So I ended up getting tired of job hunting for a bit and decided to take a break and get back to some good old fashioned modelling, but of course the task proposed the question; what to model? Well I figured human anatomy is always a strong basis to work from and hey, who doesn't love a nice character model? So, I grabbed the first hapless victim to walk past who just so happened to be my housemate and fellow digital artist, Pearse Toomey, and proceeded to take some makeshift reference photos. If there is one thing that I should really put more time into, it is definitely reference images. Good reference can make or break a model and in this case I should probably have opted for a stronger setup. Oh well, onto the modeling. Firstly, the beautiful man himself:
Maybe it's just me but I find it oddly reminiscent of a certain famous figure's request for donations. After my brief distracted wanderings into the depths of wikipedia, I loaded up the reference into max and started hacking out a model in good old fashioned poly modelling format. I wanted to pay particular attention to poly flow and to try and maintain an even spread of polys. Of course, the hair proved an annoying issue as it hides a lot of the jawline, but hopefully all issues there should rectified once the hair goes on in max. I quickly folded out the basic shape of the head and baked in the symmetry before jumping through orthographic views to tweak the model to match the references a little more precisely. Symmetry makes for a good starting point but certainly needs to be dropped once getting into finer detail.
The ear was my greatest source of annoyance as I insisted upon challenging myself to keep within using the existing number of edges I had left myself and also maintaining suitable poly flow. I was quite happy with the result, and managed to maintain an all quad process that is easily adaptable for most ear shapes.
With the head starting to look like the real deal it's now time to throw it into mudbox and see if we can't get it a bit more lifelike.
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