Day 254

Time for the last stage of evolution for my pokemon project: Blastoise. Here's a pic of him above, however I didn't want to do a literal translation of him. That's what Wartortle was for. Since I'm going to increase the polygon count even higher, I wanted to make a more realistic interpretation. I'm going to give him a more sea turtle like head. Reptiles don't really have ears so my options were to turn them into horns or make them more fin-like. Since Wartortle had the big ears, I decided to go with the fin ear option. Then there's the issue with the guns. They're pretty much his defining characteristic and also his most unrealistic but I'll figure something out along the way. On the above right, I took the model for Squirtle in Maya and added more polygons right off the bat. I also shortened the tail and removed the stubby fingers (which I will eventually regret).

I took the model and imported it into Mudbox. Above I'm just roughly adjusting the shape. I made the head smaller and pulled out the ears. I leaned him forward so it might actually look like he can stand without falling over.

I increased the number of polygons and above is how the model looked before I increased them again and again. The general strategy is to work as much as you can with what you have before increasing the polygons instead of just diving into millions of polygons right off the bat. In Mudbox, I can also switch between different levels of polygon number. If I need to make a big change, I can go to a lower polygon count and move back to higher ones to do finer details.