It's been... Damn I've lost track of time.

Sorry for the lack of progress update guys, there has been too many things on my plate as of late, including a family emergency and me undertaking a secret side project.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten this project but for the time being it's been put on hold to make way for other matters.

It's Alive...!

... Alright - maybe not, but hey at least now I have a template of a male human body I can work off:

 

Picking up from where I left off last week, I started modeling the hip and the legs. Unlike my modeling odyssey when I was working on the arm, the hip and legs proved to be less troublesome than the arms thanks to the lessons learnt from the time spent modeling the arms.

After the hip and legs came the hands and feet. Figuring that the feet need less detail, I spent most of the time modeling the hand.

 

I was a bit confused when modeling the hand since... wait a minute, I've just noticed a 5-sided polygon on one of the above pictures. Hold on, be right back...

There, fixed. Anyhow, modeling the hand took quite a bit of time since, let's face it, it is quite complex (and God help me when I rig the resulting character...). With a bit of help from modeling and anatomy references, I finally managed to complete the hand. The only problem I face now is the fact that the hand alone has around 200+ polys - much more than I bargained for.

Overall, the whole body contains 1496 polygons - somewhat below my expectations, but at least it should give me some room should the time comes when I have to add polygons.

Anyway, that's it for this week - peace.

- D.T.

P.S. - Shoot, them legs look a little bit too long...

The Arm is Connected to the...

Week 5

Before I begin to unload typing diarrhea, a happy belated new year to all those who happen to be reading this.

Okay, now that's out of the way this week has been quite productive as far as modeling a human body goes. So far I managed to produce a torso with the head and arms attached. Pictures of the model are shown below:

 

 

 

... Okay, it's not perfect. Although I tried to keep all polygons as quads, in the end I have to cut some corners and use a mixture of tris and quads or else the poly-count would end up being 1000+ instead of the current 590 poly-count that the torso has. A bit too high for a low-poly model but I'll keep on working on optimizing the mesh once I have the hips, legs, hands and feet sorted out.

So... onto the foil of my plans. Modeling the torso and attaching the head to it is all fine and dandy but when it came to modeling the arm... Heh, let's just say that it was a s*** fight when it comes to modeling accurate human anatomy.

This:

And this:

 

... were the reason why there was a s*** fight in the first place. My first attempt at the forearm ended up being scrapped due to my ignorance of human anatomy; so as a result I have to rip off the arm and replace it with a clone of the original arm model and start over again. However, partly due to the way I modeled the original arm, it proved difficult to properly add edge loops for the muscle definitions of the forearm, resulting in dodgy triangles that didn't help with my conquest of minimal polygons. While the elbow was less troublesome, the crook/joint of the arm ended up being simply edge-looped.

For the most scrutinizing, here's a closer look at the abdomen of the torso:

As some of you may have noticed I took some anatomical liberties when modeling the abdominal muscle groups - not to mention that since I was looking for a low poly count the model ended up with very peculiar looking edge-looping as I went in and merged a couple of vertices. I reckon that out of all the things I've done on this model, the only proper edge-loops I've done so far were the ones on the armpits...

... And just to give you guys an idea of what I've been through, here's a bonus picture:

Until next time~!

-D.T.

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?