‘Joan Of Arc’-Modeling Of The Body

October 23, 2011 in Autodesk Maya

Chapter 1: Modeling Of The Body – Body

First of all it is a good exercise and you should never miss the opportunity to go in at the bottom of the things and because it will be very easy to take support from the body to model clothing later, thus giving a true volume to the character. Of course there is no need to make the body with lots of details, thus the feet will be very simplified and the hands will be modelled as gloves. Muscular detail will be kept to a minimum as well. All we’re looking for on the body is to create something with good form, and a strong gesture to it. (fig.01)

Fig.01

First off, we start with a basic cube (create – polygon primitives – cube). Move the cube down to the foot, as this will be the start of the foot. (fig.02)

Fig.02

Right click and hold on the cube to bring up the edit mesh marquee menu. Select “face” to edit mesh by face. We are going to want to extrude out some more faces to begin to shape our foot. Select the back face and extrude it 4 or 5 times (edit polygon – extrude face) so you have more edges to work with. In the side view port, move around the vertices of the cube to begin shaping the foot. Right click and hold on the cube again and select “vertex’ to manipulate the vertices. Get them into a nice foot shape, like the picture. (fig.03)

Fig.03

Again, select the top face of the foot and extrude out a couple more times to begin making the start of the leg. Remember that you don’t have to be happy with anything you did in the step before…as you start shaping the leg, you can go back and keep adjusting the foot as the form of the leg evolves. Just keep moving those verts around till you get something like in the picture. (fig.04)

Fig.04

Now we’ll make a cut around the foot to give us another edge to work with and give the foot a better shape. To cut the foot simply select the “slice polygon tool” (edit polygon – slice face). To make the actual slice, using the tool click an edge…as you can see it will create a dot (actually a new vertex) where you have clicked. If you click and hold you can move the vertex up and down the edge, and it will stick as soon as you let go of the mouse. To create an edge, once you have clicked on the first edge and got the vertex when you want it, simply click on the next adjacent edge and it will create a new edge connecting the two. You can do this the whole way around the entire body, creating as many new edges as you want and, ideally, ending up coming right back around and attaching to the original vertex you created. (fig.05)

Do the same thing you just did with the foot, only now create a new edge running around the leg. Use the slice face tool again, and again simply click on each edge creating the new edge that will go around the entire leg. Create a new edge running around the leg like the red one in the picture. (fig.06)

Fig.06

Now, we’re going to apply a mesh smooth to our object. We will actually be working with this smoothed object, but we still want to be able to edit the low poly version (much easier to work with), so we’ll be using Maya’s “smooth proxy” to accomplish this. To apply smooth proxy to your object, simply select the mesh you have so far, and then select smooth proxy (polygon – smooth proxy). This will smooth your object, but it will also make a copy of the original low poly “lattice” version of the object. You’ll notice that if you move the vertices of the low poly object, the smoothed version deforms with it. This makes modelling easier since we can now edit the low poly mesh, and it will deform the smoothed version we have. Simply manipulate the low poly cage mesh (the transparent one) the exact same way you did before. Select it and right click to open up the edit mesh marquee, and use the same tools (extrude face, slice face) to manipulate both it and the smoothed leg. (fig.07)

Fig.07

Now, here’s where we’re going to start fencing the mesh and getting it to look like a nice simple foot shape. Using both reference images, move around the vertices of the low poly mesh, until you get a nice smooth, round leg. Don’t just focus on one viewport either, do a bit in the side view, and then do a bit in the front. Keep switching back and forth. (fig.08)

Fig.08

Don’t rush this part…take your time. Don’t be satisfied until it looks the way you want it to. Just keep working at it for however long it takes, until it looks right. These early steps are critical since everything else will be based around this original mesh. (fig.09)

Fig.09

Do another edge split around the leg, again, around the form of the entire leg. Keep adjusting the new vertices to continue adding form and definition to the foot/leg. (fig.10)

