Summer Work: Hand

I decided to skip the arm (oddly) and go straight from torso and head to hand (the reasoning was the hand was going to be hard and I felt on a roll after the head). The hand was box modelled from a cube but the difference that helped my model it with considerably more success than my previous (and interesting looking) attempts was the way in which I looked at the hand. A tutorial I saw suggested that most tutorials tell you to extrude the thumb out to the side of the hand when really it comes more out of the front. This was something I had noticed in all my previous attempts at hands, the thumb never looked right. Happily in this mesh I feel it does. I had now inserted ever edge look I think I will need in the hand (although the nice thing about the mesh is if I feel I need more geometry I can insert anything I need without breaking the flow of the mesh) but really its is just at the tweaking stage of moving verts and subtlely adjusting the shape to make it look the best it can.

Summer Work: Head Continued

Attaching the ear to the head was no small feat. For one thing the amount of verts that the ear had was quite a lot greater than the number it had to flow into, so no hope of a simple bridge. However I also had the problem that I didn't want to remove any valuable edge loops and thus much needed detail from the ear. However I quite quickly worked out a way of turning more verts into less, without resorting to any dreaded triangles (thats the dream). So pretty soon the ear was in place. Then I just had to tweak the area where the two meshes were connected to smooth it out ( a process I'm still doing, due to the level of verts and the tricky nature of the space). But in terms of creating detail the head is complete, now all that remains is the tweak the entire head, and then go up a sub div levels and keep tweaking verts to create an aesthetically pleasing head at the end.

Summer Work: Ear

The ear has to be my most hated body part, an absolute nightmare to draw and when I realised I had to model one I must admit I wasn't looking forward to it. The method was quite simple again using the extrude edge tool, I chose to model the ear seperately from the head and then attach it once I was happy with the level of detail and that all the correct edge loops were there. It was actually surprisingly easy once the correct loops were created and sewn together, although the ear starts very flat then it is just a case of tweaking verts to make it look the right shape.

Summer Work: Head

After spending some time adjusting my torso mesh, I decided to start modelling the head. I knew this was going to be a challenge as the head and hands are the hardest part of any character, although it was comforting to be told if you can build both parts then the rest of the body should (in theory) be easy. All I used for reference was a few images of a finished head with ideal topology and I began. I used a simple cube to begin with, I cut the cube in half and used duplicate special with an instance so that the other half would be a mirror of what I was working on. Then it was just a case of using the split polygon tool to create the necessary edge loops and then tweaking their location until things where in the right place. The head isnt perfectly formed by any means but the topology is all their for a hi resolution head, when I move up a subdivision level. It took my a long time but there is no triangles in the mesh, a fact I am very pleased about.

Summer Work: Torso

This was my favourite method of sculpting out the complicated human form, it works very well because you can tell when a vert is in the wrong place because it will disappear into the red 3d reference. This helped me a lot during the modelling process. Once the base of the mesh was complete I went back into the mesh adjusting edge loops and verts, and by changing between low and hi res divisions to see the effect on the smoothed mesh.

Summer Work: Organic Modelling

I set myself a goal at the start of the summer to try and complete (or complete as much of) a human mesh. It took my a while to get going, mainly because there is a lot of different ways of creating a human mesh, based on preference or what level of resolution you want the mesh to me. At first I watched a sped up video of a box modelled human. This first picture was my attempt at following what was happening in the video. However it got to a point when I couldn't follow the video it was moving too fast. So I started to look elsewhere for a different way to start my model. The second attempt involved making simple shapes with good topology, the advantage of this method was it encourages you to practise at making the simple shapes (of the head and torso which I have shown below) however it had the small problem that the models were not very good for then making higher resolution meshes.


The second attempt involved making simple shapes with good topology, the advantage of this method was it encourages you to practise at making the simple shapes (of the head and torso which I have shown below) however it had the small problem that the models were not very good for then making higher resolution meshes.



However third time lucky, I came across a tutorial that suggested a method I hadn't thought of before, the different thing about this tutorial was that it encouraged you to create a 3d reference out of your reference images and then use the extrude edge tool to build the mesh round the 3d reference. This worked well for me and in the next post I will start to show my (sort of) step by step images of the model being made.

Summer Work

I've spent the summer doing bits and bobs of CGI work, most of my practise has gone into organic modelling, but towards the start of the summer I spent a bit of time modelling mechanical objects (my mech) and also a little bit of environment modelling (this castle). The castle isn't yet finished I have plenty of ideas that I want to build within the scene (the idea has got bigger and bigger in my head, its now fairly epic in terms of size). As soon as I finish the organic modelling work I am doing at the moment (or when I hit a brick wall) I will be returning to this scene. In terms of the work behind this, the scene is made from simple polygon shapes, using a lot of the extrude tool. The only complicated aspect of the scene, was when I was creating the interiors of the towers. I decided I wanted you to be able to move inside the structures, but this meant some complicated appending of polygons to ensure that the walls had depth.