Last week I felt like my skills in modeling and workflow were somewhat lacking, so I decided to brush up on some fundamentals and try and create a base mesh for new projects.
To do this, I used this base mesh modeling tutorial by sociamix on Youtube, focusing on specific anatomical landmarks to improve the detailing on my characters.
And here it is! Let's walk through a few specific points I feel have been improved.
Here, the edges flow from the back of the jawline into the center of the clavicle, and additionally, the jaw flows upward into the cheekbone instead of outward into the back of the head. This should help better define the area around the jugular vein and make the jaw more distinct.
Here, the pectoral better flows into the deltoid, creating a natural deformation during animation that more closely follows actual real life anatomy.
Here, the shoulder blade is fully defined, and the spine and tail bone are also more properly constructed. This will help the back retain some depth and definition during animation.
Around the glutes and hips, the hips actually flow directly into the rear, creating a distinct V-line and sculpt of the muscle, and giving a more natural leniency for these areas to stretch and deform during movement.
And that covers the base mesh! So the question is, what do I do with it now? Honestly, I had such a great time creating it that I immediately wanted to start creating new characters with it, so that's exactly what I did.
I decided that I wanted to try and recreate one of my sketched anthro character designs that would be a bit more complicated, to test and see how easy it'd be to work with this new base mesh. And it honestly ended up not being that bad.
I started by deforming the face and extruding different ears, making alterations to the proportions, and extruding some clothes to see how it'd come together once the character was dressed. Everything here besides the ears is actually the same geometry I started with in the human base mesh, which really speaks to its versatility for different biped characters! The head was separated, subdivided, and bridged back onto the body, which I've done on a few projects before this one.
Then I separated the arm geometry, created some low poly hair, eyelashes, and eyelids with boxes, and started modeling the arm. I separated the faces for each plate, solidified them, then made sure they all fit.
I then altered the underlying geometry and started modeling in sockets for the plates to fit into, making each part of the arm modular and separate.
And here's how they fit!
Once they were all together, then I started to rig it all up.
Here's the rig for it! The arrows are for the plate sliding, and the circle is for the rotation of the forearm. The forearm extends slightly, and rotates around the elbow.
In motion, it looks pretty wild.
And one thing I started to add but haven't finished yet is a cable to connect the hand! I decided to go full Bionic Commando with this design, and used bendy bones to connect a cylinder from the forearm to the hand. It still needs some work, but it's pretty cool so far!
On the to-do list: cloth bones for the hair and ears, poly modeling and rigging some clothing, and more rigging for the tail and fingers. Got an insane amount of work done this week but still feel like there's so much more I could've finished!
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