Good God it's the second
sunday in a row I wake up without a hangover.. There must
be something very wrong here..
I was hoping to go
to the fair today with my girlfriend but it's become incredibly
cold overnight. We both decide to stay home and go to a pub for
lunch later instead. Wehaay! I get to work on my dragon again...
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Well I'm OK with the
claws as they are for now, so it's off to model the body. I may
still make alterations to the claws once I've seen them in the first
render or two but it's hard to tell just how much they'll need at
this point.
I've been loooking forward
to modelling the body, and the first step is to load the mannequin
I made earlier; to bring the claws in to check against the scale.
They're fine, so they just get hidden for the time being.
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The first step is to
align the arms to line up with the main viewport planes. When modelling
in a 2D window it's easy enough as it is to get lost in 3D space.
Making sure you're modelling along at least one of the corresponding
axes makes it much less difficult to visualise.
A few cuts and tweaks
and it's starting to take shape.
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this point I need to see it in smooth mode so I use the old reference
object trick. To avoid slowdown in the scene however, I first isolate
the area I'm going to work on and detach it from the main body. |
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pulling and tweaking and It's already starting to take on recogniseable
structure. I quickly throw in a couple of bones and test the bend.
Miraculously I seem to have got it right first time (for once!) It's
a little boxy at the moment, but that's easy enough to iron out later. |
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CRASH! - I start to model
the adjoining muscle where the forearm meets the shoulder and Max
decides to crash out on me. It only seems to happen when I'm using
cut to split polygons? Not
only that, but the bloody thing crashes at exactly the same point
When I reload and do it again.
I've only lost about
15 minutes of work (it got faster the second time round) but it's
just infuriating and frustrating to have to do the same work again.
No point in continuing
while I'm annoyed. Coincides perfectly with late Sunday lunch at
the pub.. (Monty Pythons "Always Look on the Bright Side of
Life" springs to mind about now ;)
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Early evening and it's
time to have another look.. Despite the crashes it had come on OK.
Still a little boxy (usually this is more visible when using more
than one subdivision level in Meshsmooth)
I tweak vertices and
round the muscles off until it's as close as I need it to the final
shape. There are areas that are a little messy though, so I just
spend a little extra time cleaning up:
(more obvious in the
fore-arm area)
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When modelling organic
shapes I always reccomend modelling using quads only. There are
rare times where a triangle is unavoidable, but take extra precaution
to avoid pinching when using tri's.
Another thing to point
out (and yes I know this is obvious for the more advanced modellers
out there) -always follow the flow of the contours with poly edges.
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of the same with the back leg and it's starting to come together.
I unhide the feet at this point and stitch them to the ankle/wrist
joints. |
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I'm just about done with
the body for today (I'll come back to add add real detail when I've
worked on the other parts of thes scene)
I just want to prepare
it for mirroring later so I make sure there are no extraneous polys
along the edge. I then select the border vertices and run my VertexPlacer
script to make sure they're all lined up perfectly along the X Axis.
(Place X=0)
(visit downloads
for description of the VertexPlacer script)
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Finally I just mirror
the whole body along the X axis and attach both sides. I weld any
vertices that are overlapping (globally a distance of 0.01)
Meshsmooth at this point
just to preview and I'm happy to leave it alone for now.
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Off to
bed with "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" in my
head.. ..
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