Work in Progress - Characters - "Andrew"

This post shows the progress of developing one of the main characters for the original storyline. As the story involves a young boy, I produced some concept work of the boy including illustrations to use for reference to model the character later on in Maya.

Concept Artwork

Modelling/Texturing

In order to bulid the character, I had to import and use some concept images for reference.To do that, I simply created a polygonal plane, turned down the subdivision surface modes and scaled it up to a decent size. Then I assigned a new lambert material to the surface of the plane and imported a JPEG photo file of the image that showed the body structure of the character.

Only one half of the body was produced at first using a single polygonal cube, along with the arm. Then I composed the leg with another cube. Once all boday parts were complete, I combined them into one mesh, then merged certain vertices to others in order to secure the model even further. With construction history deleted (doing this will prevent problems with the mesh in the future), I mirrored the object to create the other half of the body, but not before aligning the vertices of half of the body in order to avoid complications.

The image above shows all the vertices of the open side of the mesh being snap-aligned. It is important to do thise every single time you wish to mirror the geometry of the mesh to create the other half as not doing so would cause problems. If for any reason, the mirror geometry mode fails, I would have to mirror the geometry with the mode to merge vertices with the original switched off and then go through the process of merging appropriate vertices together manually.

The shirt, trousers and shoes that I have produced are actually created from duplicates of the original mesh so they would all fit on the character with a few modifications. Later on, I would also create a lifejacket for the character as it would be relevant to the setting of the story.

Son character in low resolution. Some of the geometry/topology may need some cleaning up to do but it is looking pretty good. The shirt has assigned a new lambery material and given a new colour so as not to get confused with either one of the objects.

A screenshot of a smooth mesh version of the son character. Applied simple lambert materials to each object and a phong material for the eyeballs. The area around the ears on the character are not perfect but that could be solved with other models in the future.

Screenshot of the son character with some textures applied. Started creating and adding hair using CV curves and a hair system. Textures for eyeballs were creating using Photoshop files that I produced years ago and applied using a spherical mapping technique. With the original mesh, I applied automatic mapping to the surface, and then went to the UV Texture Editor to take a snapshot of the mesh's outlines. Then imported it into Photoshop and produced a good skin texture with some freckles around the face area. Saved it as a JPEG file and then imported and assigned it to the colour section of the lambert material.

Another screenshot with a rendered image of the character's head, with some simple textures and hair.

Wireframe mode screenshot of the smooth mesh with the hair, CV curves and other body part objects included.

A screenshot of the boy charcter near completion.

A close up of the character with the main mesh outlined in object mode.