Speeding Up

Time is Ticking
Through out this modelling process I began to feel disheartened, because as much as I was enjoying building these characters I forgot how long it can take. I have never been hugely fast at working in Maya, except for when it comes to the animation process itself. However after moving on further with building these characters, I was at the point of modelling the more intricate parts of their geometry.

The characters I had modelled previously, all had either flippers for hands, or only three fingers all together. So when it came to modelling the hands, I was prepared for this to be tricky. However this actually went surprisingly well. I needed to make sure there was enough geometry lines added to the hand itself to allow me to extrude out all five fingers, whilst keeping gaps for the space between them.

The hands on this first character were designed to be small, so this in a way made it slightly harder.

 When it came to modelling the hands on my second character, it was a quicker process. The ends of the fingers are more more squared off on this design, and the hands as a whole are much larger. The incorporation of nails on this design was necessary however I decided not to include them on the character of the young boy, because his hands are very small anyway.  







When it came to modelling the clothing, this was a very different process for each character. For the character of the young boy, his clothing needed to look loose and slightly too big for him. So the best way to go about this was to model the body mesh first.

Each part of the clothing was it's own separate mesh. I had to ensure there were the appropriate edge loops around the edges of the shorts or the sleeves, to prevent them from looking paper thin, and to give them some depth.

Rotating the Arm

Something I took away from last year's Maya module, was the importance of adding a twist in the lower arm, in order to allow it to move realistically. Therefore this was something I added to the geometry of both characters. I took the lower 4 edges of the arm and selected them all. The rotation setting was set to 22.50 which then allowed me to do down each edge and rotate them the appropriate amount.





How Did This Go?

As this stage of the modelling progressed, I began to feel more and more confident with the work I was producing. I did encounter a problem after creating the clothing mesh for the boy. I combined all of the different clothing parts together, thinking this was the right thing to do. However, this actually resulted in the software running very, very slow. Thankfully I had saved my work at each stage, so I was able to go back to the point where these components were un-merged. This resulted in everything running much quicker. Instead I just made sure that all of the components were grouped together, rather than actually being merged. This was a useful mistake to make because It made me realise there is no point in merging things unless it is necessary. Otherwise it could result in the programme running slower and therefore slowing down my work process.