What exactly am I making???

Okay - Some of you may be wondering as to what exactly I'm modeling for my personal project in the first place. Whelp... Here's a few concept drawings that I did about - let's say 5 months ago. The design had been finalized back then so not much has changed for the current time.

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What you're looking at here is the subject of my project at hand. Partly inspired by the Dynasty Warriors and the Otogi video game series, I designed this character to be some sort of a oriental medieval fantasy swordsman. Apart for the corset, thigh armour and armoured leggings that are inspired by fantasy and Japanese/Chinese/Japanese-Designed-Chinese armour, the feature of this design is the armour that is worn on this character's left arm.

The above picture shows how the armour is supposed to be "constructed". This will give me an indication of how I should model the armour once I get up to that point.

 

Showing the helm design... Actually, I might alter this design since I'm not 100% happy with how this guy looks. Again I'll save the redesigning until I get around to modeling the armours.

... And what's a swordsman without even a sword? Presenting 2 sword designs, the coloured one being the selected choice. I might also create one other weapon type for the swordsman, but would depend on my progress of animating him.

PS: Sorry for missing out on updating this blog last week; other plans got in the way. Same thing with this week too - not much modeling is done so showing my concepts should suffice for this week.

Until next time.

- D.T.

Guys, this is Head. Head, this is Guys.

The following is actually a back log of my somewhat slow progress over the last 2 weeks.

WEEK 1

Been going on and off with this half-of-a-head during the past week. The model being featured here is actually the second attempt at modeling a human character of my own design after I have fudged up the first attempt.

Pictured here: the 3 iterations of the 2nd attempt, the first being the one on the far left.

It is sometimes a good idea to keep previous iterations of the models since if I *do* screw up there will be something I can fall back to.

Pictured here: 2 iterations of the first attempt at the far left, the 3 iterations of 2nd attempt at the right.
Not pictured here: the 3 iterations that led to the point that prompted me to start all over again.

And here's a valuable lesson boys and girls: NEVER start modeling without a reference picture of some kind.

WEEK 2

Nothing much this week except that I spent the last couple of hours improving the mesh, finishing up the head and investigating ways to decrease the amount of polygons.

Polygon count on the final version of the head stands at about 230+ polys post-lobotomy (far right), 240+ with the head intact (middle).

Now... looking at this, since I am trying to make this as low poly as possible I might have to get rid of some of the edge loops on the neck; *shrugs* I might do that after I've finished the rest of the model since I still need sufficient details on the model once I get to the Ambient Occlusion stage.

First things first... Introductions.

First blog post, first exposure to the big bad world-wide-web.

To all visitors, welcome to my 3D development blog. From here on I will be posting my progress of what I have been tinkering in Maya during my free time.

This development blog started out as a very recent separate journal on my Facebook profile (for obvious privacy reasons I will not divulge my real name, so "D.T." will do for now). By the suggestion of my workplace comrade, I created this blog so that my successes and failures would gain further exposure (hopefully I won't get too much failures).

So without further ado, shall we get started then?