My first character (Fantasy Female)

# 1 29-11-2007 , 11:53 AM

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Hey, I'm sure you're all probably sick of people posting their 'first character' threads.....especially one from an SM video tutorial! Ah well! user added image

In the past (~3 years ago when I was 17) I used maya for a little bit, but I only ever started making human heads. And they were pretty rubbish, which is why I was never particularly inspired to develop them further. Well now I've got the modelling bug again, and I'm determined to become an expert at maya! Haha, might take me a while! Well here is my first attempt at creating an entire character. I'm following Kurt's excellent "Fantasy Female" tutorial for this at the moment - but I like to watch large sections of video absorbing as much information as I can, then work on my model afterwards. I find this way good as it A) is more interesting than copying tweaks on a vertex-by-vertex basis and B) allows me to actually learn a lot more about what I'm doing. Enough jibbering, here are some pics.....

Quick render of the smoothed sub-Ds:
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Screengrab of the wireframe:
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Close-up of the wireframe for the head:
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Any constructive criticism would be great. Thanks for looking!

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# 2 29-11-2007 , 01:17 PM

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hmmm...

Great start! NIce! One thing you could do is get rid of some of the horizontal lines running through the middle of the chest. They seem a bit crowded in there. Just a suggestion. user added image

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# 3 29-11-2007 , 02:08 PM

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DJ, I think you meant to say the VERTICAL lines! Yes, the vertical lines do bunch up a bit and that might cause problems during rigging/animation. The horizontal lines are fine. In fact, the whole figure looks VERY nice! I particularly like her head. Well-formed and proportioned!

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# 4 29-11-2007 , 02:59 PM

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indeed, those vertical lines will make it hard to edit later and they're unnecessary to create the form. There are a lot of ways to terminate edgeloops to reduce this sort of problem. A lot of people use the clavicles to help spread some of those edges you get coming down the neck. These are techniques you'll pick up from practice. Try to avoid adding edges just for the sake of adding them. If they don't really help the form or the deformation, they're usually not necessary. This can make your mesh cleaner.

the anatomy is pretty good, but if you really want to get serious with character modeling you should pick up some anatomy books and learn all of the major bones and muscle groups and the exact relationships between them.
Looking quite nice though, man. Keep it up user added image

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# 5 29-11-2007 , 04:35 PM

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Yeah, I meant to say vertical. user added image

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# 6 30-11-2007 , 09:32 AM

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Wow thanks for all the positive feedback, can't say that I was really expecting that. I definitely agree with what you're saying about the vertical lines in the middle of the chest. But like I said, I'm following the video tutorial at the moment so I can try and get a general idea of a workflow for creating characters as I'm completely new to it. The point I've reached within the tutorial has a mesh similar to mine, so I assume this problem gets sorted in a later tutorial. If not then I'll fix it later anyway. Besides, I'm sure shes more worried about the fact she has no hands or feet, and also that her head is not attached at the moment! user added image

Thats good advice about getting books on human anatomy, it is definitely something I'm planning on doing when I receive my next student loan payment in January! But this being the end of a term, and with christmas approaching, I'm not able to splurge quite as much as I'd like to at the moment. Maybe santa could bring it for me, who knows! Anyway, I've not updated this model much at the moment so theres nothing to show - I'll probably have some updates on this either tomorrow or Sunday. Thanks again for your feedback!

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# 7 30-11-2007 , 09:55 AM

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Human Anatomy

Maybe this can help you out for the future for your image planes to get the right proportions.

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# 8 30-11-2007 , 09:56 AM

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...

male

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# 9 30-11-2007 , 09:59 AM

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Male & Female Skeleton placement

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# 10 30-11-2007 , 10:12 AM

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Oooh thanks for those, I'm sure they'll be very useful. Perhaps not for this model as I'm using existing references anyway, but they'll definitely come in handy when I begin creating my own references. Should the body always proportionally be equivalent to 8 heads? For some odd reason I thought it was 6.5....shows how much I know! I just checked and this model I'm working on is the height of 6.5 heads (including some imaginary feet) and it seems fairly proportional to me. Hmm, maybe I need to scale the head down a little. Now would probably be a good time to do so actually, before I attach it to the rest of the body.

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# 11 30-11-2007 , 10:54 AM

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It's seems ok from what I can see. Post up the full figure so we can see. Remember that all bodies are different, these images are just to guide you since they're the "ideal" body proportions. You don't want to make it too perfect. Also keep in mind that the female body, for the majority, tends to be shorter in stature than the male body.

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# 12 30-11-2007 , 04:38 PM

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Shape your edge flow. With the right edge flow a model will want to look human. A good way to put it is if you made a balloon out of your model with edges being more elastic then faces and you blew into it would it grow into a human or quickly turn back into a tube. Models with the geometry in a grid like the one you have are hard to work with because the don't want to look the way the do. They want to be primitives. They are primitives, just shaped into human form.

In the early stages of a model you don't want it to look right. First it needs to work right, then you can shape it into a thousand different proportions that all look right. All because the foundation is there. It comes down to do you want to move 50 verts to correct your anatomy, which you will need to, or move five.

***Edit***
Just noticed that you hip bone is not defined. I thinks it make her look less shapely and more round.

Last edited by wokendreams; 30-11-2007 at 04:50 PM.

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My first character (Fantasy Female)

hmmm...

Human Anatomy

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