Waitress modelling and general project goings

My apologies for the long-ish post
Thought I would make a post on recent happenings.
So I've recruited the help of a first year to help me with character designs. She is a good drawer from what I've seen so I'm happy to let her help me out in the aspect i suck at. She has already done a turnaround for the waitress but I have asked if she could do a few changes, not too big though.


Image by Kelly Brookes

Because I'm fairly happy with the overall shape and look, I've started to do rough box modelling and then make the changes as I go along. This might be a bad idea from a technical aspect, but I'm starting on this as soon as I can so I'm not too far behind.



Also I've been working more on texturing of the diner. It's fairly close to finished (Even if it should be of been finished by now). I'm in the stage where i want to try get it lit. Problem is, my maya keeps crashing when it comes to rendering. So I am going to have to do a few things to try and clean the scene up. Make sure some shaders are working okay. And convert some of the png textures to a lower Jpeg, which should help a lot with rendering.

As a side note. The chef character i was working on, was sculpted on a base mesh in Mudbox, However I am creating the waitress from scratch, partly because there is no base mesh for a woman and also because I need to properly make one from scratch to demonstrate modeling skills on an organic model.

In all honesty I have no idea if i can get this project done for the looming deadline. However I'm going to try give it my best shot. Should the characters prove too troublesome, I will have to revert back to the plan B, which was to purely show off the environment. Maybe as a bonus include one of the characters I've created.

I have this feeling that in order to fulfill the potential of this project, it really could of been a 2-3 man project. My lack of textures and organic modeling is what is slightly letting me down, However that is also part of the learning curve and hopefully by the end of this i will have become a more confident modeler and Texturer.