tex mex chicken!!!

finally got both my UV map and my Texture map sorted for Wee-eck. The most difficult part was the face as there is a lot more detail there than i thought so in some cases i had to break the model down into really small parts to get the texture map to work.
most impressed with the kilt to be honest with ya, and also it was probably the simplest bit.

final design work for wee eck and for willie billiams pretty happy with it

willie billiams

so heres the progress with the model at the mo still needs a lot of refinement

research on the kid

yeah so heres a couple of images grabbed from the net for my research only a couplle dont want to drown u with a flood of images

problems with my mesh

so i transferred my mesh into Zbrush after i thought it was finished and then i encountered problems with my model. there were holes in the neck area ( in Zbrush not in maya) and in some areas there was a clear seam with strange irregularities.

so i went back into maya and tried to fix the problems with relative success, with the neck problem there were no evident reasons for the mesh breaking but there was a quick fix with the collar by adding some geometry which needed to be there, with the neck i decided it was the same problem so i took my maya model and smoothed it then exported it to zbrush and that seems to have worked fine.

with the crazy seam problem it was apparent that when i mirrored the geometry in maya it did not merge the verts so i halfed the model and made sure the geo wass merged and still the problem occured. i looked depper into the mesh and it was clear that in some areas the seam had created lots of extra geo and placed it on top of each other so i went through the model and got rid of the unneeded geo and this solved my problems now it is ready to be messed with in zbrush.

this process has proved a good test for the model that u have built as zbrush shows up irregularities that maya didnt.

model

this is where im at so far with wee-eck as you can see the rough model is nearly finished and I am nearly ready to transport this mesh into Z-brush to refine

maya modelling WIP

so heres the stage im at so far with my character im pretty impressed with myself at the mo seeing as this is my first solo model (without tutorials or anythin) its only mirrored jus for the screen shot iv been workin on the one side then mirroring just to make sure that its all going well :D

clay maquette

so seeing as i have to create a 3D character that looks to be in a clay style what better way to understand the way it should look than by actually building the model out of clay

sketchbook scribble sheet

so i pitched all of my character sketches to my family and got them to pick the best designs that fitted the brief and profile. so yeah the one that came out on top was one that i had over looked as such it made sense and i had realised that my idea of the character had become too soft . so i redesigned the character based on the results

faces

here is a collection of facial expressions for wee eck

maya and modelling

yeah so im not too strong at modelling so from the beginning of this project i have been working through the maya workbook that i posted earlier which by the way is probably the most useful book of all as it goes through everything that u need to know, some things are very detailed and iv come across new ways of working in maya through this book not to mention the confidence boost i got from working on this cartoon penguin.....

sketchbook

heres some pages from my sketchbook mainly research and the last page is character designs mainly looking at the guys face, if u hadnt guessed im doing the scottish zoo keeper

my reading list

these are some books that have treated me well so i thought i would share them with u guys, if ur into concept art then the halo art, skillful huntsman, imagineFX and digital fantasy painting books are all very inspiring and very useful so look into them.