Fig.10

Once you have a nice looking leg, duplicate it. First off, select the smoothed leg (not the transparent cage, but the actual smoothed leg mesh), and freeze its transformations (modify – freeze transformations). You’ll also want to center the pivot (modify – center pivot)…this is all so the foot will copy properly. Now, go under edit tab, find duplicate and click on the little square next to the word “duplicate”. This opens up the duplicate settings menu. Change “geometry type” from “copy” to “instance”…this is so our copy leg will keep updating as we make changes to the original. Also, change the first “scale” setting from 1 to –1….this will automatically mirror the duplicate foot so we don’t have to rotate it. Once all that is done, hit “duplicate” and you should have a second leg, mirrored in X direction. Line this leg up with the reference picture. (fig.11a & fig.11b)

Fig.11a

Fig.11b

Select the low poly cage, and make a few more extrusions up the leg to create the knee and thigh. Keep shaping them as you go, in the front and side view ports to create the upper half of the leg. Notice your copied leg is moving too. This is a good tool since you can see the changes you’ve made in your copied leg, without the edges interfering with your view. (fig.12 & fig.13)

Fig.12

Fig.13

Extrude the leg up a few more times to create the beginning of the hip section. Don’t forget to continue adjusting the foot and lower leg, as the upper half starts to take shape. What you were happy with before won’t always look as good once the rest of the figure is put in, so don’t hesitate to keep adjusting area’s you’ve already worked on, until it looks right. (fig.14)

Fig.14

Now, might not be a bad time to save your work, as we move onto the next section.Before we continue, I’m going to want to make a few adjustments. First off, I want to switch back to the original low poly mesh, rather than modelling with the “smooth proxy” method at the moment. Smooth proxy is good at adjusting verts to get the final look you want, but I find for just simple extruding and basic shaping, using the low poly version is a bit easier to work with.

To switch back, you need to select the smoothed out leg. It can be tricky to select since it’s behind the low poly cage, so just click and drag select over the two, and then while holding CTRL select the low poly cage mesh…this will de-select the Low poly mesh, leaving only the smoothed mesh selected. Now, on the right side of the screen under the Channel Box in the “inputs” section for your leg, they’ll be the “polySmoothProxy1” operation. These are the options for the proxy smooth we applied before. Click on it to open up the options. Now, we just want to change the Exponential Level from 1 to 0. This essentially turns it off, and you can see that your smooth leg has returned to the low poly version. You can delete the transparent low poly cage now, as it’s not needed anymore. We should also delete the history (edit – delete by type – history) on our leg, just to clean it up. This essentially collapses all the modifiers (stuff like smooth proxy, and edge cutting) and just leaves the simple mesh behind. It’s important however not to do this when you’re in the middle of working with poly smooth, or smooth proxy, since it will make your mesh stick in the smoothed mode, and you won’t be able to get it back to the low poly version. So make sure “polySmoothProxy1” is turned off before you delete the history. (fig.15)

Fig.15

I also want to change the material on our objects from the default gray “Lambert” to a nice shiny “Blind”. To do this select both legs, and right click and hold again to bring up the marquee menu…only instead of going to one of the edit mesh modifiers, go down the small menu to “material”. A new menu will open, and select “assign new material” and then click on “Blind”. This will apply the Blinn texture to your legs, so they are nice and shiny now….the reason we do this is with the shiny secular level it makes it easier to spot errors in our modelling, making it easier to adjust. All right…we are now ready to continue! (fig.16)

Fig.16

First off, we want to delete these edges. Select the edges highlighted in the picture and delete them (edit poly – delete edge). Don’t just hit delete, as it won’t delete the edges properly (it will leave the vertices behind)We want this new face perfectly flat, so the easiest way to align the verts is to select the face, and using the scale tool (“r” is the scale hotkey) scale the face ONLY in the x-axis (the red axis) until all the verts are perfectly vertically aligned. (fig.17 , fig.18 & fig.19)

Fig.17

Fig.18

Fig.19

With the face that your just aligned still selected, extrude that face to create the connection for the two legs.(fig.20)

Fig.20

Delete this edge. This edge you can just hit the delete key, since it won’t leave behind any stray vertices.(fig.21)

Fig.21

Select the top face, and extrude up a couple more times to begin to create the pelvis. Adjust vertices like in the picture to start forming the shape. I had to do a lot of adjustments to get it to where I wanted it, even adjusting as far down as the knee…so don’t hesitate to take your time on this section. Get it all lined up real nice. You can see I also made an edge cut right around the crotch to add some definition. This was done with the “split polygon tool” again.
These are the front and side views. (fig.22 , fig.23 , & fig.24)

Fig.22

Fig.23

Fig.24

Again, continue extruding up, creating the waist. Keep adjusting those verts!It’s important to note some anatomy though. Even though she’s a cartoon, you should always be trying to think of anatomy as you’re creating your character. It’s not detailed at the moment, but even now you can see how the edges are flowing according to how muscles form, and you can see how they wrap up around the pelvic bone. It’s always handy to have an anatomy book by your side when modelling. It will improve your work greatly. (fig.25 , fig.26 & fig.27)

Fig.25

Fig.26

Fig.27

Now, on the inside of the thigh I’ve added a couple more edges to help round it out. Though leaving edge ends just like that isn’t the best way to model, as it will cause problems when smoothing, it’s something we can correct later, and at the moment won’t cause a problem. Adjust the new verts you created to help round out the interior of the leg. Now would be an excellent point to take a brake and save again. Make sure you’re always saving to a new file (always “save as” never use “save”) just incase something goes wrong with saving…you don’t want to lose the work you just did, as well as the work you saved before…(fig.28)

Fig.28

Now, we’ve got to take care of this triangle here…triangles are very bad since they cause problems when smoothing, and they don’t deform well when animating…as often as possible you want to keep everything in with 4 sided polygons (quads)…sometimes you can’t avoid a 3 of 5 sided poly, but you always want to try to keep everything in quads as best as you can. So to get rid of this triangle simply use the slice poly tool, and create an edge from the corner of the one triangle, wrapping around the side of the leg (we’ll connect this edge later). Then delete the one side of the triangle (the highlighted yellow edge) and you’ve gotten rid of the triangle.Also….you may have noticed that while extruding the pelvis and waist, some of the poly’s seem to be tinted a strange shade…as you move the camera around they turn kind of black. If this is a problem for you, you just need to adjust the normals. Select the object and then go “edit poly – normals – set to face”. This resets the normals. You’ll get that blocky shape of your character, but this will be fixed by smoothing or doing a smooth proxy. (fig.29 & fig.30)

Fig.29

Fig.30

Though using extrusions was quick and easy, the buttocks still need some addition work since they don’t have enough roundness and form to them. So let’s add an additional edge running down from the small of the back to the inside of the thigh. Again, just use the Slice Poly tool and click on one edge at a time to cut an edge down the leg. (fig.31)

Fig.31

Add another new edge running down the leg….keep rounding everything out. (fig.32)

Fig.32

Remember that edge wrapping around the inside of the leg that we made from correcting the triangle at the front? Continue that edge around the back to create the fold in the gluteus. Adjust the verts to make the fold more defined. (fig.33)

Fig.33

The two halves, mesh smoothed (poly – smooth), with 2 divisions. You’ll notice that where the two halves meet seems kind of warped….this is just because they have not been joined yet so don’t worry about that now. It will be fixed when the two halves are joined together. (fig.34)

Fig.34

Another couple of extrusions from the top face, to create the bust. You don’t need to worry about the breasts yet, since we’ll create those later, so right now just leave the chest flat. (fig.35 & fig.36)

Fig.35

Fig.36

Another couple of extrusions for the neck. (fig.37 & fig.38)

Fig.37

Fig.38

To prepare for the arm, we will want to only have to deal with 1 face for the arm to extrude out of. So take the vert at the center of the 4 quads where the arm will come out of, and delete you….note that you cannot just hit delete, but actually have to go to Edit Poly – Delete Vertex to get rid of it. Then you should just have one single face left for the arm to extrude out of.We’ll also make a couple cuts below where the arm will extrude out to add some smoothness to it. Just two simple cuts at the side is all it will take. If you’re happy with what you’ve got so far, now wouldn’t be a bad time to delete the history again. It’s always a good idea to keep everything nice and clean, so if you don’t think you’re going to need to go back and undo anything, delete the history. Alright, let’s save our work now again, as we move onto the arm.

