Thursday 18 February 2016

Model preview& chest modeling

In the image above, I have decided to make sort of a test pose. I duplicated the arms and the legs inside my scene and mirrored them across. I also added in my low poly head and the gauss cannons that I created after making the legs. You can also see in the model the beginning of the torso coming along.
I wanted to create this image as i had been modeling all these separate pieces for a long time and it was a satisfying feeling to see them all coming together like this. I wanted to make sure they all worked together and nothing looked out of place. 

Here is a big more of the progress I had with the torso. At this point in my modeling process I was wondering what I would use for a pivot for the arm, as similar to the leg, the original reference simply has a plain sphere that connects the arm to the torso and I don't want to carry this onto my model for the same reasons as with the leg, so think that what i will do create a similar joint as I did on the leg but re size it a bit so that it fits right in the torso.  

Leg Modeling

You can see in the above screen shot my process of creating the leg. In the window to the side, it shows how I have created the leg out of three separate objects, much similar to how I created the arm model. This process will continue on through my project, and the final outcome will end up being quite a lot of parts in the end, but it will be advantages for me as it means later on down the line posing this model will be a lot easier.




Above you can see, much like my process again with the arm that I am placing in the pivot points on my leg model. I wanted to place one and the top of the foot so that it could rotate on all axis as the legs are designed so that they wouldn't look right if I was to rotate them along any other axis, so the foot and the top of the leg need to be able to do this. 

This is another area of my model that I decided to be a bit more original with to increase its realistic values. On the broadside figurine the models leg simply has a ball attached to the top of the leg, which is able to move around with in its socket. However, I didn't think a plain sphere would look that good on my model, as I wanted to make it appear like it would actually be able to move my models leg.
I instead created a sort of hinge, that is able to swivel at the top to enable the legs to spread out, but it also attaches the rest of the leg by a hinge so that the top part and the bottom part of the leg can only move along one axis and cannot go side ways.  

Above is an image of the final part of detail that I added to the foot, being the heel. The heel is a separate part to the foot which can also move, making the final model piece count for the leg up to
five. I wanted the heel of the foot to be separate so that if i was posing the model to be stood with its foot on a ramp or something the heel would be able to appear as if it was supporting the rest of the foot by rotating itself. 

Arm Modelling

Bellow are some screenshots of my process of modeling the broadsides missile arms. 

You can see above from the original broadside model that I have made some alterations to add a bit more detail to the arm. I instead wanted too have some exhausts that would extrude out of either side of the arm to give the idea that when the rockets fire off they can let out head from the side of the arms. I wanted to do this to add the extra detail of realism to my model, as I don't want my final outcome to look as if it was a 3d render of a warhammer figurine and is instead an actually asset for a game.




You can see above how I began adding in the pivots into my model pieces so that I could pose it later on. I ensured that the arm had two pivots, one which could move the entire arm if it wanted too, and one that was placed within the elbow, so that I could bring the arm up and down as you can see in the second screen shot of the three.

Head modeling

As my model is only going to have one part of it that is going to be organic, I decided to begin creating my head model early on into the project. 
As I already had a basic head model that I had created to practice the topology of a face, I took that into maya and expanded on it, I extruded out around the bottom of the head to make the shape of the leather armor the tau has wrapped around his head and I then created the shape of the communication device that he has on his ear.
With this basic shape ready it was time to take it into zbrush and begin making the detail that it needed. 



Im fairly happy with the final outcome of the head that I created in zbrush. At this point, I had not created anything organic within zbrush, so this was  new area for me, and as it was only loosely based to resemble a human face I had the ability to be a bit more free with my design. I think I got the resemblance to a Tau's head pretty good though, I wanted to give him a bit of character too so I added a few scars going down his eye.


Heres is a screen shot of a quick test I did within quixel. I had baked my high poly zbrush model onto my low poly model to see how it would turn out so that I could edit it somewhere down the line if I needed too. From this outcome, I can see that I will indeed have to make some alterations, only to the low poly model though. As what I mistakenly did was not edit the high poly model after the zbrush process, hence why the face is quite flat. What I will need to do is bring the zbrush model into maya with my lowpoly model and make the high poly model a live surface, so that I can shape my lowpoly face around it a lot more to get a better sense of the shape.