Chapter 2

After finishing the first chapter of the 'Character Modeling with Maya and ZBrush: Professional Polygonal Modeling Techniques' book I moved on to the second chapter. Chapter 2 starts with an overview of the software Maya. I have used Maya a lot lately whilst working on my other unit where myself and my group are making a short film. This section of the book talks about the guidelines of modeling, the guidelines state that you should use quad (four sided) polygons, your mesh should not have 'n-gons' (polygons with more than four sides), your mesh should have uniformly spaced topology. Fortunately I had learnt these points whilst modeling in Maya on lots of other projects that I have done at my time a Ravensbourne.

The chapter then goes on to explain some of the tools of Maya and how they work, it also goes through Maya's user interface. Again having used Maya a fair bit I knew pretty much all of these basics that were in the book. However there were two tools that the book pointed out that I had never used before. The first tool was the 'Offset Edge Loop Tool'. The 'Offset Edge Loop Tool' creates two new edge loops and evenly spaces them between the selected edge loop by sliding them across the mesh. The second tool  was the 'Lattice' tool, I had heard about this tool but had never used it before. The 'Lattice' tool places a low-res cage around the selected object. You can then manipulate the high-res object by using the low number of points of the low-res cage that was created by the 'Lattice' tool. Both of theses tools will come in very handy when modeling.

Now that the overview of Maya is out of the way the book moves onto the first important stage of modeling a character. This stage is called 'Blocking Out'. I followed the tutorial in the book on how to model a Game Character in order to teach myself how to carry out this process. The tutorial starts off by showing you how to set up your character reference images. I have done this lots of times before so this was not difficult. The reference was supplied with the tutorial. Below is an image of my scene with the reference in place.

This tutorial then taught me something new. I already knew that to save yourself time you only model one half of the character. Once finished you then mirror the geometry of the half that you have modeled and you then get the other half, this now gives you a complete character. The book uses a different technique that I was not aware of. The technique or tool is called 'Duplicate Special'. What this tool does is initially the same as mirroring geometry but allows more flexibility. Mirroring geometry simply just mirrors or copies what you have created. 'Duplicate Special' allows you to edit the original half of the mesh and the mirrored half will constantly update itself with the changes that have been made to the original half. This way you can always see the whole model and you still have the luxury of only working on one half.

I then continued to follow the tutorial step by step. I already knew about the process of 'Blocking Out' and how to do it, but I had only ever done it once so it was still vital for me to follow this tutorial just so I could make sure I was doing everything correctly. Everything was running smoothly until the book offered a technique that I had not used before. The book used a technique that would cause the model to mimic the twist that humans have in their forearm that is created by the ulna and radius bones.

The tutorial stated to rotate the bottom face of the arm at the wrist 90 degrees. When I was doing this my results looked similar to the results in the tutorial but it did not quite match up. However I kept tweaking and finally got it to look as best as I could to what the image in the tutorial was showing. I then felt that this had a result on the rest of the tutorial as my 'Block Out' was slightly different.

I found that this meant I had a lot of trouble when it came to blocking out the hand, the index finger and the thumb. Although my block out was not too far from the images in the tutorial it was still not quite perfect. I still pursued and carried on tweaking until my block out looked as close as it could to the one in the image. Overall I was fairly happy with the outcome as my block out looked pretty much spot on. Below is an image of my finished Game Character block out:

Now that my Game Character Block Out is complete the next stage will be to add detail to the block out. That gets covered in chapter 6 in the book. So unfortunately there are a few chapters to go through before I will be continuing with this character. Now that I have completed this tutorial and chapter of the book it is time to move onto the next chapter. Chapter 3 is called 'Introduction to ZBrush Modeling'. It is now finally time to start learning some ZBrush!