CDC, known as Character Design and Creation, is the first introductory class to character modeling in Maya. I’ve made characters before, but what was great this time around was that I was actually able to understand what I was doing. Granted, the tutorials I learned from were very sparse in their expertise, and I didn’t know a lot about edge flow in the human body, I still brought my basic knowledge of character modeling into the assignment.
So, for the whole month we had to take reference photos from 3DSK to create our models from, which I chose who was known as “Female 3”. There were choices between different models, male and female, but I decided to make a female because I felt that the nature of creating a male seems blocky and not as ‘fluid’ as female anatomy, which is a little trickier to figure out.
So, starting out I used the traditional views: front and side. I blocked out the character using cylinders with the caps off, and 8 subdivisions around, making an octagon shape, instead of the default 20 SubDivisions. The placement of these cylinders around the image place were used for features like the leg, arm, body, neck, hand and fingers.
I’ll save my process for another blog, so for sake of time I went along and added edge loops and reconstructed the surfaces so the edge flow replicated how muscle flow works. After the model was completed, I laid out the UV’s in Roadkill, a handy free UV unwrapper, and textured in Photoshop, mainly using photo reference and manipulation.
After the texture was complete, I found I had a little more time, so I decided to model clothes and hair for the model. In the end, I felt the nude model was better than with having clothes, but for the class clothes were extra credit, so I quickly made them up so I’d have them there. Hair was also an issue. While this was a modeling class and we had to model and shape our hair with polygons, I was trying to experiment with the Maya Hair toolset, but it wasn’t as successful as I thought. Still, I needed to have it done, and I felt the texture was pretty well for the nude model, and that it would give me a better grade, rather than being judged on the clothes or hair.
In the end, I was satisfied with the result, and submitted it 2 weeks before the final due date was called. This was so because this project was due before Winter Break, and our teacher gave us two more weeks to work on it. I wanted to stick to the original deadline, however, because in the real world, how often does a client change their mind on a deadline? On top of that, how often do they extend it, rather than making it shorter because in the end, time is money?
So, this project took approximately 32 hours and a little extra here and there.
-endy