Year 2 Term 1 Game Production: Pt.1
After receiving our brief and drawing our key words from a hat (World war 2 and Hospital), I started where i usually start and began sourcing some inspirational imagery, not solely for my role as Character modeler, but anything that would help with the overall aesthetic of the game.
This Served primarily only as a starting point for the visuals, somewhere to move forward from, and included visual aids for environment, props, uniform choice as well as character style.
Next up i proceeded to knock up a rough, first draft for a one sheet.
Again, this was intended as a starting point, with the visuals and information included fully meant to be altered and swapped out along the way.
Next, while i waited for the first draft character concept work to be passed over, i set about sketching some ideas myself before jumping straight into knocking up a very simple base mesh, so i could have a blank canvas ready to adapt once the concepts arrived.
After plucking a rough male reference and setting up my box planes... i followed this tutorial..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spi4lGxnMZg by James Taylor, as pointed out by one of my tutors (Steve Brown) to begin creating the model, beginning with a cylinder for the torso, and using a second and third cylinder to add the arm and the leg.
Keeping the shading on X-ray i manipulated the shapes to loosely match the refference.
I then Extruded the side of the chest out to form the shoulder, and merged it with the top of the arm where the shoulder meets the bi-cep and tri-cep, this would cause a topology issue i would later have to come back to correct however.
I then began to connect the upper leg to the torso, concentrating largeley on creating the basis of the V shaped edge flow important for the hips/groin.
Using a cube, which i added enough edge loops to create the base of the fingers while also matching the number of edges at the wrist, to those of the forarm, i pulled out the hand, extruding each finger individually.
Then created a simple thumb using a similiar method as the fingers.
The foot was made in a similar, albeit more complicated fashion, modifying a basic cube and adding in enough edge loops to provide both the basic geometry, as well as the appropriate edges to join it to the leg at the ankle.
Using the Multi cut tool i divided up the front faces to create the toes and extruded them out much like the fingers, and finally attached the foot and leg at the ankle.
The feet once smoothed....
And the main body.
For the head, i tried several workflows, the first consisted of making the topology for the eyes, mouth and nose individually out of the front faces of cylinders and then connecting them up to form the face, and in turn create the head... however i abandoned this method in favor of creating the skull out of a sphere, manipulating the vertices to form the general shape, and then proceeding to add edge loops in and mimic the topology of the first method.
Once the head was joined to the neck i had the base mesh ready to be modified once i received the concepts.
