue of his shoe will look poofy.  I mean I have an idea of how to fix it, I plan on using the "Move" tool and leaning the intersecting side forward a little bit, and then shifting the texture across the polygon to make it look good. But I have yet to try it, so we'll find out soon.

 This next picture shows where the boots meet the leg/calf.  This part is pretty important in my book.  It was the beginning of the downfall of my try at the Exdeath layout.  As the picture shows there is an intersection.  If you don't take care of it then your model will probably want to be leaning forward a lot because the polygon for the leg extends into the face of the top of the boot, in other words the rest of Bartz' leg is hidden inside the boot.  So if you don't fix this then your layout will include that extra length of leg and you won't be able to connect your model.  this problem can be fixed as well I'm not sure the best way, but I plan on doing it in a way that there is no ambiguity of which way the leg should face, and provide good structural stability.

 The last major intersection you'll notice is in the armpit.  I'm sure I'll still end up having to "squish" the armpits into place, but I'll try and take this on as well.  I'm not sure how other people feel but because its on the backside of the model most likely I'll just reduce the polygons in the back, and not worry if the texture looks too funny.  But I should try to make the entire model look as close to the original as possible, we'll see how difficult it becomes.

So this is the start of the Bartz model, based off of my experience thus far, and what Kaizo's videos have shown me, these are some of the problem areas you want to address when looking at your model in sketch up.  From here the next step is just to intersect the faces and delete the excess (Thanks ACE!!!).  That part can be kinda complicated if you're like me and not used to working in 3D, but its not that bad.

The holidays

I reprinted out Exdeath and was planning on taking him home with me to work on for the holidays, but forgot him, and realized it halfway on the trip home.  So it looks like any progress on him won't be made until after Xmas.
In the meantime though I plan on working on Tidus, I'll post pictures later, its been taking me a while and some of the building process lead me to make some changed with my layout of Exdeath.  I also plan on doing Bartz and Golbez shortly...

I've been excited about working on completing all the dissidia models out there. The other night I tried my hand at posing the .SMD for Chaos.  I got a pretty cool pose for him, but I think I'll work on some of the other models in the list on the FFPCblog.  I don't know how well the Exdeath treemode papercraft will come out.  I figured I'd do it as well since I'm doing the original, really it's just a swapped texture, but for some reason it shifts it on my model slightly but only on the boots.  Haven't figured that part out yet, but at somepoint maybe I'll do it.


Happy holidays everybody.

Progress Report

 12DECEMBER2010

   Alright so the layout is looking pretty good so far, all that's left is to send it off for a quick review, and then test build number 2.

   For this part of the layout I re-arranged things, stuck with the horizontal banding as best I could, repositioned the flaps.  I still need to delete some of the lines.  But things are looking good so far.  Got this layout onto a tight 54 pages, that's a 14% reduction in pages from the previous layout.

11DECEMBER2010

Alright I've put Exdeath into pepakura and specified as many open edges as I felt were necessary.  i tried to stick with as much of the horizontal banding as I could, however in the upper part of the torso I started to just think about what was easiest for me to put together.  In addition to this I deleted some of the edges in the model to allow for easier banding.

    From here I've unfolded and the layout already looks pretty good.  The hands are always tricky so most likely I'll have to go in now and fix this.  From what I've seen the warriors of lights hands are a little less complicated.  Exdeath's hands seem a little bit trickier. notably the fingers.  I went in with Sketchup to try to avoid really small folding peices (hopefully the texture on these parts are alright. I figured some of the weirder looking parts are not in easy view.)  But as you can see already the layout has pretty much taken care of itself.

10DECEMBER2010

Well this has been a huge ordeal.  Basically I didn't learn how to use sketchup until last night, but now I have started all over again, and I believe I have a pretty good foundation to start.  I just brought Exdeath back into Pepakura and am going to mark the open edges and then unfold. at 1.5

Basically I fixed the problem where the boots attach to the knees, I plan on using tabs to connect them so its more structurally sound as well as keeping the legs in the right direction.  Also I fixed the intersecting polygons that I presume are common in the armpit area. Hopefully this will lead to an easy connection of the arms. Test build number two coming over X-mas.

Where does this leave the bottom half of a botched Exdeath test build you ask?  probably in the trash pretty soon.  I might take pictures of the problem areas to help other future builders know that they can't just bring in the stat.obj files without editing these problems away.

So far Exdeath is buildable but it will be a while before it gets released, I think I have to redo the layout, this has been a learning experience, the stat.obj file had some intersecting polygons which I didn't check for, namely between the boots and the legs. 

Here is the lower half so far... 

I need to learn to use sketchup to clean up some of these intersections, so maybe around late December early January...

Current Projects

Here are some of the current Dissidia papercrafts I'm working on