Portfolio Modelling Task – Part 3

Over the past few weeks in our portfolio modelling task set by Matt, I’ve been making making quite a bit more progress; it may be slow progress but its progress nonetheless. Just in case you missed it, in my last modelling task blog I presented my sketches and reference images that I hand drew for the project so that I could start modelling…

Well over the past two weeks, I’ve made quite a lot of progress on my character and in this blog post I’m going to be going over my progress so far.

Before I began modelling my character, I made sure to keep in mind my previous character model that we did last year.What I mean by this is that I tried to copy the same techniques that I did with this character than I did my previous character character model, for instance using the box modelling technique and using quads and even modelling one side of the characters body so that I could later mirror the one side so that the character would look symmetrical and not lopsided.

My first step that I did before I even started modelling was setting up my reference images. I did this by setting up 2 planes and adding my hand drawn reference images to them using lamberts in the Maya hypershade menu…Once this was done, I then went onto modelling the torso and honestly this was my main focus; this is mainly due to the fact that my character is very bulky in his build, making some areas somewhat difficult to model and get in the right positions. Anyway, I started off by modelling one side of the characters body, using the box modelling technique, which if your unaware of is the practice of extruding from a simple box. I box modelled up to the where the neck area should become a sort of “V” shape. Then came the extrusion of the shoulders and the arms; this was tricky! This was difficult to overcome due to my characters bodily structure being bulky, Matts advice to me was to try and extrude out and shape the mesh to look right using edge loops and he was kind enough to show me an example. I refined the edges that Matt had placed for me and it gave me result shown below…Then I extruded the arms, this was pretty simple once the shoulders of my character were refined. Firstly I extruded from the shoulder and manipulated the extruded edge to fit with my characters muscular upper arm. I then extruded again however this time scaling the extruded point down to try and replicate the lower arms structure, I messed around with the edges forming the entire arm giving me this result…I decided to skip the modelling process of the characters hands for now only because I don’t really have a top down reference for the characters hands, I think this will be one of my focuses for next time.

Next it was extruding out the neck and head of the character. At this point I was kind of stumped due to the fact that my characters neck is very wide and also with my character having a very large chin, so I asked for Matts help once again. His advice for me was since my character was this way, to have the neck extrusion on a slant so that the face and prominent chin would look better, therefore giving me a better result. This was also beneficial due to the characters facial features being slanted too…I then extruded the head out so that I could start forming the shape of the characters head; I extruded all the way to the ear portion of the characters head…Just to see my progress so far, I decided to select my model and mirror my character so that I could see what the whole body looked like at this moment in time. The upper body so far is shown below…

Overall, I’m really happy with my work so far! I think that my focus for the next few sessions should be to create a hand reference for my character so that I can give my character hands and also the create the lower body of my character so that then I can create UV’s for my character and export my model and take it into Mudbox for some sculpting work like smoothing out some edges and making the model look better as a whole.