so I start the modeling process with my three cylinders
and I'm going to reshape those cylinders to match the
image reference that I am using
and when I'm working on it I'm working entirely on rows
of verts. I'm not touching any single points.
(with the exception at that point right there that I just moved down) we do want to move
that point at the bottom of the body downwards. But in general
we're only focused on rows of verts. And this is because we're trying to capture the overall shape of the body.
We don't want to get caught up in details yet.
So I'm moving the rows of verts for the body around
to match my reference. I am rotating some of these rows to suit the curvature of the spine better.
Most notably at the top of the body,
where we're trying to capture a little of the neck and shoulder shape.
But I'm using entire rows, rotating entire rows, scaling entire rows of verts.
We want to be sure we're not moving and single verts
or making changes to any single verts at any point.
Then I'll move on to the arm.
The arm, we want to make sure, is narrower at the wrist, obviously.
And at the shoulder, the arm will be about as wide as the torso.
And at the top of the arm, you'll note that I'm rotating
the edge row at the top of the arm, to match
the angle of the body in that area.
That will facilitate connecting the arm to the body,
when we merge the two parts together later.
and I'll add a couple more rows so that I can create the curvature of the shoulder,
but other than that, shaping the arm
is relatively easy. It is basically a cylinder. We don't have to put in a lot of effort here.
With the leg, I'll start the same way,
rotate the top of the leg to match the angle of the body
and then how reshape the leg just to match the reference
and especially with the leg, I have so
few rows of verts, that I can't capture the shape of the leg very well,
so I'm just going to be overall whole. I'm not try to capture any
fine detail in this case.
and now I'll go to the edit menu and use Duplicate Special
with Instance turned on, to flip my objects across the axis
that way I'm seeing the entire character but I only have to create half of it
Now I'm going to create the neck. I grab those edges at the top of the torso,
and I use the Edit Mesh tool, Connect Components. That will connect those edges together like so.
Then I'll Extrude that new row of edges / new faces up
and that top row becomes the base of the skull
and the bottom row is where the neck, chest, and shoulders meet.
So I have to pull that row up a little bit.
I definitely have to pull the top one up a little bit.
and that allows me to start reshaping
the upper torso area. I'll start by adding a subdivision to the upper torso
using the Insert Edge Loop tool.
This will allow me to connect the arm.
With the arm, we see that there's a hexagon
at the base of the shoulder - that's what we need to plug the body in to.
But if we look at her body, we don't see a hexagon
but if we move the two bottom verts up,
and I move the top center vertex up, now we a hexagon.
and that is exactly what we're gonna connect
the arm to. So now I've got the body, and we see that
the body is a single object, and I only need half of it. So I select the faces on the opposite half
and delete them. And then I mirror the body using Duplicate Special.
Now I will move the verts from the body
to snap to the verts on the arm.
I'm connecting the body to the arm.
I go to the Mesh menu, and use Combine to attach the arm and body.
But first, I will delete the original mirror-image duplicates.
Then I Combine the objects, and then use Duplicate Special. Now I can use the Merge Vertex command.
I can start to move my verts around,
to get a more even distribution of verts.
The shoulder is a really difficult area when it comes to deformation (animation)
So it is important to make sure we have a very evenly distributed
evenly distributed group of verts and well structured topology
so that when we start animating the shoulder area, it will animate well.
At the top of the shoulder there are these two triangles that are a problem.
We don't want triangles in the shoulder.
So I will cut another row edges around the arm, using the Multi-Cut tool.
I'll make the cut on the body, around the shoulder,
There are a few triangles that are left. Get rid of those using Collapse or Merge to Center.
Now I've got these two rows
and at the top of the shoulder I need to figure out how I can connect the
rows around on top of the arm. If I connect and straight across,
we did end up with some quads, but it just moves
triangles to a different area. I will connect across using Multi-Cut,
and I delete the corner edges, and now I do have
some nice quads
at the top of the body
and what I'll actually do is insert a little space
so that I can create an entirely new set
connections and then Collapse that together and we'll see that I've got
a nice set of rows and edges in that area
everything is a quad. Next I will spread the verts out a bit better,
so when it comes to deformation,
the edge rows / verts in the shoulder won't be clumped together.
Now I'm reshaping the area to match
the reference a more closely.
The neck is lower in the front,
and higher in the back. I'm also matching my verts to the shape of the clavicle
Now let's start on the leg. Remember that single vert
we moved downwards at the bottom of the body, to create that point
at the bottom of the body - look there, and grab the three faces on the outside edges
and delete them
just leaving those two triangles in the middle. I will connect them
to each other by inserting
verts along each edge and then I use Merge to Center on the new verts.
Now I have quads at the bottom of the body instead of triangles,
and an open socket where I can connect the leg.
I'll adjust the verts a bit.
Then I add another subdivision on that ring at the bottom
of the body
and I can pull those out, and round out the bottom of the body a little bit.
I lined up with something that all %uh replicate the bottom
The result should replicate the pelvis a bit better. So adding those edges is important.
They give us something to match the leg to
With the leg we have that cap, just like the arm, and that's what we match
up to the body
At this point I start snapping verts together
correspondence should be pretty good because we created our body with 12 axis
subdivisions, and we created our leg with 8 axis subdivisions.
and those two numbers should match up really well
From the center, under the body,
to the side of the leg, it's a one-to-one correspondence of verts
it only gets a little bit tricky in the back
where we get some triangulation, and we cannot connect
things as straight across as we were able to do
on the front of the body. So I'll add another subdivision
to that ring in the center of the body, that will leave you with a
triangular shape gap
I will move the vert from the new shape I've created over,
to meet the leg, and now I am left with a single triangle.
I extrude that edge straight down from the torso
and snap those directly to the leg
and move my verts together
Now I have a connection. I can Combine my body and my leg
and I can Merge the verts together. Now I will deal with those triangles.
The front of the pelvis works pretty well as-is.
I'll select the body and use Duplicate Special, remember to make sure Instance is turned on.
Now I have a full body, with a mirrored half that is Instanced,
I'll add a few subdivisions to the torso
to round out the shape there
but that will also help me
with deformation when it comes time to rig the character
Back to the leg: we will resolve that triangle by cutting with Multi-Cut
all the way from the front of the leg to the back of the leg
and that will fix the triangle there
by turning it into a quad. And you see how I got rid of those verts there.
I'll cut another row straight from the bottom of the butt,
across the leg to give me another row of quads
And this row will go to the side of the body,
where I will leave it open and unconnected for now.
The extra edges that I'm cutting in
will better define the shape of the butt.
I'll push in the center row to create
the empty volume in the center
I'll Multi-Cut straight up from that new triangle I created and
This new set of edges will create a more rounded butt shape
we do have a triangle up at the top where it meets
the base of the spine
but that's not dangerous areas for deformation
we won't worry about that too much
this is a good stopping point. I will continue adjusting vert positions for a minute
just moving verts around, and I'm doing it by
comparing my reference in the front view and the side view
just to try and match the base shape of my model
to my reference. And with our model
we want to try and make the rows
of our topology conform to the shape the character's muscles and bones structure
so that we get a nice agreement between our topology
and the construction of our body. At this point I'm playing around with the waist,
the waistline of the character. I'm moving around the verts
to match the waistline of her pants in the side view reference.
At the same time adjusting shapes in the butt
to create more roundness in that area.
I will smooth the model
using the smooth proxy (press 3 on your keyboard) to see the shape
and it looks like it holds up pretty well. Now the basic model is done
and it's time to turn to detailing our mesh.