I sit here at 5am....

So, its 5am.

My eyes hurt.

Wanted this night to be about Design work and I had every intention to do it; but since I started animating Harland Shears its been in my mind that the Mesh for him, was god damn awful.

Here was the original if you missed it:

I blamed time constraints on the quality for this one, but in all honesty, it was down to laziness.

I rushed most of it just to get to the end of it. I didn't take into consideration anything about the edge flows or overall form.

From the moment I took a second look at this model, I knew I was going to have to remake it; the following blog post will chart my 5 hour slog to complete it.

(I say 5 hour, but I also watched The Walking Dead in that time. I fucking hate Carl.)

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Since I already had the head modelling from a while ago, it was essentially just the body I needed to fix.

I was vaguely happy with the head, still wanted to work on it some more but, whats a head without a body?

My initial hope was to simply modify the existing model and improve on it. I started like this, adding in lines and verts here and there, however this proved to be  impossible. 

There was no way I could follow the flow of the muscles or manipulate how the body actually looks into place, so after much though, I decide to start again and this time, go slow. 

I started by loading up my old sketches of Harland, (which Ive since learnt where not very helpful at all, serious.) and proceeded to model each body part separate.

Im not used to this method of building, but it proved to by just what Harland needed. I managed to get thinks looking roughly the way I wanted them to,  specifically the legs, arms, and boots look significantly better than the original. 

With each body part made the way I wanted them to, next came the part I was dreading: attachment. I did my best to keep the vert number on each of the models roughly the same to make attaching them together a hell of a lot easier, which worked somewhat.

I decided to start with the pelvis since I figured this was the hardest part to fix and if I could make it through that, I could do the arms and neck easily. 

I spent a lot of time starting at the screen and uttering profanities for this one, but eventually got a decent looking joint. Its not good by any means, I've just managed to hide the problems and ugly parts well behind the rest of the mesh. This is certainly an area Ill need to practice on. 

With the pelvis finished, it was a relatively easy task to join up the shoulders and chest. I had to make a few triangles here in order to get the edge flow right that essentially makes up the pectoral muscles on humans.

This was actually a fun little task, studying drawing and memorizing certain muscles structures paid off (FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER) and I was able to get a nice flowing feel.

Its not perfect by any means and I defiantly need to add more polygons to increase the effect, but I was pretty chuffed with it. 

Finally on the body mesh was the neck. Something which proved to be tricky.

I had a cylinder which would act for the meat of the neck, however the topology that connected the shoulders was providing me with no end of frustration. I managed to get it looking decent, although there is a weird affect if you look at the model from the side where it looks just a little...off.

I put this down mainly to the images I drew up to act as reference. I've since learnt they need to be 100% perfect or else modelling becomes a real grind.

I think Ill take more care for the line up shots of the next character I design. 

I was pretty much done from this point on wards. 

I did carry on working on the topology in certain areas, once I could see the mesh in its entirety. I particularly had to focus on making the pectoral muscles flow a little better, as well as fixing up some areas on on the back of the mesh and the ass cheeks.

Just for a few extra touches and details (prior the the texturing phase) I added a Batman style utility belt and attempted to model a collar and neckerchief from the original character sketches. These, assuming I like them, will probably end up as individual textured items I can just stick onto the model to enhance the 3D feel.

Im pretty happy with the image overall, think I captured enough of Harland in the model to make it worth while, I hope everyone else likes it also.

Some things I could have done better, would have been the edge flow around the pelvis and shoulders. These are problems for many 3D modelers so its something Ill be practicing with in the future.

Additionally, I think the model feels a little, flat, when viewed from the side. Although that might just be the position Harland is modeled in.

Oh and I rushed the Hands. This was a tough area, I sort of, made the ones in the image above as stock, but they looked somewhat convincing when viewed from afar, so I didn't see much point going back in to finish them. I think Ill clean them up if I have time, but for now they are staying as is.

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Next phase for my Art, will probably come over this next weekend.

Ill be finishing up with Design deadline stuff tomorrow night and getting the doucment finished, once that is out of the way I fully intend to spend the rest of my time getting textured up and animated.

My current plan is to animate (at least rig) Harland up within a few days.

I figure this way I can give the boned up (lol) lHarland to others who might want a go at animating.

On top of this, by animating first I can fire Ben some sprite sheets across so he can have a play with them in the Engine.

Applying the texture can come right at the end of the assignment if we wanted, since it could be applied to the animated models once finished pretty easily and just re-rendered out as a sprite sheet.

Not sure what I want to do for the texture, since I want to hand paint it. Ill spend some time on it and see what I can come up with.

First I need to unwrap it.

I fucking hate unwrap....

Thats all for now folks.

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Its all bleedin` coming together.