Elly - Part 4 - Ears

It took me ages to make the ears and they still do not look right. The shape looks good but I think they look too thin and realistic and not enough like a cartoon which was the effect I wanted.














I made sure that the ears were the same shape as the drawings I created. I used the planes as guidlines.

















The image below shows how the elephant looks rendered so far.

Elly - Part 3 - Head

The elephants head was very difficult to construct. I tried to extrude the shape from the body but this was very difficult to do because this meant that I would have to make the sphere-like shape of the head by using editpoly and constructing it myself. Because of this i created the head separately and used the sphere shape. By using soft selection I was also able to make the head look more like a rugby ball shape.

Once I had the head ready I selected a few polygons from the front and created the elephant trunk which was very tricky because the template did not have a very good shape trunk so I mainly guessed the shape of the trunk.

Once I had finished the head I rendered it but I was still not happy with the fact that the trunk looks square-like and flat at the end. I wanted to cartoon figure to look cute and round. I knew I would have to edit the trunk at a later date.














This is the rendered image of the elephant with the head. I am not happy with the elephants trunk, so that will need to be changed at some point. I also changed the colour of the elephant because I was experimenting with the different colours that the elephant could possibly be. I liked pink because it suited the elephant most.

Elly - Part 2 - Legs

I noticed that Elly's body started to look a little bit like a bum so I decided to do something about that and improve the arms by making them slightly larger and closer to the body. I then constructed the legs by extruding them from the body. The legs were the easiest part of the elephant to do because they are a very simple shape and they do not curve or bend in any way.

I had many problems with the elephant at this point because I accidentally started editing the meshsmooth instead of the editpoly. This meant that the elephant suddenly became very difficult to edit and very difficult to shape properly. The feet became very square at this point and misshapen.














I think this can still be improved because the legs look very square-like and not how I imagined them to look. The image shown below is the rendered image of the elephant at this point.

Elly - Part 1 - Body and Arms

I started Elly by making a template which would allow me to make the shape of the elephant in proportion. For this is created two planes and using UVW Mapping, I was able to apply a map to the area which could be seen on both sides of the plane. I applied to bitmap image of the front and side views of the drawn elephant. This has come in very handy in the past when creating a shape or person from scratch. The picture shown below shows what the template planes looked like and how they were positioned.














Once I had the template in place i was able to begin modelling the elephant. I Firstly decided to create the body because this is the middle of the elephant and limbs can be extruded from this. I used a sphere shape to create the body shape and then used editpoly to give it a particular shape. I was able to use the soft selection tool to make the elephant seem evenly rounded. The symmetry tool came in very useful for this because I was able to cut the sphere shape in half and mirror one of the sides. This enabled me to create a shape which was equal and similar on both sides of the both. By doing this I was also able to create even arms while only editing one side of the shape. I created the arms of the elephant by extruding a selection from the sphere and then shaping them to match the template. This is shown below.














This is a rendered image of the finished body and arms. From this I will be able to create the legs and head.