Day 247

Now it's time for Squirtle to evolve into Wartortle. Since I have it, I'm using my Squirtle model as a starting point so it's actually literally evolving into Wartortle. Above is what I'm starting with along with reference images. There's two because one is for when I'm looking at the front view and the other for the side view. Although neither image is a front or side view of the character but that's what I had to work with. This is all done in Maya by the way.

So I'm bumping up the polygon count for Wartortle. Instead of just increasing it everywhere, I added in more where needed. Considering Squirtle's head was just a blob, I had to add in a fair amount. Squirtle's face was just painted on but here I'm modelling the facial features. The ear things I pulled out the side of the head and then expanded. On the above left is the actually polygon model where I started working. Then I switched over to the smoothed view on the right.

For the body since it was blocky, I had to round things out a bit. I spent awhile on the hands to turn the stubby fingers into pointed claws. Luckily I didn't have to do the same for the toes. The tail was tricky. Originally it was just paddle shaped. I thought I would have to add in geometry like with the ears but I just heavily manipulated what I had until I got this shape. It isn't exactly like the reference but it's good enough for me.

With that done, I mirrored the half over to create the other side and fixed the oddities that appeared along the mid line. There are still some bumpy areas but I'll be fixing those in Mudbox. I may have made Squirtle with too few polygons because the jump in quality is pretty drastic.