The Characters - Modelled

These are the final modelled characters which I will be animating. The next step is to put a biped inside the model and use skinning to make them move.




















I am having many problems with the rendering at the moment. Every time I render an image, anything which is a plane with a material assigned to it, appears black. Which is shown on the flag. I will hopefully find out what is causing this and find a solution.

Mizo - Part 5 - Changes to Top

I noticed that Mizo's shirt would be very difficult to skin and make move with the body. Because of this I looked into different ways I could apply a shirt to him. I found some tutorials online and asked many of my friends. They gave me the solution of using Material ID's and applying them to each polygon. This was so much easier to do and I wish I had found it sooner. I needed to create a material with 'Multi/Sub-Object' Selected.

The image below shows how I did this.














This is a rendered image of the mouse's shirt with the edited polygons and the t-shirt that I originally made. They both look exactly the same and very similar, however, it would be lots easier during the skinning part to use material ID's.

Mizo - Part 4 - Ears, Top and Face

The rest of the mouse was quite easy to make because it was very similar to the elephant. I had to make sure that it looked exactly like the drawings I made of the mouse.

I thought the ears would be very difficult to make but because of previous trial and error, I was able to make sure that I did not spend a lot of time on the ears. I made a sphere and squashed it to make the flat shape. I then reshaped it and using different tools, I was able to turn the sides of the ears inwards. I mirrored the other ear once I had made the perfect shape to make sure they were both identical.

The eyes and nose were very easy as well. I simply used spheres to make the shapes by reshaping them and squashing them. I then made them black to make sure they glisten.

The T-Shirt was very difficult to do because I needed to make sure it was only slightly bigger than the actual mouse. For this I copied the body shape and simply made it slightly bigger by using the select and uniform scale tool. I do not think this is the best way to make a T-Shirt so i might look into different ways I can make the T-shirt on the mouse's body.














This is the rendered finished mouse. I am quite inpressed with this character because he looks sweet and content which was the character I was trying to show.

Mizo - Part 3 - Arms and Head

After I had placed the sphere on top of the body, I knew I needed to shape it by using the select and uniform scale tool. I made it into a fat peanut shape. I made sure the head had the symmetry modifier tool applied to it so that it was in proportion.

The arms were a little harder to make because I wanted them to be a certain shape. They took a while to create because I wanted them to look exactly like they appeared in my drawings. I only needed to shape one arm because I extruded it from the body which had a symmetry modifier applied to it.














This is the rendered image of the mouse up to now. I think it is looking good so far. The more i add things and edit it, the better it looks. I think the ears will make it look really good.

Mizo - Part 2 - Head and Feet

After I had made the legs, I then formed the feet from this. It was very difficult to make the feet because I had to extrude them from the legs and form them by moving each vertex individually.

I created the head through using a sphere shape. I have not been able to reshape it yet but I am happy with the way it looks so far.














Below is the image of the rendered mouse so far.

Mizo - Part 1 - Body and Legs

To start Mizo I looked at the basic shape of the mouse. Its body looked very similar to an egg shape so I created this using a sphere. I tilted the body back slightly to make it look like most of the weight is on the mouse's shoulders and it is leaning back.

I used the symmetry modifier to make sure that the body was symmetrically mirrored on both sides. This made it a lot easier to create the mouse's legs because while I creating the legs, the other legs was being formed at the same time.

I made the legs by extruding on legs from the egg shaped body. This was not difficult because I just shaped them by using the select and uniform scale tool to make the bottom half of the legs bigger.

Dito - Part 3 - Feet and Flag

Dito took me roughly 3 days to complete. I think this was the easiest character of all three.

The feet were very easy to make and very similar to the way I made the legs. I made a sphere and used the select and uniform scale tool along with the edit poly modifier to make the feet look like how i designed them. I made one foot first and then changed the colour to match the beak and legs. I then made a mirrored copy of the foot to make the other one. I then positioned them on the end of the legs.














This is a rendered image of Dito without the flag. I am very impressed with how Dito turned out. I wasn't too keen with making him because the different shapes looked difficult to make, however, I found it surprisingly easy compared to the elephant.

















The material for the flag was an image which I made in Photoshop. This image is shown below. I then found out that I did not need to use an image and I could have used the tools and features available on the material editor. Below is the material that I used for the flag.

Dito - Part 2 - Beak and Legs

The rest of Dito was also pretty easy to produce. I think this is because he has a really simple body shape and his features are simple shapes as well.

I created the beak by firstly making a sphere and reshaped it using many tools. I used the selection and uniform scale tool, edit poly modifier, soft selection tool, Meshsmooth tool and many more. I changed the colour of the beak to orange to make it match the body well.

The legs were very simple as well. I simply made a cylinder and used the select and uniform scale tool to make the bottom and top of the legs slightly bigger then the middle of the legs to show they connect to the body and feet. I then slightly bent the cylinder near the middle to make it seem like the duck has knees. The mirror tool came in very useful at this stage because I was able to make a mirrored copy for the other leg.














This is the rendered image shown below. It is nearly finished and I am very impressed with it at this stage. I only need to make the feet and flag and then Dito will be finished.

Dito - Part 1 - Body, Head, Eyes and Arms

Dito was surprisingly easy to make. I started by making the shape of the body from a sphere. I then changed the colour of the sphere to yellow because Dito is a duck. Using the symmetry tool was vital because I needed to make sure that the body wash the right shape on both sides of the body. I then extruded the head from the sphere and shaping it to make it slightly larger on the top of the head. The body and the head was fairly easy to make as I was able to produce this within 3 hours. I did mess up a bit of the sphere on the duck but I fixed this by connecting some of the edges on the poly.

The eyes were very simple I made these out of spheres and used the select and uniform scale tool to make sure that they were shaped correctly and both with different sizes. This was to give the duck a slightly quirky look. I made sure the eyes were not pure white because they would blend in with the background and would not be seen very well. Because of this i made the eyes off white. I then made the pupils by making a sphere and squashing it flat. I changed the colour of the sphere to black and then mirrored a copy to make sure there were two identical pupils.

The arms were slightly more difficult to make. I had to extrude a section of the body which I thought would be sufficient enough for the arms and I then reshaped them to form a circle shape arm. I wanted to make the arm fairly thick to make sure that it could be seen, however, i only wanted the duck to have small arms to make it seem cute. The body had the symmetry tool applied to it so I did not need to shape the other arm and try to make it match. Instead I made one arm and the other arm naturally formed as I was producing it.














This is the rendered version of the duck so far. I am very confident at this point that the duck will look very good. I think this character needs to be very simple because it is not a main character.

Elly - Part 5 - Face and Bag

To form Elly's face I made an eye from a cylinder by squashing it and making it black. I then used the mirror tool to make the other eye which needed to be exactly the same as the first eye. I was very pleased with how the eyes turned out because they look exactly like they do in my drawing.

Yet again I was not happy with the ears of the elephant so I changed them and made them a lot simpler by using a squashed cylinder and shaping it. I then mirrored the image instead of using the symmetry tool. This worked lots better because I didn't need to reposition the ears, I only needed to move them over.














I added a few sky lights and allowed shadows which meant that the rendering took ages, however, I am extremely happy with how to lights made the elephant look. The rendered image of the elephants face is shown below.

















I then had to make Elly's bag. This was very difficult to do because the straps needed to be formed around the body without going underneath the skin of the elephant. I need to make sure the bag doesn't move when the elephant moves because the bag or arms may look distorted.














The image shown below shows the finished bag. At a later time I might add some accessories to the bag like a handle or a strap.