Summer Cyborg Project: Initial Modelling

With my modelling references complete, I could finally get started on the 3D part of the project. Using the tutorial to inform my process, I created the body in separate chunks and joined them together. This was a method I found incredibly helpful and streamlined, and it is likely how I will model all my characters from now on, when it is appropriate. I began with the body, extruding and shaping a cylinder to fit my reference, and quickly began work on the leg.

After creating the basic shape for the body, arm and leg, I mirrored the geometry to create a basic block shape which I could begin to refine and tweak to the shape of the references.

After this, I turned my attention to the more complex structures of the body, namely the feet, hands and eventually head. The feet were quite a challenge as I really wanted to nail the form of the foot rather than making a generic shoe shape. By rotating edge loops, I managed to get create an edge flow which mimicked the organic flow of the foot, whilst maintaining the rigidity of the boot shape. The hands were actually more straightforward; whilst in my assessment model I steered away from modelling individual fingers, I figured it was time to tackle that fear if I wanted to make the robotic hands look convincing, and elaborate. So with a few extrusions I had myself some fingers, and all it took was a some inward extrusions to create the bionic look I wanted.

Then it came to the head. Oh boy the head. I've never tackled anything as complex as the human head, but I really wanted to nail the shape and form this time, as my assessment piece makes me a little bit sick every time I look at the shape of the head now. So this time I followed my reference, built the topology outwards from the eyes, and tried to nail the proportions; and honestly, I'm really happy with what I ended up with. I built the entire shape from scratch, with the exception of the ear which I imported in because I'm really not ready to torture myself that much just yet (attaching the separate component to the head mesh was hell enough), and in terms of the reference, it couldn't match up any better. Topology wise, I think it would be suitable for animation, granted I'd need to subdivide it a little, but I'm really happy with the overall edge flow. I did find however, that I needed to subdivide the top of the head into oblivion to get the desired smoothness, but that's a minor issue, I think.

And with that, my base mesh was complete. A few minor tweaks here and there and a few corrections later, and I had my final low poly mesh that I would later use for my final model, sitting at a tidy 8000 tris (mainly because I'd misread the project brief and thought 10,000 was the limit -_-), but oh well, no use in wasting tris where they're not needed.