Week 28

I spent this week focusing on getting my high poly done. Most of this was fairly easy to create as I frequently used my own hand as reference and trying to reduce it down to some basic shapes that I could craft into metal pieces for my hand. The most trouble I had was with the palm and thumb due to the fact that the thumb needs to be able to move but a ball joint seemed out of the place and offered too much freedom for thumb as you can see below. I also found my polygon count was getting rapidly higher so I needed to stunt some of my creativity if I really wished to get it within the poly count Chris was asking for.
      As you can see below I went through a few iterations of the palm due to the fact that it offered the most interesting design options but came with the sticking point which is where to place the thumb. After doing some research into where on a human the thumb joint sat and looking at other peoples interpretations I landed on the joint mechanism on the left that relies on the thumb rather than the palm, I also think aesthetically it looks much better than the one on right. Now back to the issue that was the actual design of the palm as you can see I did go down some rather intricate design paths but found that when I wanted to put in the mechanism for the thumb I was struggling get clean geometry because of all the edge loops and the poly count was getting to a point in which I worried if I would even be able to get it low enough. So I went for a lot more simpler design that I was going to rely on the roughness map to put in some interesting scratches and designs. I did however add this sort of shield to the top of the palm to give it more of an interesting feature and I think it really helps with the overall atheistic of piece. The wrist was fairly simple to work as I've gone for a design that allows all the movement you would want, up and down delivered by the cylindrical pin at where the wrist and palm join. Then left and right being delivered by the wrist rotating on the first part of the wrist design the rest is static. Now that the high poly is done I can now move on to creating my low poly so far I seem to be keeping to the plan I had for this task my only issue may be that I wont be able to get within the limit for the polys as currently my high poly sits at 50,000 (1.5 million when a smoother is applied) which within ZBrush is fine but inside of Maya it means I need to take away each edge loop by hand until it get's within the needed specs for the task. Overall however I'm happy with they way in which this has come out.