09 February 2003 - Day 4

Ahhh waking up bright and fresh with the birds on a Sunday morning is such a rare thing. Look, no hangover!

After breakfast and half an hour with a good paperback I feel like painting a dragon. Girlfriend's off to work so I've got at least a couple of hours free.

I start with a simple cube and use the symmetry modifier in Max. Tip: When modelling half an object always make sure you have symmetry on and "see end results" toggled ON. It's remarkable just how a whole model can be way off-scale when you only model half the object and imagine how it will look mirrored later.

The usual extruding of faces and vertex moving takes place for the next hour or so:

I leave off the head and feet at this point as I'll be modelling them separately. I would always suggest doing this anyway for an area of particular detail in any model.

I'm often asked what machine I'm using to do my rendering and to be quite honest; it doesn't matter how powerful your machine is- it's a much better practice to manage your workflow. You can model a scene of ten billion polys but you only ever really need to have the current few thousand on-screen. I'd be hypocritical if I said I didn't want a bigger machine, but it's not the most important thing. (and for the record... I've got a 1ghz athlon and using an ancient geforce 256)

You may have noted that this model hasn't been sketched in advance.. Sometimes I prefer to sketch in 3D... it may not be "good" practice, but I find it strangely therapeutic to model freeform in this way.

The whole model looks very rough at the moment, but it's just enough to make sure all the proportions are correct. The neck may seem a little long and gangly at the moment, but once the bones are in it will appear a lot shorter when bent. Another reason for the model being so basic is that there's another process I use when fine-tuning the model: