After much thought i decided that i would link my final 3D model with my game from the game design unit. I decided i would make the main character of my game (Kangaroo Bruce) in a simple yet effective cartoon style, just like the research i have done into this style. Little did i know how hard it would be.
The Journey :
I started off by searching the internet for character modelling tutorials that would help my achieve my goal. I found this very hard as there was next to none that were either not telling me things i already knew or that weren't incredibly simple and useless. I eventually found a simple tutorial on how to make a shark using hypernurbs. The tutorial gave me more of an understanding on how to make organic life life looking models by using the hypernurbs turned on to help with shaping. I then spent weeks trying to create a kangaroo but constantly ending up with something that looks like a lizard or getting stuck when it came to doing the limbs.
Here are some of my failed attempts :
First Prototype :
After many failed attempts and a stroke of luck, i finally managed to produce something that look slightly like a kangaroo. I had definitely made progress from my last attempts but this version still didn't feel right to me. I like the shape of the body, although it doesn't seem smooth enough. The main part i didn't like was the head, because the ears look unprofessional and the shape is more like an aardvark I also didn't like the way the feet turned out and there looked like balloons. Because of these reasons i decided to start again.
The Final Model :
For the final model, i took every skill i had learnt from researching tutorials and i took the good things from the last model such as the body and thighs and i tried to improve them and take a different approach with the bad things such as the feet and head. Just like the other models before this i started off with a cube with a 3x3x3 segment layout. I then proceeded to use extrude, inner extrude scale and move the segments into the desired shape, constantly tweaking where i thought it needed to be. Once i had the main body shape i put it into hypernurbs to make modelling the limbs easier. I created the feet better this time by inner extruding the bottom to give a flat surface and also defining the thin to thick shape better than before.
It was all going great until i got to the head. I had followed the advice of a teacher half way through modelling and deleted half the model to use a symmetry object as it would be easier This seemed like a great idea until i got to the head and it would do this when i tried to extrude.
I pretty much tried everything i could to get around this problem but never managed to do it. So i decided to leave it and make the gloves. The gloves were simply made from two cubes which i made flat and long and used extruding and rotating to make. Once in hypernurbs they looked just how i wanted them to.
I had now go to this stage, and was wondering what to do about the head.
I wanted the whole model (minus the gloves) to be one whole shape so that there would be no ugly seams and it would look clean and smooth. Unfortunately this was going to be possible because of the way i had modeled the polygons wasn't working with the symmetry. The only solution i had left was to make a head separately and position it on top of what i had already. The head was made the same way as the body using a cube to start, but this time i made sure to make the ears better by using a mixture of extruding and re sizing as i made my way up the ear. After looking at some pictures of kangaroos and tweaking the shape to look somewhat normal, i had finished the head and positioned it correctly on top of the neck.
The modelling section was complete.
Before Texturing :
Here i have decided to render out four different views of the final outcome so you can see the defined shape of the model before the hair texture is added. The lighting is the same as the lighting i used in the tutorials as there is no need for scene lighting yet, its just to show off the model itself.
