Keeping up with my progress reports on my modeling project!
So I continued to model on the base mesh, until I have something that looks like this:
Notice it isn’t entirely done yet, as I still have the boots to work on. They aren’t in my original sketches so I think I will just get creative with them.
A lot of people ask me all the time: when a video game character has armor, do I model the armor on top of the already-modeled character body, so there is a body model underneath? Generally: no. It’s way more efficient to just treat the armor and clothes as if they ARE the character, so there is no “naked character” underneath the model of the character. The general idea is not to model any polys you aren’t going to see. If a character has to wear a different outfit later, swap out the model entirely, or swap out parts of the model, which is how it works in games where you change clothing. Sorry to disappoint people who thought that maybe underneath her uniform Chun-Li was totally naked, but if you delete her uniform you just get a woman with no torso.
Proof positive.
So anyway, there’s a problem with the base mesh I made in that, well, it’s missing that whole “Dragonborn” thing I was trying for.
From my earlier sketches I decided that the velociraptor was a dinosaur that had the sort of face shape I was looking for – something with a slightly thinner jaw. So I found some pictures of raptor skulls from around the net, and set them up as view planes in 3D Studio Max to use as a model sheet. Here is a useful mockup someone made. I also stumbled across the gallery of Helen Zhu in my search, an artist who has done some amazing monster critters for D&D on-line.
Not that this rough draft measures up to that work at all but here is my very basic dragon head. It’s gonna need some major tweaks to make it fit right on the body, but for less than an hour’s work it makes a suitable head to port over.
And here is the result of that. I want to do a little more with the fins on the back of her head, so I’m working on that bit now. Notice I’m keeping the head and body parts seperated in to individual materials. That’s because I plan to use one texture file for the body and a different one for the various parts of the head. Also the proportions do not yet make me happy. More next time, with a hopefully-finished mesh.
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