Sunday, April 26, 2015

Polishing up the Baby Model

  Good news, the basis of the baby model is completed so I was able to jump to polishing up the model more in details. Some of the features I needed to polish on the baby was well more on the head; dealing with the size of the head, the shape of the nose and mouth as well. Then there's the hands that need polishing, back, butt and lastly the positioning of the arms which I'll get to later. When given this project, one of the things the client wanted with the baby model was the model having a big head. Having this information I was able to make the head bigger through selecting all polygons on the head and scaling them up in all axis. Once doing that I shrink the top vertices of the neck a bit to make it look better


  If you were to look at my previous blog, the last image posted showed the baby's back straight. My goal with the back was to create a more realistic back; to curve it more. Essentially that's what I did and this process was long. Creating this curve from the back well... Most 3D modelers would have an idea how I did it. The idea is pretty simple however the process took some time. Basically what I did was grab a few desired vertices and move them towards the stomach and as I descended down to the next edge, I would go in more with the vertices giving that inward look for the back. Towards the middle I begun grabbing vertices and pulling them away from the stomach to create that arc look. Now as odd as it sounds, if you were to look at the butt... It's pretty flat. It should be rounded more. 


  As you can see with the picture above, I was able to succeed that. Through some observation you can definitely pin point that I added a lot more edges to the stomach to round it out more but as well as to begin working on the butt. Modeling the butt was very similar to polishing the bottom of the back. I begun pulling vertices out and then inward. After doing so I begun rounding the butt out more that that it doesn't look flat on the sides. If you were to compare this picture above with the first picture in this blog, the noses are different. In all honesty the nose's shape was bother me a lot and after accomplishing the arc on the baby's back I was thinking... Why not do the same for the nose. So similar to the back, I arc the nose to create more realism and appeal.
  Unfortunately around this time I stopped creating different versions of saved files and continue polishing with this one, so I wouldn't be able to pull up the progress of how I did certain things with the model. Fortunately because I made this baby model, I can go into details on what I did as far as processes goes. After getting the shape of the head, the neck, the back, butt and nose..My next task was positioning the arms. 
  
  The problem with the model is that it's in T Pose. Upon texturing it where practically texturing the armpits as if it was stretched. So upon moving the arms down when rigging, the texture for the arm pit's would still be stretched. Knowing this would be an issue I changed the baby's posed from T to relax, as you can see above. Now wouldn't this be a hassle to do for both arms? YES! This is where mirroring came along. I grabbed half of the models polygons from one side and deleted it. Upon deleting it, in the modifiers tab, I selected Symmetry. Symmetry is just like mirror but the difference is, it has a auto weld function that upon collapsing the stack of modifiers... It welds the symmetrical half, to the original half. With symmetry, it makes a copy of the model and then you can choose which axis the copy is in. Where I'm going at with this is, all I had to do is re position one arm and boom! I'm down with the other side! Now re positioning one arm was bad as it is. What I had to do was select a ring of polygons that would separate the arms from the shoulders and delete it. Once deleting that ring allowed me to gain access in maneuver just the arm of the model and not the arm and the model at the same time. So when I did this, I translated the arm down a bit, rotated it as desired. Once I was satisfied with the position I had to re attach it to the model. From using 3ds Max for a while now, I'm very comfortable and confident when it comes to doing crazy things. Re attaching the arm back to the body is very possible. The way I did it was selecting border. With border I selected the opening of the arm and hit Cap which creates a face in the opening. I did the same with the shoulder. After doing this I selected both new faces and hit bridge. Hitting bridge connected both the new faces together which in turn.. Connected the arm to the body.
  Having re position the arm I had a few tasks left for the baby. This came from rounding the head out more and polishing the hands. To give an idea of how I rounded the head... I begun moving vertices inward to give less of boxed head shape and more of a sphere shape.



  After accomplishing that I begun polishing the hands more. The hands to start off were just spheres in the beginning. Considering Max the baby, would grip on objects, we needed a more realistic hand.  I was able to accomplish this through very similar methods. Pushing and pulling vertices in and placing them in desire locations. I also spent a lot of time on rounding the hands out more so that they don't look like there are any sides that look squared. Thus after doing this finished the baby model! Well at least modeling it! As you can see there was a big jump from pictures as far as progress went. My teammate had textured the baby for me. After texturing was completed meant we were one step closer for integrating the baby. The last things left are Rigging, Skinning and Animating the baby. Hope you guy's enjoy the model!


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