Blockman Begins

 

    The title is a pun...haha. This is where I start the process for my character model. Though the sculpting work will be done in Zbrush I will begin by building the basic form in Maya first, saving as an .obj and then importing. First off I was advised to look at the proportions of the character. People are generally considered about as tall as 7 lengths of their own head. Though in games and other media, to suggest a powerful or dominant character, particularly in the protagonist if this is appropriate, this scale can be increased. In this case I will be working with a model that is roughly eight heads tall. To prepare for this I have painted over an image of the default mudbox  male mesh to demonstrate.



      There are many ways to begin building a character's base mesh and I have experience in none of them. So for no other reason than because the book I has explains this method, I have opted for box modelling. I began with a cube and extruded segments down until the hips where I split it in two to make the legs.

 

All the way through the process I am making constant adjustments to the edges in order to create human proprtions. You can see that I have the mudbox human mesh in the background for just as a bit of a guide in this process.

 I actually learnt how to enable symmetry in Maya within this process which is not something I have have used before. This obviously makes things much easier except in a few places where symmetry with extrusions did not work

 I kept switching views to make sure I was not neglecting any of the form. I learnt within this process that pressing the "3" button activates the smoothing preview (pictured below) which transforms my boxy model to this more human shape. I also learnt that once my model was ready I could make this smoothing permanent via the "modify" toolbar, which prepared my mesh ready to be saved and imported in to Zbrush.

     Oh yeah, I had to activate one of the plugins in maya's preferences menu in order to save as an .obj because it wasnt on automatically- what a hullabaloo.