Day 110

I kept working my way back and eventually wrapped around the back of the head. When I was working on Harvey, I knew my methodology was flawed so it's good to know the right way to do things. With the head done, I moved on to the neck and kept building down and down while shaping it to the reference drawings.

I finished the body and kept going with the leg. The foot was a little tough because the toes don't point straight forward. So I had to slowly and careful rotate the leg as I went down. I forget if I mentioned it before, but the rotate tool doesn't quite work as its suppose to on my computer so it was a little challenging.

Next I moved onto the arm. The hand was a pain to do. Like the foot, it's rotated slightly. It turned out ok though.

Day 109

Now it's time to model a character. Here are the reference drawings for the alien. When I made the character for the last book, I started with a general head and body shape and then added detail. Here I'm starting in a much more methodical way. First I made a sphere for the eye and started adding polygons around it one by one.

 From that ring around the eye, I kept building from there and the shape of the head began to form. Again, I just worked on one half, however the book showed me how to duplicate the other half so that it mirrors what I'm doing as I'm working on it. I built up the area around the eye, then the mouth and then attached the two together.

Day 108

Next I went over some of the uses of curves things. I started out with drawing a curved sort of cross section. I was able to spin that around 360 degrees to get the shape on the upper left. Then I stretched it out and added some legs to make the bath on the right.

I used a similar technique to make a door frame. I started out with a cross section and duplicated it a few times and set them at 45 degree angles. Then I bridged the cross sections together to make the frames. Finally I went back to one of the rooms I made and added in the furniture from last time and the door frame. I might come back later on my own to make some more furniture and do some stuff with the windows. Otherwise, I'll be back in a few chapters to add in colors and textures.

Day 107

Next I built some furniture using basic polygons. The videogame is suppose to take place in a run down asylum so I made a broken down set of drawers and an examination table. 

Day 103

I spent a fair amount time going over the basics again. Luckily, I still managed to learn some new things. The first project involves creating a level for a possible video game. The author is very keen on being very practical so since it's for a video game, he wants to keep the polygon count low and he'll ignore any parts that the player wouldn't see. I started with the hallway and then built two rooms. At that point, the author told me to build the rest of the rooms as practice. I'm not a big fan of that approach. I don't need to have my hand held the whole time but at least give me something to aim for instead of just doing whatever I want. Anyway, I'll be coming back to this building multiple times I imagine. I think I'll just be focusing on a single room though.  

Day 102

I finished my second book and I'm on my way to the third. I thought I'd show the books I've spend so much time with. My first one is on the left. It was about 600 pages and took me over two months to get through. Meanwhile the second book on the right is about 270 pages and took me less than two weeks.

One reason I went through it so quickly, besides just being simpler and less comprehensive, is that it wasn't very information dense. You can see there's a lot of words on the left for the first book and pictures weren't afraid to get pushed into the margins. Meanwhile the other other book had a lot of empty space. I don't regret going through the second book but I'm a little disappointed that both books cost the same when the second book has probably a fifth of the information as the first.

Anyway, I'm getting into my third book now. Similar to the second book where I had one project from start to finish, this one looks like it'll be focusing on just two projects. One being the alien on the cover which looks a whole lot better than the guy from the second book. This third book is over 400 pages and isn't quite as information heavy as the first. It has a more textbook feel to it and the author is a teacher at an art school. It's also fully colored which is nice. The second book was as well but it was barely noticeable. I'm looking forward to going through this book. The first book was good but going through it felt slow and a lot of work. I think I'm over the initial hump though. We'll see.

Day 101

So I finished up Harvey here. Doing the hair on the back of his head was a pain in the ass. The cowlick was also hard to do cuz there was also some angle where it looked really weird. I also could have tweaked the nose so it looks less flat in the profile view. Otherwise, I think it turned out pretty well for my first solo try at this kind of thing.

While the end product is good, the method I used to get there wasn't very efficient or elegant. I just kind of went for the brute force method. I built him using simple polygons, however while I'm working, I can see how the smoothed final look will be. So I was just looking at the smoothed version as I was actually manipulation the blocky version beneath the surface. I wanted to keep the blocky version simple with less polygons but that meant I had to overcompensate when moving points around. This lead to overlap that I didn't want but it was still workable. I wouldn't do this in the future though. So here's how he looked before being smoothed out.