Just a quick update on the 3d work today.  I’d hoped to get a lot more time to work with Maya this week, but once again things have been pretty busy.  I did spend a lot of time with Illustrator designing a tee shirt and some wedding invites, but I’ll save Illustrator for another post.

Most of the work that I have done on the model is around the eyes, and I added the neck which, while the most striking change since last post, was actually quite fast and easy. I simply adjusted the vertices on the bottom of the neck where I wanted the neck to be, selected the faces, then used the “extrude face” tool to pull the neck out of the bottom of the head. After that it was just a matter of sculpting the general shape.  Fine tuning, as always, will come later.

The character in the story is supposed to be a tired old fisherman and up to this point, the model has had some pretty taut skin for an old dude, so it’s time for wrinkles! I’m modeling some wrinkles directly into the model and others will be created with textures.  To create the wrinkles, I use the “split face” tool to create three parallel lines where I want the wrinkle to be.  Pushing the vertices of the middle line in and pulling the top line out a little creates a nice deep fold in the smoothed model. I’ve carved in some crow’s-feet at the corner of his eyes and started work on some deep wrinkles around the eyelids. It still needs a lot of work though, and just as I was really getting into aging this poor guy, the mail arrived.  I rushed out to check, and sure enough, my eagerly awaited copy of Dragon Age 2 had arrived one day early! So Maya went off and I rushed to the kitchen to do some pre-epic-gaming-session chores, poured myself a frosty glass of home-brew and popped in the game.

I’ll expound on DA2 in the next post. For now I’ll be thoroughly immersing myself in stylistic noir fantasy.

Till next time…

I’ve been away from Maya for a week now and haven’t had time to work on this model until today. As you can see, there isn’t a whole lot of difference from the previous post.  Mostly, I spent an hour or so poking around vertices and adding some detail around the lips and forehead. I am going for a very strong brow and cheekbones that create a sunken, almost pathetic look in the eyes, cheeks and mouth.

This exaggeration of features extends to the oversized ears, the most significant addition to the model. Once I was happy with the rough geometry of the head, I felt comfortable enough to add this major detail. The ear is simply a sphere, rotated out, flattened and elongated. Once some of the folds of the lobe were added, I combined the two pieces of geometry and merged their vertices to make them on solid model.

From this picture it is pretty apparent that I have disobeyed one of the cardinal rules of modeling by adding a little too much detail into the lobe before the rough shape is correct. Luckily, the wire frame is still pretty simple and a few adjustments shouldn’t be too difficult.

Up next: Between now and next Monday, I’ll be working on finishing the ear, cleaning up the wire frame, and detailing the eyes and mouth. Hopefully I’ll have a fairly complete head for next Monday’s 3D post.

This is a little project that I started thinking about a while back and blogged about a little on the other site. My goal is to create my first 3D short.  While I have a lot of experience modeling in Maya and C4D, I have yet to spend much time lighting, rigging and animating. So, with the ambitious goal of more thoroughly understanding every aspect of the process, I’ve booted up Maya again and started the first step of on modeling the head.

Starting with the concept I doodled a few years back as a source image, I began with a sphere, deleted the right hemisphere, and started modeling just the left side of the model’s head.

Modeling Tip: Start Basic.  Don’t add detail until you’re happy with the basic shape of the model, then slowly add detail, refining the overall shape as you go along.  The more complex your model is, the more difficult it becomes to change the models cheekbones or smooth out that bump it his head!

This is what I’ve got after a couple hours of playing. It’s not finished yet. I still need to add a lot of detail around the eyes, mouth and forehead, but I don’t want to do that until the shape is right.

Time-Saving Tip: Only model half of your subject. When you want to view the entire model, duplicate your work with “-1″ in the X axis input field.  With this method, you can create a perfectly symmetrical model in half the time.

With a quick “command D”  I can view the full model.  It’s still a long ways away from animating, or even texturing, but I hope to get to the body before too long.  I’ll be sure to post some more images, ideas, and tips as the project moves forward.

Here is where I will be documenting my interesting and deeply profound insights into whatever video game I am currently obsessing about.  I’ll also post digital art to this section, including documentation of my current project, the C of Sound.