character modeling and rigging

This picture is of my model when I had finished it in nerbs, at this point the model was not merged together and everything was slightly out of proportion. The arms and legs were too large, which was not what I was looking for in my character. Everything in this scene was made from spheres shaped by the lattice tool, the lattice tool allowed me to give my model shape and also keeping the geometry clean.

Everything on the left was duplicated and then mirrored on to the right cutting my work by half and making everything to the correct size and position allowing me to work easier. When I was happy with my model I added the eyes, this was simply creating a two nerbs spheres and creating a Start Sweep Angle, allowing me to create an eyelid if my character was to blink. Placing another Sphere inside the original and adding a texture called Ramp gave the impression of the eyeball and the pupil.




The picture bellow shows the poligon version of my model, at this stage I has completed my model in nerbs and converted it to polygons (expect the eyes as I needed them to stay as nerbs for future control). Once I had done all of this I had to start the long process of merging my character. I deleted half my geometry when it came to merging my character as I could always simply merge on side, in this case the right side and then mirror it across. This took me a while as I had to clean up my character and find the right vertices I found that when you convert from nurbs to polys a number of things happen to the polygon geometry, I had more than usual amounts of edges, faces and vertices making the cleaning up process very long and hard. Lucky for me my at this point my model was still very basic.





This is my model once I had finished cleaning it up and merging my mirrored side to the original. At this point I hadn’t added teeth of a tongue. I had to re model the hands and feet as the first nurb limbs where too complicated to work with. It turned out easier and less time consuming to just remodel the hands and feet.
My model is smoothed out here but not by adding more detail and vertices, I simply just used the tool Average Vertices to give that effect.

After I was happy with the way my model looks I started on the movement of his face, I duplicated it 15 times and created Blend shapes, one for each individual movement on the face i.e. left eyebrow raise, nose up, smile etc.