MHill's Blog: Avatar

First attempt at creating a 3D avatar.

When I first started to build a 3D character I had a huge learning curve in topology and how to create a detailed character with very little topology and how to add higher detail through extra edge loops in for example the face and not have those loops running through the rest of the body.

In this first avatar creation I used myself a reference so that I could poly model the face and box model the body.

The assignment called for a 2k tri limit so I had to reduce many of the loops in order to meet this requirement.

In an attempt to get detail back I put the model into Mudbox and began to scultp for a normal map.

This is as far a I made it with this particular assignment, I had many topology issues that I spent a long time attempting to fix, I used most of my time using the methods I had learned in the minotaur project to reroute loops and to reduce my tri count.

My second attempt at creating an avatar went much smoother, while it was for a different project I beleive it is worth posting here to show the comparision of what I learned since working on my first avatar.

This time around instead of using the box modelling and poly modelling methods I used the basic human body mesh from Mudbox.

This character is a tubby bandit.

i used several reference images for this sculpt, many of them of different body types to achieve the design I wanted.

My original plan was to sculpt all details onto a single mesh, while this could work I was advised it might be better to create seperate objects for the clothing so that I could achieve more detail in sculpting.

After several alterations to the form and changing the clothes into seperate objects I was starting to acheive a much higher detailed and polished model.

I decided to keep the hair as part of the body mesh as the character has short hair none of it would need animating therefore having it as a normal map was possible.

While I did not get as far as rigging and animating these characters I have learned a huge amount about toplogy, form, sculpting methods, modelling methods, how to use different programs such as Max, Maya and mudbox all in unision, I would often send the model from Maya to Max in order to use the topology checker tools.

All of these tools have helped me to produce a very high quality sculpt which I am currently working on now for games Mechanics.