Character Modelling Part 2: Character turn around and mesh topology.

Once my designs were finished, I had to make a character turn around to determine what I am modelling. The turn around showed front, side and back views. Once I had made the turn around, I then went onto making the mesh topology which would act as a vital necessity for this character modelling. Below are the steps explained in more detail.




Character Turnaround

A character turnaround is a drawing of the character in a T pose to determine where the elements of the character are. As seen in theses GIFs, I had drawn out my turnarounds to determine what I was going to model. The steps I took to do this was I drew several lines to help draw the outline of a male human; this helped to get the proportions right. I then added on parts to the model like helmet, armour, thigh pads, boots, gauntlets, gloves, shoulder pads, diamond on the chest plate, and a holster for a sword. The next GIF shows the changes made and also the mesh topology. Below is an explanation of what it is.

Mesh topology

When creating anything in a 3D environment with a turnaround, a good technique to use for getting the right amount of polygons is to draw out the mesh topology. This helps determine where the faces, edges and vertices are going to be placed when modelling around a character when placed as an image plane on the front and side views. Sometime the animators may draw either the top or back view, depending on which has more of a significance to the model.

Changes to my model

As I explained in part 1, due to the complications to some of the model I had to remove the parts that I found were going to complicate the model's movements and also parts that were confusing for me to model, like the gilded design on the boots and gauntlets. Fortunately these changes made little difference to the whole design of my character.