Hair

My attempt at hair for the kid. Not to sure if its working, definitely needs more work on it. I am going for a fairly stylised hair so its quite large thick strands which gives me more control and means I can pose it more when putting together the final composition.

Finished the base mesh

I would say the base mesh is finished so far. It needs some details but before that I have to fix a few mesh problems which confuse the hell out of me.

The screenshot below shows one problem that I don't know how to fix. It doesn't seem to be the normals, and I am fairly sure there aren't duplicated faces and/unwelded edges or vertices so I am really stuck for now until I can fix it. It might be harmless but it looks worrying especially as I don't know Max that well.

Head and hand modelling for Panhead

I have been modelling more on the panhead character. After the base mesh of the body I moved onto the hand. Spent quite a while on this and it still needs a fair few tweaks and changes. The head was the most difficult thing I have done recently. Just the topology of it felt like a headache and then with my little experience of max that made it harder to fix problems. The hands were box modelled while the face was polygon modelling from planes using cylinders for the template of the eyes.

Current body

Head turbo-smoothed and head unsmoothed

Hand turbo-smoothed and hand unsmoothed

Turnaround and modelling

I created my turnaround for the pan head character, with a version with and without the jacket so it's easier to model certain areas of him. The t-shirt, trousers and boots will be part of his geometry where as the jacket will be a separate piece.

Start of the modelling in 3ds max

Pan-head character concept

I sketched up and coloured the concept for the little pan-head guy. I am not the best for concept work but I tried my best knowing, how much more I do of it now will help me enormously in the later stages.

I am fairly happy with him, however I think I accidentally made him look a bit older than I imagined, but it still works. The next stage would be to create a good turn around of him. Maybe draw him first in his jeans and t shirt and then jacket over the top.

Mood-boards for Reference and Ideas

So I have an idea for a new project. I say new idea but I actually sketched this vague thumbnail years ago and rediscovered it and seemed perfect as I was looking for a character piece to work on.

The character is a young kid in his garden 'playing soldier'. He is wearing a military jacket of his dad's/grandad's that is too big for him. He is also wearing a pan on his head. Other details include baggy trousers or cargo pants, a loose belt, walkie talkie and remote control tank or Humvee.

I have little experience with concepts and sketching characters let alone 3d modelling them. So I attained lots of reference images to use and take inspiration from. I compiled these in a mood-board and made notes on features I liked and would maybe put towards my character and composition of the final image.

 Next I created another mood board of textures, model ideas, details etc.

And to make this project even more challenging for me, I am going to attempt to create it all in 3dsmax instead of my normal package Maya. Models, shaders, everything!

I still plan to use photoshop for lots of texture work and mudbox for maybe some light sculpting, but I don't think I will use it heavily due to the simplistic style of the character and his props.

Starting speed modelling

During my downtime between my previous project and my next project I have decided to see what I can really do under pressure, so have started speed modelling. Basically seeing how much you can get done in a set time or as little time as possible. The chainsaw below was aimed for 1 hour. But I went over by about 10 minutes because there was some final things I needed to do.

I need to think of ideas for future speed modellings and also time frames for them. Some I could do for 3 hours and some I could see how far I get in an half hour.

Tunisian Courtyard Finished

I finished my courtyard scene. There are things I would still change on it and have still to improve on in my own skills. I plan to move onto a new project soon when I've finalised my ideas.