The task of what we were going to make was fairly simple, it was just going to be an abstract form of a man made from a cube. From there, we'd go on to make slight changes and use new tools.
We started, as mentioned with a cube. We grabbed the top face and extruded upwards twice, so that we ended up with a cuboid, essentially made from three cubes. We kept extruding, re-scaling and cutting faces until we got a very basic man.
From there, we went on to make him a little less basic. Added features to more resemble actual human anatomy made the model seem less blocky, and more like a stylised character. For my guy, I gave him little stumpy feet, more prominent pectorals and a shaped head.
Once we had our blocky man, our next step was smoothing him. By smoothing the character, Maya made the edges more rounded, and made him higher poly (made up of more polygons). In my case, this resulted in a character who looks somewhat decent from the feet up to the neck, and then the head is just an egg. It looks SO much like an egg after the smoothing process.
Once we had our smoothed out model, we started to use tools I've personally not encounted before; the sculpting tools. The toolset is preinstalled into Maya, and allows the user to manipulate surfaces however they want. Things can be pinched, made jagged, cut into, etc., and the changes will stay there.
We messed about with these tools for a bit, just to get to grips with them. In the end, my smoothed out egg man looked like what I've dubbed as "Human Jar Jar Binks", due to it's large billed mouth and eye stalks.
Our final experimentation with sculpting was in a program called Mudbox, another Autodesk package. It's specifically made for sculpting and modelling, with no real functionality outside of that. I found the program less user friendly, and ultimately a lot more tricky to use. I wanted to try and recreate elements of the character Thanos' design, but parts of the model kept getting dragged out and warping where I didn't want them to.
(My Thanos (left) facing Sam's Sonic (right))
This session was a nice introduction to the entire modelling aspect of this unit! And it's a good thing I think that, because we're going to be doing a LOT of it. I'm not looking forward to more of Mudbox though, I wasn't a fan of that. However, my Skollcrabb design doesn't seem like it would involve much sculpting, since it's shell is meant to be smooth without any kind of real divots or cracks. But I'm excited to get started on making Skollcrabb a digital model!
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