Easter (not so) break - Modeling Cho continued

Having briefly gone through the process of building Cho's head, I’m now going to show how I went about making her body. First of all i created a very basic body shape, modeling alongside the image planes to get the right proportians for Cho. this took a while because i felt it was important that i took my time so i had a strong foundation to build from. I didnt take many screen shots through out modeling cho regretably, but i think you can get a good idea from what i do have to show and say about how the development of cho progressed.


LEGS

I began by sculpting her legs, modelling the legs was pretty straight forward, I took the existing proxy mesh and modelled around that, adding edges where appropriate to sculpt a more curvy leg for the beast (aka Cho). I roughly modelled her waist which we don’t see, but it is there so the jacket has something to rest on when the Ncloth is applied later.



JACKET

I modelled the jacket by extracting the geometry I created as a basic body shape for Cho, I then extruded the edges to develop the shape of the Jacket. To form the pockets I extruded a selection of faces and shaped them appropriately. I wanted them to look as though they had stuff in them like sweets or something because Cho's a heffer. I sliced in more edges around the bottom half of her jacket so I could create a more crumpled look of the geometry, as though she had been sitting on it or something, rather than it look smooth and unworn. The upper half took a while to shape, like the collar around her neck because I wanted to get it looking soft and not so rigid. The zip part of her jacket took a while also where I had to shape the geometry as though the material was resting on top of the other. I did experiment with buttons, such as toggles, but I went for a more basic shape in the end as the characters needed to be done ASAP for Dan and to keep on track with the time schedule, and the toggles would require further sculpting in the jacket.


BELT

I took the geometry I left baring in mind the belt when shaping the jacket, and extracted it from the mesh. I again extruded the edges to form its shape. However. Once I did that the edges had been double extruded, I checked the extrusion settings and it was set to single division as I thought, so I’m not entirely sure what happened there. To fix the problem I selected a face and used the grow selection tool 'shift + >' until the doubled layer was fully selected and then deleted it leaving the single layer of faces.



TOP/SLEVES

To create the top I approached it the same as I did with the rest of her, by extracting the appropriate faces and sculpting the geometry by cutting in and extruding edges.



So, below is Cho with everything modelled but her hair, which is still prooving to be a problem at the moment for all the characters in the group. Looking at this image I think I will re skale her ears down a bit :) (Occlusion passes have been added at a later date, where she had since had hair and ears have been re sized.)

Easter (not so) break - Modeling Cho

CHO HEAD

Having built more confidence with the maya interface and refreshed the modelling basics in my brain, I went on to build the head. So I started over, following the video tutorial from youtube.

This time round the basic geometry went more smoothly, not looking like road kill. Below is the progress of Cho’s head.

The hair is a problem at the moment, which is why our characters are all bald, as a group we have yet to find a way to make it look a good as possible, but we will find a way!

EAR

I went on to model an ear and a set of teeth that we could all use as a generic model for each of the characters. For the ear I wanted to keep it fairly basic, but I didn’t want to have an ear that looked like a piece of rubber stuck on the side of their heads, so I modelled in a small amount of definition.

Teeth

As for the teeth Jake had previously experimented with tooth shape but couldn’t find something that we were all happy with so I had a go at it keeping it “chunky”, which I think I managed to pull off and it’s something we are happy with as a group.

Blockouts

TREES

Having scribbled out a shoddy picture in photoshop with Dan, looking at how we should frame the characters in the opening scene, I blocked out the basic tree shape that arced over the three characters as they run into shot. We took the tree block out and within the animation menu in maya gave the model a nonlinear deformer, which allowed me to animate the mesh to curve up, to quickly create a second shape for the tree.

GRAVES

Below I made some graves that we could use to block out some of the environment in the graveyard scene. They are basic, but we intend to add more elaborate graves with in the scene for a more elaborate environment.

FIRE EXIT

I went on to block out the 1^st corridor room in the ride, where the floor gives way and splits the girls up. The room is very basic and is meant to be quite bland, like a typical lame ghost train, so it’s just rectangular with a dugout floor for the cart and a fire exit off to the side. The fire exit is hardly seen, but its there as an extra light source and to add to the element of lamenss, so the blockout is more or less close to the final version.

STALLS

I blocked out the stalls for the outside scene, using Anna’s original art work as reference. It’s very basic but dose the job of allowing us to position them within shots, so we can frame the characters.

COFFIN

I blocked out a coffin that will be in the graveyard scene.

Wellys! I like that word, welly welly welly!

I went on to model a generic boot, which all the characters would have. I think the basic design works well and looks nice! The colours will vary per character to fit with their colour schemes. I had to make sure the mesh for the boot would match up to the folds in the proxy model of the boot, so it would skin properly when it is referenced in later.

Mausoleum

I wanted to model the mausoleum from the graveyard scene first, as it was a defining piece from the scene, and once I had that done I would be able to use that as a reference to scale the other environmental objects. I feel like the model is in keeping with the “chunky” style, and I will be adding the doors to it soon.

Cho's head 1st attempt

Having finished the hand I went on to attempt to model the head of the Cho character. I followed a tutorial similar to that of the hand tutorial, which roughly guides you to create all the necessary basic geometry. It was tough, as getting the basic geometry done well is vital to having a good finished model, and I felt that it wasn’t coming together. Having been out of practice with maya for a while pre-hand, I felt I would benefit by modelling some environmental objects prior to Cho’s head, as a head can be quite a complex piece of geometry.

Hand

Having spent some time away from maya over the holliday I wanted to jump back into it with something that would be a challange. Also, Dan needed the hand modelled asap so he could take the model and break it up for the proxy models for the three characters. I modelled a hand that all three of us could use for each character. This was to save time, rather then me, Anna and Jake model a hand each. Our style is “chunky” so I followed a really helpful tutorial which resulted with this hand.