Oliphant

# 1 23-03-2009 , 11:36 AM

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Hey guys,
Thought I'd go through modelling the Oliphant from lord of the rings. Its still wip so I'd appreciate any input on it and how I could improve it. Working on laying out the UVs atm which is a pain!

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Last edited by Taj; 24-03-2009 at 12:34 AM.

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# 2 23-03-2009 , 01:59 PM

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Great stuff! Looks very good. Are you going to add detail in ZB or use texture / bump maps? user added image

Not a critisism on you or the tut by Kurt, but whoever did the design for the Oliphant got the ears wrong! An elephant uses it's ears as radiators to keep it massive body cool. The small ears on the Oliphant will cause some serious overheating in the poor beast.

-Jacques

Poly-pushing on a '96 SGI O2

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# 3 23-03-2009 , 05:17 PM

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Originally posted by halfloaf
Great stuff! Looks very good. Are you going to add detail in ZB or use texture / bump maps?

Not a critisism on you or the tut by Kurt, but whoever did the design for the Oliphant got the ears wrong! An elephant uses it's ears as radiators to keep it massive body cool. The small ears on the Oliphant will cause some serious overheating in the poor beast.

-Jacques

Originally Posted by

they didnt, the oliphants ears are like that and besides, the asian elephants ears can be quite small (although some still have massive ears)
A heck of a lot better than my attempt user added image

https://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/as28g11/

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# 4 23-03-2009 , 07:00 PM

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It would seem the Oliphant is based on an Asian elephant then, not African. Although they have smaller ears, they are not as small as the Oliphant. Poor beast!

Good spot elepahntinc! user added image

Poly-pushing on a '96 SGI O2

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# 5 23-03-2009 , 07:26 PM

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yea the small ears were getting to me also, but when I saw stills from the movie they had even smaller ears than this! Maybe the small ears keep em irritated and more vicious ^^

Anyway, about the texture, not sure whether to do it in Zbrush or Maya, I don't have any experience in texturing. It does seem a lot more time saving and easer to do it under Zbrush, but could I still import the model back to maya and rig/animate it?

At the moment I'm working on laying out UVs and drawing a bump map in photoshop or by hand. Maybe you folks can help with this? It's kinda tricky. Thanks for the comments...

Last edited by Taj; 23-03-2009 at 07:42 PM.

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# 6 23-03-2009 , 07:43 PM

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any chance of a wire frame? if there are tris then you will need to sort those out before uv'ing or zbrush.

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# 7 23-03-2009 , 07:56 PM

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Yea, I'll get it up soon (I'm not on my PC atm) But as I remember it, there were areas with a small patches of tris. How would you go about fixing these? Creating quads on the base mesh by spliting ploygons/moving veticies?

I also started mapping out the UVs on the head (which had tris) and applied checker map to it and moved the UVs around till I got decent and even checker map on the head.. Again, I'll get a snapshot up asap.

Thanks again..

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# 8 23-03-2009 , 08:34 PM

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Originally posted by Taj
Yea, I'll get it up soon (I'm not on my PC atm) But as I remember it, there were areas with a small patches of tris. How would you go about fixing these? Creating quads on the base mesh by spliting ploygons/moving veticies?

Originally Posted by

rerouting edge flows ftw
hardest part of modelling imo unless you class unwrapping UVs as part of modelling

looking quite nice so far

that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

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# 9 24-03-2009 , 12:28 AM

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Hey,

The pic to the left is the base mesh with wireframe on shaded. As you can see there are a few tris there, but with the UVs layed out and the checked texture applied to the head, it does seem to be pretty clean. But then again, I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking for. The pic to the right is the smoothed mesh (2 levels), and again, the texture seems to remain fairly clean and even.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated...

thanks

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# 10 24-03-2009 , 12:33 AM

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For instance how would I go about to remove the tri circled in yellow other than cutting with the split polygon tool all around and therefore increase the number of polygons of the base mesh?

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