MILESTONE PROJECT 1: I fought a piggy bank

 Initially, I had several of my initial concepts that I debated going over but overall, decided not to expand (RIP Hive Mind). After our critique, however, I thought about what some of my classmates said about my original ideas and decided that my "When Pigs Fly" idea had the most room for me to expand on the concept. 

I started off by fixing the actual pig asset. It looked dinky, it wasn't really a piggy bank which was what I had originally wanted, and the placement of the wings was haphazard at best. 

That, and after our lecture on Meshmixer as well as some of the additional tools on Rhino, I felt more confident in taking what I had started with and trying to put a better spin on it. At least, as good as I could with my current skill set. 

There was no good piggy bank asset that I could find on Thingaverse, even deciding that the one I had originally used- while cute- wasn't really what I had in mind. So I took the closest asset that I could, which was this little guy right here:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1096674

And took it to Meshmixer to start sculpting. 

I decided I liked the more realistic pig ears, but I wanted my piggy bank to have eyes, a cute tail, and a better snout- so I made them and slapped the pieces together in a Frankenstein-adjacent manic episode while trying to get both programs set up at home. 

Eventually, I got the piggy bank working, so I reused the wings that I had formerly used with a (hopefully) more realistic wing texture. I also redid the paint job on the piggy bank itself to look more like plastic. Finally, I used my favourite clouds and re-did the smoke-esq effect that I had again, used for one of my concepts (RIP Bottle Your Feelings) and the coins (RIP King of Nothing). 

Just a little guy flying in the sky

I used a directional light in front of the pig so that it would give the illusion of the sun, however, in a lot of the final renders it wasn't as obviously visible as I had hoped it would be. 

I think it's most visible from front-facing angles because the reflective surface gives the light something to bounce off of.

So for a few of the renders, I tried to zoom in and have the directional light coming down on the piggy bank instead, giving it an almost angelic lighting? I wished that the metal on the coins were as reflective as the texture of the piggy bank but the metals didn't want to cooperate with me. 

I didn't want to use a studio light or a backlight or anything other than directional really because I felt like they ruined the scene in which the pig is in the sky. It felt disingenuous to the illusion I was trying to create for these pieces. 

I really liked playing around with the camera angles, like this one wherein it's posed as though you're looking at the pig flying overhead. Will the falling coins hit you and cause massive bodily harm? Probably. But hey, free money!

I also tried to adjust the wings in between so that it would look like they were flapping but I'm not too sure how successful I was with that idea. 

Overall, I think that my pieces came out better than I expected, however, I want to try and push myself for future ideas because I feel like once I did all of my exploration of the programs during the concept phase- I was reluctant to try anything new because defaulting to things I already knew about was so much safer and easy to do. 

I still love this cloud asset though. No idea why- I just do. 

Anyways, on to the next project!