the characters

so change of plan as i decided to take Benny off of Dan's hands and start modelling him. I would prefer Dan got the set and the lighting ready so that we dont limit our time on this at the end...i know the more that Dan tweaks, the better the overall look will be. Its obvious from the inital texture tests that the final outcome will depend on the quality of the lighting. If i can get Benny as far a long as I can, Dan can take over again and we'll both be on par instead of Dan having to catch up. It gives me a break from working on the one model by flitting between each one...

in terms of John...im feeling much happier about the way he's looking. I kept in mind the traffic cone shape and remodelled this using nurbs circles. i then deleted the faces of the old head and stitched in his facial geometry including brow, nose and mouth and the rest as they say is history...or rather delete history merge verts *ahem*

the old model...lost the intentions of the 2d design....too curved, loss of harsh features/lines i was originally going for.

the new model! using nurbs curves i created a cone shape that stretched down to his trousers. I then cut away at selected faces and stitched the old face on there...already an IMMEDIATE improvement :)

starting to smooth out the geometry...looking much better. Very happy with this now

benny

although he looks deceptivly simpler than John's design i can assure you he has an equal number of challenges. Main issues are currently his eyes. Im trying to cut away faces so the eyes can be hidden behind the face. However, as Benny is completely spherical, when you pan around you can see the gaps between the face and eyes....hmmm.....will require some problem solving. Other challenges include Benny's hat which requires a working propellar, im sure this will just require some more trial and error, dan and i discussed briefly a method of grouping which might work, but i shall need to test this to make sure all the elements will follow Benny when he moves/rotates.

it started with a sphere...cut in half and verts changed round to meet the trouser line...starting to loose the spherical shape though of benny. old attributes added such as the arm and feet are from my old model.

eye hole cut out...bennys eyes need to sit behind his geometry. the sphere has been seperated into 2 now to divide the facial and the pants but retain the spherical shape of benny. seems a lot more tricky to get a perfectly round shape

Other aspects of the characters i need to sort out include creating any inner mouth geometry such as teeth or tongues as well as lining up verticies ready to attach the arms when skinning.

I wish to move on from modelling, again i feel this process has taken longer than originally scheduled but perhaps we werent allowing enough time for this. By the end of the next week i wish to have both characters UV mapped so we can then move onto skinning which does require more time spent on it so that its correct.

In the mean time, the set is complete so i guess this gives both myself and Dan opportunity to focus on our characters now. We really need to press on as time is running away.