Teapots Modelling:
This was a class activity to practice our modelling using the extrude stool mostly, to shape on-the-go some tea pots. (By the way I hated this activity and found the modelling overall very clunky. If I was to approach this my way I would have a set idea of what shape I wanted before I start. I would use techniques such as extrude along a motion path seeing as teapot are manufactured and I find extruding creates far too organic and irregular look)
Development:
We started with a cube and snapped it to the grid for mirroring later. From there we created the basic shape of the teapot- snout and handle. I also made a lid and a hole at the top of pot so the lid could fit.
Proxy:
The proxy was an interesting tool that I was introduced to. This allowed me to see what the geometry would look like when smoothed. This means that if I were too add illegal shape I could see if they would be smoothed out into quads easily or not. I found this a very useful tool and I will defiantly use it for more complex organic shapes.
Teapot 1: Pot Belly
Character Face Expressions:
This little fellow was a grumpy creature so I made the eyes low down and very heavy eyebrows.
This was a development form the first face expressions- I changed the position of the snout to make it look like it was blowing air out of the snout like an elephant like a trunk.
Teapot 1: Elongated Pot
This one was far more elongated but was modelled form the same basic shape as the precious one.
Character Face Expressions:
This tea pot is far more snouty with elongated features, heavy eyelids and a very sleepy expressions.
Character Sheets and Doodles for Characters
Sketch Book Doodles:
I started the design process afresh taking a different aproch of doing small doodles and light sketches exploring a varity of shapes, pulling and streching animals natural forms.
These sketches (above) were inspired/ based on my mother. I was circling around the idea of characterising my parents and goblin/ gremlin/mouse/ pixie creatures living togerter in an under ground burrow type setting.
Trip to London Zoo:
To further my research I went to London zoo to seek inspiration form the animals there. I found it very useful as seeing the animals in the flesh meant I could get a better sense of their character. For example bellow is a photo of a parrot who looked/ felt like a solum, hooked figure of authority so I developed the ideas further in a series of biro sketches.
This particular fish remind me of a previous character design of a stella fish who eats stars, planets and moons resulting in a big glowing stomach. The painting bellow I completed a couple of years ago but I though I'd re explore the character further with some more biro sketches.
This snap shot is form Howie's Moving Castle which I happened to be watching when I was sketching my other characters. I found the mouth of great intrest and scketched out an idea however the form is very alike the lion design and I decided not to take this character furhter for this project.
In my previous doodle deers featured prominently in a variety of shapes and forms and I ended up drawing this more detailed depiction of a mythical long necked deer. Out of all the drawings I completed this character seemed to stand out the most and dominate the page. If I do take this idea forward the next stage of development would be to understand the character further, where it originates form, ( the patterns suggest a possible connection of a civilisation or culture), how it moves ext.
Modelling of Dinosaur:
For modelling practice I followed a series of tutorials which showed how to make a dinosaur in maya. It touch me a variety of new tools plus introduced me to a way of modelling not show to me before for organic objects which I found very effective.
Tutorial 1
In this first tutorial I learnt about some settings for the world tool. By setting this tool to reflection and selecting the appropriate axis the vertecies along the centre of the geomatary (where the object will be mirrored across form) will not move off that line. This meas the verticies can be manipulated in the other two axis without having to worry about mirroring problems later on.
Another method that this tutorial showed was to work in smooth shader while bloking out the basic shape for the model. This well for orgnaic shapes and also gives an indication of how the object will look like once smooth shaded. Also instead of using the extrude, which sometimes can cuase problems of hidden faces ext, this totorial showed of streching the shape and adding edge loops, adding more geomatry to shape. I found this an easier way of modelling than the extrude as I felt I had more controll over the modeling and shapping process.
Tutorial 2
Tutorial 3
Tutorial 4
These following tutorials showed how to use the extrude tool carefully create eye sockets, mouth and other details on the head. Although having been introduced to this tool before I found this tutorial helped find a controlled way of using the extrude with clear methodology on how to create clean topology.
Tutorial 5
Tutorial 6
In this tutorial I learnt about hiding part of an object from view to reveal only the part of the object you want to mode. By selecting what you want to remain revealed and then clicking an icon next to the shader/ lighting options (close to the panels bar). This was really useful when modelling the tongue and mouth, areas which before would have been hard to reach and shape.
Tutorial 8
This tutorial showed a time saving trick with repeating object in a geometry. The teeth have all the same shape although vary in size. To save uv space and texturing the first tooth was UV mapped before duplicating so all copies didn't need to be UVed.
This final tutorial showed how to UV map the entire object using relax and unfold tools and selection techniques to produce clean UV's. The first step was to use planar UV and then select edges along parts of the geometry which are less likely to be seen as the seems. Although this isn't part of modelling it's good to have an understanding of the text stage in the overall pipeline and get the model ready for further modelling in ZBrush or texturing.
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