This week was for a bunch of modelling and for improving on what I'd already made in prior weeks! Let's have a look!
The upper clothes are more or less all done! I added a big ol' oversized zipper on the side of the jacket, and shifted around the zipper bits to actually make sense in terms of how a zipper works. The work on the upper clothes was mostly just refinement with what I already had. A little bit of moving vertices around, a few extra bits, that sort of thing.
We've finally got pants and a belt now! I quite liked modelling the belt. It involved getting a curve to follow around the pants, then extruding a mesh along that curve. After that, I added some holes and a buckle and it was ready! Thank goodness that I wear a belt almost everyday. It really helped getting the buckle correct in a way that I wouldn't be able to otherwise from just using an image online. A belt buckle is surprisingly complex! There's a bunch of little bits that you don't see when you normally look at a belt. The loops around the pants were simple to model, but the positioning of them was something that I had to double check. In a previous attempt at making a character, I simply just made a belt loop with an equal amount of them going around the pants. This was a good attempt, but it just made the overall shape boring to look at. Basically, the lesson of this was that I should use reference for even the most mundane things lol! This is pretty evident by the pockets. I definitely think I can improve on them, since they don't really look all that much like proper pant pockets. The problem comes from the geometry of the pants, however. I could probably rearrange the faces in a way that would get me a more convincing pant pocket, but I would have to experiment with what I can get away with. I would much rather just alter what I have already than having to go back and redo something.
Next, the bottom half! This is where the pants in particular shine! I said in my previous post that I might try using Zbrush to create the shoes, but I instead used it to make the folds in the pants more believable. Zbrush has a very useful tool called TransposeCloth. This allowed me to easily deform the mesh for the pants in a way that could mimic how clothes fold and bend when they move around and settle. I focused on the knees and ankles in particular because that's realistically where the body moves around the most when walking. You will also notice that there's some snazzy looking shoes! These were quite a challenge to make. My first attempt to make them were based off of my Dad's work boots. However, Maya crashing thwarted my attempts at making those. I figured that a more stylish option for shoes would be better instead of work boots. I based them off of a classic Converse Hi-top sneaker, since that's close to what someone would see when they think Shoe. I modelling the main parts of the shoe on top of a duplicate of the model's foot, and making it a live object. In Maya, this allows for new meshes made to stick to the live object. This made the task of conforming the shoe to the foot very easy. A modeled each part separately and eventually combined them together and extruded outwards whenever I needed to. The sole was as simple as extruding the bottom edge outwards. I originally planned on making the shoes have laces, but those seemed really finicky to model, so I opted for a velcro strap instead. I've been wearing a pair of velcro shoes for a while and I figured it would help me connect it me personally.
The last big piece of modelling I did this week was...
Wow, a gun! Hell's Horses!
This model actually turned out really well, to my surprise! I fully expected this to look like complete doo-doo, but it turned out pretty good. I think there's some more that I can do with it, but as for the whole shape, iI'd say it's done. I tried out a new method of modelling when I was making this. I started out with an 8-sided cylinder, and extruded the edges and followed along the contours of my reference image. When I couldn't go in any one direction, I would split the extrusion and go a different direction. It was a very spur of the moment idea, and I hope that I can replicate it again If I need to. This is based off of the MP-412 Rex revolver. It looks a little familiar, but I can't put my finger on it. I think there was something about a 60 million double dollar bounty? I set out in particular for a modern looking break action revolver, and luckily, this one fit the bill quite well. As well as making this gun look particularly unique, I also wanted to add a little personal flair for the model. My character's trusty hand cannon, Stardust (name pending), technically has infinite ammo. The only stipulation is that the gun can only fire shots in quick succession a couple of times before it overheats. When overheating, the gun can't fire and needs to be vented by the break action mechanism. This version of the gun fires Cosmic Rounds (fancy!) which would be evident when venting heat, with a colourful looking nebula seen on the back of the cylinder. The overheating can be circumvented by firing slower, but that isn't fun in an intense firefight. When firing, you can see a burst of cosmic energy erupt from the barrel and speed towards an enemy, slowly accumulating more and more smoke until it cools off itself or until vented.
That's all for this week! I certainly made a lot of progress this week, and I'm very proud of that! I think I might keep working on this until it's done. I actually found out that I got accepted into my graduate course! The e-mail for my acceptance should be going out within the next week, which is very exciting! The course starts in June so if I get this done by the end of the year, that would leave me with 6 months to work on my animation skills. I really hope that I will be able to learn a whole bunch more from this course!
Thank you and good-bye for today!