02 March 2003 (Sunday) - Day 13

 

I only get a couple of hours free today, so just a very quick modelling session.. I wanted to get the head finished really, so it was time to approach the horns.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm running on a pretty crusty machine at home (I've ordered an upgrade, which I'll probably get on wednesday). The one good side of this is that it teaches you good scene management. In this case it means taking the focal area and detaching it from the main.

I run the trusty old SmoothRef script and start bevelling and tweaking away...

One thing I only discovered recently was that it's possible to use a deformation lattice (in this case a 3x3x3) on sub-selection sets. This is good - it allows me to select just the points along the length of the horn and bend them using the lattice.. also giving me a decent non-linear scaling.

 

Once the horns are positioned and scaled right it's time to model some of the more interesting bumps and ridges that are the defining feaure.Again, I'll add some finer detail in the bump-mapping stage, but it's a good idea to make sure the light catches right on the mid-scale features. Bumpmaps don't actually affect the edges either, so attention should be paid at this point to make sure the silhouette isn't too smooth.

Some more work is done around the eyes and I've added smaller horns to the rear of the jaw and top of the head. I was originally going to model the tongue as part of the head, but it would make much more sense to have that as a separate object. The teeth I will model quickly tomorrow again as a separate object so as to ease the texturing process a little.

For the final model I'm going to break one of the horns and add some facial asymmetry, but for now it's still good to keep it as half an object.

Mouseover: Meshsmooth