I'm a DirectX guy. I design engines, I write shaders, and in general I make things look pretty and run fast. These "things" that I play with, however, have always been made by other people on the internet or other artists on the team I'm working with. This really hasn't bothered me, as I've always been concentrating on projects for other people, classwork, etc.
Recently though, I've wanted to take some of my own side-projects and turn them into polished demos in my own vision. This requires specific models and environments, specially rigged skeletons, and generally a lot of work that I didn't want to put on other people.
Fortunately for me (unfortunately?
I've been laid up during the last week because of shoulder surgery, so I decided to take it easy and teach myself a modeling program. Seeing as our school has a site lisence for Maya, I have only one more year left at Uni, and I was laid up with nothing better to do I decided to give it a try...And I <B>love</B> it! It's reeeally easy to make models that actually look like something! Keep in mind that up until this point, I've been the victim of terrible "programmer art". True, I've made some of the most beautiful quads/triangles you'll ever see in your entire life, anything more complicated than a cube was always a product of someone else's work.
Lookie lookie!
I made that, and in about 4 hours too! Mind you, I've never touched Maya before and realize that it probably looks like crap to most of the people in this forum, but I'm just baffled that I could make something that looks like this:
I began to follow [url="https://www.thehobbitguy.com/tutorials/polymodeling/"]this tutorial[/url, but realized that he had some skills that I just didn't have or know. What did I end up doing? Dive right in and try to make it! I don't mind if it looks like crap, as it's my first model ever!
I admit that there are a TON of problems with this model:
- The nasty seam down the middle of the head didn't seem to get smoothed like the rest of the mesh (I figure this is one of those learn-as-you-go things)
- I started in 2D from an image plane, then moved to 3D
- His upper lip looks like a beak! O.o
- I "eyeballed" a little bit
- There are non-square (weird for a DirectX guy
and non triangle polygons- It's a mishmash of lines
- Okay, I "eyeballed" nearly the entire thing
... and a million more I'm sure that you guys can spot. But again, this is my first model... and certainly not my last!
I'm open to criticism and critiques! Be brutal... the more things you point out that I did incorrectly, the more I'll learn. If you don't want to, then just take this as my way of saying "Hi Artists"!
Edit: Sorry, I'm typing this with one hand, so I probably made a thousand spelling mistakes
Edit2: So sorry! Thats what I get for trying to host a site on a Dynamic DNS :/
