Character Modelling Part 3: Making the model

In this blog journal, I am going to talk about my model in stages, showing print screens from Maya as I modelled it. I will explain the changes I made during the modelling stage and why I made them.

Beginning the model

This GIF shows how my model began in Maya. I had placed two image planes behind and on the right of the of the model to start modelling. What I had also done was I started off with a shape that had one face deleted and used edit>duplicate special and clicking on the □ to bring up the extra options. To then make sure that whatever I modelled on one side would mirror, I then changed the scaling option on the x axis to -1 and clicked duplicate; I had a shape that would model exactly the same thing as my first object in a mirror. This was my first attempt at making my model to which I soon discovered an easier method to modelling.

I decided to start over on my model because I had difficulty when trying to make the neck of the character. I knew before that the armour is non-deforming and that the neck deforms in order for my character to look around. I then decided to make the armour and arms as one object. I discovered that there were problems with doing this as shown below.

When I put shoulder pads on my character, I had tried to model them as exact to the turnarounds when I had found that it was going to confuse the mesh when UVing the textures. Also when I deleted the first shoulder pad, it was hard to close up the hole as you can see in the GIF above. I then decided to delete that and moved onto making the legs.

As you may notice, I had added the colour to parts of the arm to experiment how I can place multiple colours on one object. How to do this was I selected the faces I wanted to be textured and after creating the textures in the Hypershade tab, I then placed the textures on by using the middle mouse button and dragging the texture onto the areas selected.

Glitches and Changes

During my modelling process, I had come across a severe glitch and also more modelling problems. Below is a GIF of the glitch I encountered.

The problem I encountered is shown in the GIF above. As I made more changes to my model and reversed the normals on my flipped object (that's normals>reverse), about 98% of the model became invisible and only at least a couple of faces were showing. I had learnt before that if anything goes wrong on Maya that usually shouldn't, I had to go to edit>delete all by type>non deforming history. Even after trying this method, nothing changed. I then went online to read about this glitch in some help forums and they claimed it was something to do with the texturing, yet no textures were added to this. Below is where the problem was fixed and how.

I added the black texture to the legs to get rid of the error and changed the renderer to Viewport 2.0. This fixed my model's problem and I was able to then continue modelling my character.

Finishing the modelling stage

In this GIF, it shows the last parts I modelled onto the character. You will notice that the visor design changes three times. This was down to when I was trying to figure out how to make the model simple instead of making a model with faces that consisted of three vertices, which would confuse Maya or Mudbox when it came to UV and texturing. Once I was happy, it was then onto UVing my model and texturing it.