guess who?

1 month later and after some serious hours put in, i return to my blog and back to weekly installments hence forth!
ok so lets start off, as one of the modellers for the group I've been given the task to make the apprentice character so I'll be provided some images of my work flow over the past few weeks into the creation of a character.
below is a concept design for the character drawn by Simon Acty.

 

when starting a new character i prefer to start of with the face of the character and begin with the eye.
so how i go about this after setting everything up such as image planes, i create a Sphere and then a polygon plane, the plane is place at the top of the eye and then i slowly work around the sphere to create a shape like below.

click to see a larger version 

so after completing this it sets me up for the rest of the head, i prefer to work my way down the head starting with the nose area and the flesh leading from under the eye to the cheeks.
a days work later you can see from the picture below ive got the basic area i prefer to be in to start introducing the rest of the topology to the head.

im pleased with what ive produced so far, espcially with the speed of thinga, practice makes perfect as they say. The ears are my greatest achievement unlock so far, my second attempt at making an ear, and if i may say, i think its pretty darn good for a second attempt. how i went about making the ear was to take some reference images of my own ear, and then in photoshop draw the topology i wanted to make over the image. this helped a lot  and it prevented me from going slightly overboard with the topology.

click to see a larger version

i was introduced to a great forum post about topology..geeky i know, and as correctly guessed by my tutor, I spent most of the night reading it all and studying the methods.
this helped me with the flow of my model so far and to get around the horrible task of sewing the ear onto the head, i prefer to do this straight away after the point shown in this image, as it makes life easier in the long run. after the ear is sewn on, its plain sailing to get the rest of the head done.

click to see a larger version

upon completion of the head, i then go about making the body. i do this by starting of with a cube and divide it into three sections to make a torso. then its just a matter of filling out the shape. after some research into topology i found that the flow to the left in the picture is not really suitable, it doesnt flow with the structure of the body, so after so tweaking and adjustments i made the shape to the right of the image. the upper torso was the area in need the most and im pleased with the results so far.

click to see a larger version

next on my hit list was adding the arms to the body. 4days work and ive got the base of my character sorted, and the great thing is a can always reuse everything i make for later projects. im really pleased with what ive done so far and im noticing errors alot faster and avoiding the majority all together. its a great feeling knowing you are improving and the vast amount of knowledge you know.

the next steps in my workflow is to start thinking about items of clothing. from learning about the flow of the body the same principles with follow with clothing also.

OK its the 2nd of november and its time to make some clothes for the apprentice. i started with the shirt, and what i did to make this was to duplicate my base body and delete away faces to make a shirt. then by scaling slighting and creating a thickness.. voila! you have a shirt. the boots and trousers i re-used from a previous model i made.
I'm very working very closely with Simon with the character, which is great as its recreating working for a client/colleague, and thers always lots of changes to be made..hehe

click to see a larger version

Nov 3rd and his basic clothing is done, damm those dungarees! the top part with straps was quite challanging to make and keep nice topology, but my hard work pays off and im in a nice position for to take the character further.
feedback from simon preciously was to increase the bagginess of the trousers which ive done and added some minor creases without going overboard on topology. so far its going well and its really enjoyable making the character.

next part is to start making the hands of the character which is always a tedious section. getting the right balance of topolgy and and detail is key.
this is essentially how i start off with making hands, sometimes i start of with a cube and go from there, others with a single plane. for this version though i started with a single plane and worked on from there.
once the basic shape is there, the fun starts with making the topology work.

 so after a fair few hours of tweaking, ive made these basic gloves for the character, now in hindsight i see they arent that good, and after some reference and feedback i saw what was wrong and i made further adjustment.

here is currently what the character looks like with his gloves. currently the gloves are off putting, so more time in front of the pc is needed.

apart from that i added a temporary afro to the character to represent his hair...awwwwyeeeh!

click to see a larger version

ok so its the 12th of November and after alot of tweaks ive made some new gloves. Slightly stylised and more shapely.i orignally made the fingers too long in comparison to the palm of the hand which is shown in a picture below.

 currently the hands look very thin which isn't good so some fleshing out of the hands is in order. ive spent alot of time on the hands as they are the tools of a person, nearly any action you do involves hand movement, so attention to detail was needed.
it was at this point i realised that the character needed to be stylised a bit more, as having just stylised gloves and nothing else seems a bit weird to me. to counter this i tried making the arms differently.

it was around this time where we had a team chat about stylising the character further as it seems to realistc looking for what we are going for. so we set about coming up with a slightly new design.

click to see a larger version

its now the 15th and as you can see, quite different to the orignal design, exagerated features and more obvious lines.
i didn't make a new face for this, i simply reworked my original face is a sculpting packed to more easily move around the topology. to me this is a good sign as my original base head obviously is holding up with a variety of shapes

click to see a larger version

click to see a larger version

we still need to make a hair piece for the character, this still needs to be worked on, but im much more at ease now the character is less realistic, and it really feels like things are going places.ive also adjusted the arms to make him look slightly scrawnier and now it seems more fitting with the large gloves.

Simon has asked me to make the character some goggles to wear on his head. they are pretty simple to make especially with the pipe primtive. the goggles will hopefully be one of many little items the apprentice will have to wear on his journeys with the hunter character.

click to see a larger version

after getting the basic character done i started to UV unwrap the parts of the character. i use a free program for Maya called RoadKill, its great for displaying your object in 3d space making marking seams easier. its very simple to use, but i find you do need to swap between Maya's built in editor to just tweak the Uv's slightly when they are unwrapped. a couple of months ago i hadn't really touched Uv's and texturing before, now it seems like a piece of cake......mmmh cake.

click to see a larger version

here are some examples of my layed out Uv's for my characters rousers and gloves. the checkered pattern in the image is used to tell if there is any stretching with the uv's. if the squares are similar size and evenly distributed, this means there is little or no stretching which is what we are after.

click to see a larger version

my next task and nearly finalising the character is to create the hair. this is found to be very tricky, i drew up some basic hair designs to work from to help me.
i tried making the parts with cubes orinally, but was quite tricky to do, so i tried using curves and got some better results.

click to see a larger version

 here are some shots of the hair on there own. its a really tricky task, but i will persevere and hopefully produced something worthy of keeping. fingers crossed on that.

okie dokie thats me blogged out till next week, thanks to those who actually read through that, hope it may have helped in some way shape or form.

peace out




i'll sort the layout issues later ^^