Starting off with creating the main character of Troy was important, as he is among one of the most vital parts of the documentary. My first attempt at creating a model of him was purely in Maya through manipulating shapes and vertices. I then attempted to apply manual rigging on the character, something which I had never tried before.
The reason I decided to go with Maya instead of a modelling program like ZBrush was that of my lack of experience and frustration with the user interface for the latter, and that I had experiencing modelling objects on Maya in the past. While modelling the character from the reference sheet was pretty straightforward delivering a desired simple look, something about it looked dead-eyed and lifeless when created purely with veracity manipulation.
However, the major issue with creating the character turned out to be the custom-built rig that I created. I had multiple attempts at this with knowledge gained through online tutorials and complicated coding, yet there were always technical issues with the character that I could not overcome with my lack of experience. For one thing, the model was deforming in a non-desired way for certain areas. But the biggest problem lied in and the right arm, where moving it resulted in the mesh to flicker in and out, which could potentially ruin the whole documentary if I went ahead of it.
Frustrated with the issues that arose, I decided it was best to scrap the Maya-built model since trying to fix it would take up too much production time. My second attempt would be creating the model with ZBrush and automatically rigging it with Rapid Rig, which I'll detail in the next blog post.