You Can’t Run Without Legs:
Legs have to be the easiest thing to model in character modelling. We will do this in two parts; the upper part of the leg and then the lower part and foot. Your proportion line will help a hell of a lot with the legs. To make your legs just shift copy the bottom row of edges, and make the hips. Then shift copy to the knee, refine the shape of the leg and add any extra bit to the leg (like the extra bit for my character.)
Now for the bottom part of the leg; do the same as the top of the leg but to help out with the calf muscle we will use a GeoSphere with a Boolean.
That is it for the legs; see I told you they were easy. Once again we will optimize and fix the flow after we have the rest of the model done (which isn’t to long now.)
Come On! We Have to Give Him Something to Carry:
The best way to add objects (not including clothing of any kind) to a character is to make them first and then line them up with the mesh, and that is what we are going to do.
To make the back pack I will shape some cylinder and attach them together and line them up, easy.
Now to add the extra elements to the character, this will in include the cords and straps for the back pack, any extra clothing and those little things that will give the character some more personality.
We will use the loft tool in Max to create the cords. Loft is one of my favorite tools in Max; it is very useful in both high and low poly modeling because you are able to easily change the face count of the object you make with it.
We will use the line tool to start with. We want to make these lines to follow the course of were the cords on the character will run and keep them as separate objects. Before we do this it may help to add the plugs were the cords will run too and from (which will just be cylinders). Now make another spline which will be the cross section of the cords (a triangle works very well for a low poly cord). Select one of the lines then use the loft tool which can be found in the create panel under compound objects. From the roll out select get shape and click on the cross section of your cord. Go to the modify panel with the lofted object selected, in the roll out go the skin parameters and change the path and shape steps. The shape steps should be set to 0 and the path can be set to what ever you thing that you can work with the lower the better (I used 2 for this). Do this too the other lines, then convert them to edit meshes and optimize and move the cross sections to make the cords look more rounded.
Now for the straps for the back pack (I will also use this same technique for the clothing around his belly). Create a plane, size it and line it up with your character were the strap starts or ends is best. We will need to hide the back pack to help us with this. Now convert that plane to and edit mesh and shift copy the strap around, keep the strap about ½ cm from his body. Now refine the mesh but selecting all the edges and shift copying them into the body (just under the skin, this will make there no need to have the back facing and make is easier to texture than having them well into the body’s mesh). Then add the little extra elements of the strap.
This technique can be use for petty much be used for all straps, armor and clothing.
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Brendan George BrendanDoord@hotmail.com
Mid-Poly Modelling
09/2002