Character and Narrative: Making My Spider Character

Knowing what I learnt from my tutors tutorials about creating a character, I decided to start having a go a modelling my character for the animation about the spider. But before I could start modelling in maya I had to do something in photoshop so that it would make modelling my character in maya much easier.

What I had to do was get my character designs, front and side view, and scale them together so that they are the same size so when importing them into maya I can use them for reference. I scaled the character designs by using the ruler tool in photoshop and lining them up to the same size. This was easy to do but by doing this will help me in maya to keep my model a consistent size and look in proportion.  

I wanted to make that spider in the same style as the environment, which is blocky. To do this I started off creating a square, then adding some edge loops and then extruding a face on one side and made that into the head. To create the legs I extruded them one by one and reshaped them so that the legs get chubbier at the end, but also I gave the spider little booties for feet to exaggerate the comedy factor of the animation. Most of the modelling was done by extruding faces and edges so it was simple enough to do without looking at the tutorials again. I feel like I've done a good job of modelling my character and I like the way it's come together, however rigging it and actually animating the spider will be a bit challenging but I'm looking forward to the final outcome at the end.

I'm also half way through giving my model a new UV texture map so that when it comes to texturing the spider it will be easy enough to figure out what part is what when we take the texture map into photoshop. My next thing to do to the model is finish off UV mapping the spider and then adding a skeleton to the mesh. This shouldn't take me too long to do but it will be hard because I will have to give the spider spline IK handles so that its legs spring.