Character and Narrative: Creating Our Demo Character in Maya Part 2

In this session of maya I created a foot, head and hand for my demo character, and found that it got a bit harder to do that because of the amount of times you have to keep switching from the front view the the perspective view just so that you haven't made any mistakes. I also had to keep making the character go into smooth mode to see what it would look like and to see if it looked semi realistic because I don't won't the character dropping into the uncanny valley.

Starting with the foot was simple enough to follow because it's just extruding it out from the leg and then just resizing the extrusion to make the shape of the foot. the hardest part was just trying not to select vertices and edges I didn't want because then it will start deforming and the foot will turn into an abstract foot. I feel like I've done a decent job with the foot but it didn't look exactly like the one in my tutors tutorial but hay no one can get it exactly the same because then it wound be unique.

The head was the second body part I created after the foot, which was harder to make but a simpler shape to model if that understandable? the hardest part was getting the top of the head in the right position, and also the mouth because I had to bevel an edge and then move the edge in on its self and insert an edge loop on the lips so they wouldn't curve as mush. This was hard to do because it was my first head that I've modelled with a mouth, however it was interesting to see how a simple mouth was created and now I feel that I could do it again with out help hopefully.

Next was the hand, which took me three hours to do (but only because I was in the living room with a load of people distracting me). I feel like this should of been simpler however staring at a computer screen for three hours can slow me down and give me headaches. Other than my excuses I had an interesting time seeing how I can make short cuts to create multiple figures i.e. using the duplication tool, plus it's just extruding edges and resizing them to create the hand shape.

Overall I'm quite pleased with my model and I feel like I've learn quite a lot about building a character and how if you think simple about designs, it's easier to model in maya. Also creating a character is simply just about extrusions and inserting new edge loop tools and then just resizing to fit the characters design.

After modelling most of my character we then had to mirror half of the model so that we can get a full one. We did this by duplicating the half model and if you've followed all the guides correctly your model should look fine and normal. I also modelled eyes on my character, which where really easy to do because it's just two cylinders, one of them is hole and the other one is split in half to make the eye lids. I found doing all this was simple enough but if you did have something wrong on one side of the model it won't mirror correctly.