Modelling has finally come to an end

We met on Wednesday over the easter break and had an awesome session as you can see by Leons pig getting finished. Leon seen an image in a 3Dworld mag where the character was all white in a white environment...and so we wanted to duplicate hence all the white renders! We think it looks sexy...hehehe.

Although we had planned to hopefully have started texture mapping, which we didn't get to, it was a very informative meeting. And I could not thank my lucky stars enough to have have Chris and Leon as group mates. Between them I learnt so much today...Chris inspired me to go home and play endlessly with things with Maya which he was doing during our meeting, and by doing so we figured out ways to do our texture mapping, and ways that won't work.

It was also decided that Chris would take over on the level design. He had finished his chicken model and almost his main character, and I suppose he feels more confident doing that where Leon and I can paint the textures etc !

My MODELS

Above you can see Bailey, her weapon the sickle and her sidekick dog Fudge. It took me a couple of weeks to complete Bailey with the minimum time I have, but I finished Fudge in one night unaided! So I was very happy, cause I was getting concerned that I couldn't model as fast as Chris! ;)

For Bailey we decided as a group that we would leave her as was in the image...but the more I thought about it, the more I really was not happy with her mouth or the geometry in the face in general. As you can see from the geometry below there alot of triangles and her mouth just doesn't look right...she looks like she has a hard membrane like a fish under the skin for a mouth. So I consulted my good friend Andrew Martin who is currently working on a short 3D animated film called Gus. This is his website http://www.andrew-martin.com/

He took literally not even 5 minutes and she then looked beautiful...I was depressed that I couldn't figure it out....but mah...Ill get over it. Andrew pointed out that you need to think of the muscles on a human body and how they run and work. The lines of the topology in the face should generally run in line with those muscles, and in the picture above i had the running against the natural flow of the muscle, hence the awkward moving lips!!!

Andrew also suggested for animating purposes that it may be best if I model the complete head and use only a poly plane as the fringe which then can move...by modelling the forehead and remainder of the eye area, it will also enable me to get rid of some of the messy triangles and stuff that are there...and also because the way its modelled now, may lead to some weird deforming when animated. So Ill give it a go and see if I can keep the poly count low but wont spend too much time as we really need to start the texturing. If I can do her easy enough it will just be a bonus. But otherwise, with her new lip job, Bailey is ready for texturing along with Fudgey and her sexy sickle.

NotES on My MODELS

I am modelling them with the idea to keep the poly count low but also give it enough geometry in the right places, as I really want them to be rigged basically to be put in poses for our final submission. So I am aware that I could loose a few triangles to get my count even lower, but I think its good practice also to see how low you can keep the poly count when modelling for rigging.