BLOG PROGRESS. Due 18.10.2013
Over the past 4 weeks, I have been spending most of my time thinking about of different ways to approach modelling 'Nelle' within Maya, and have now, I have a near complete pre-vis model of what I want her to look like - referencing as closely as I can to the designs I created in design and visual thinking in term 3.
Following the assessment guidelines and keeping in mind that I will have to create a more complex model at the end, I decided to start creating 'Nelle' with more divisions than I needed for the time being. That way I could easily save a number of different copies while slowly developing the character which would lead me to the final, reduced, pre-vis model of her - while also having made the more complex model on the way.
I began the modelling process by firstly building the torso, which I did a number of times as I was testing the subdivisions, height and scale on what started as a cylinder. I decided to go with a simpler mesh to begin with and then duplicate it to create the extra 4 body divisions upward. This way I could make sure they were mathematically even, which is what I tried to keep constant throughout my entire bug model. To have the bug bend slightly I used lattice deformers - which I felt worked to my advantage because it was an easy and simple method I felt comfortable using. Once completed I realised I could have made this torso a number of different ways - some easier and quicker - but was happy with the result.
Next thing I created was the wings - because at first I thought I wanted to have the legs and arms separate to the torso, which I ended up changing along the way. I created the shape using a sphere, deformed slightly and duplicated then combined so that I could merge the vertices accordingly - with one egg shaped oval inside the other. Off that I used the extrude tool (keeping edges together) to create the wings - which I ended up separating eventually after realising that rigging it would be just too far out of my knowledge. I felt this way worked better in the end anyway, because then I can have the littler wings underneath. I did have some issues when using the interactive split tool when making this mesh though, which I did figure out after I did a clean up. I made sure this object fitted against the torso shape snug and placed it there, deleted history, froze transformations and made it into it's separate layer.
Creating the legs and arms proved to be quite easy - I just extruded from the main torso mesh and made just enough divisions so that I could identify the elbow, wrist, thumb and finger (mitt) joints up the top, and the knee, and boot entities down the bottom. I used the append to polygon tool to fix the mitt fingers, because if I just joined the end of the hand up by merging the vertices I would have a couple of triangles! and I wanted to stay well clear if I could. By using the append poly tool I could then simply use the tool twice OR I could use the interactive split tool. I tried the interactive split tool and sometimes it just was stubborn and wouldn’t work. I extruded the arm and leg bases to create the elbow, knees and boots for the model, which ended up being quite simple yet effective enough to keep the shapes intended (as on my design).
After creating the arms and legs I realised the arms were too short so I altered them slightly just by scaling and moving some of the divisions around. I didn't have too much trouble doing this, was just a bit fiddly. Overall, so far, I feel that my model has come along quite well for something that has been created very simply using a limited amount of tools. I found that I was also trying tools such as 'slide edge tool', 'duplicate face' and merging tools to fix up little bits here and there all over my mesh, but I was for most of the time trying to locate them using the action keys and hot boxes, which I now feel so much more comfortable using. If I could change anything and create my mesh again, I would more precisely think about what I'm modelling before hopping straight onto Maya and just giving it a go.