Ok! Let’s start the arms! Start by selecting the large flat face you just made, and extrude it out a few times to begin making the shoulder. (fig.39 & fig.40)

Fig.39

Fig.40

The shoulder is often one of the hardest places to rig and animate, because of the extreme range of movement our arms have, and because of how the muscles in your arm and shoulders work….therefore we want to make it as easy on ourselves as possible and make shoulder geometry that is going to deform as nicely as possible. (fig.41)

Fig.41

Another 3 extrusions to finish off the shoulder and begin the upper arm. A good thing to keep in mind, although this is going to be a stylized cartoon character, it’s always a good idea to be studying your own body to see how you should be shaping the character. The background sketches are great to work from, but they won’t give you the idea of form and how weighty body parts should be.While doing the arm here, try looking at your own arm for clues on where to place the verts. How the bicep is shaped, and how it will connect the deltoid. It may be a simple model right now, but it’s always a good idea to keep this stuff in mind anyways, and it’s just good practice for when you want to do an actual full body study. (fig.42)

Fig.42

Finish off the arm with more extruding, and by pushing the verts around some more. This is the part where studying your arm is really going to help sell the character, getting in the little nuances of muscles structure so that your arm doesn’t just look like 2 cylinders.We’re not going to worry about the hand for now, since she’s going to have gloves on (which we shall model later) so just end the arm at the wrist for now. (fig.43)

Fig.43

The arm from the back….the elbow is fairly basic for now but since it’s going to be covered up later, we don’t need to put a lot of geometry in there to develop it. Just give it enough definition to tell that it’s there. (fig.44)

Fig.44

Now we’re going to start work on the breasts. I didn’t have enough edges around the center to get it done, so I added another edge that wraps right around the whole body. It should be positioned so it’s half way between the top and the bottom of the breast. (fig.45, fig.46 & fig.47)

Fig.45

Fig.46

Fig.47

Select the two highlighted vertices and merge them into one. To do this, select the do a Merge Vertices (Edit Poly – Merge Vertices). If it doesn’t work, then the threshold (the distance between 2 merging vertices) isn’t high enough. If this is the case, when selecting the Merge Vertices tool, click on the small box next to it to open up the options, and increase the distance until its high enough to merge the two verts together. You now have a single point to model the rest of the breast from.Add in the red edges, while deleting the yellow ones (edit poly – delete edge). This is going to create the flow between muscles that flow from the arm to the pectorals and breast. (fig.48)

Fig.48

Select the center point of the breast and pull it out to start actually creating the form of the breast. (fig.49, fig.50 & fig.51)

Fig.49

Fig.50

Fig.51

Add in a ring of edges around the center vertex, and align them like in the picture to get rid of the point in the breast.Here is the work at the front so far. Looks good proportionally, but there is still a lot of work that needs doing in order to get this model up to par. So let’s take a look at what we can do to make her look a little more natural. (fig.52)

Fig.52

Firstly, we can do a lot to improve the flow of things coming off the shoulder and into the breast. Delete the highlighted yellow edge in the picture and add in the red ones. Then arrange them to look more like the section picture. Don’t worry about the triangles, we’ll take care of those in a sec…This is going to help improve the flow and structure of the edges, and it’s going to give the model something it sorely needs….edge loops. I’ll go more into edge loops in the next section, but right now edge loops are a way of modelling in order to facilitate the best deforming mesh for animation. And the best way to do this is to mimic muscle structure as closely as possible. (fig.53 & fig.54)

Fig.53

Fig.54

Same deal as before…..delete the yellow edge, and add in the reds. These new edges though don’t need much adjustment….they’re going to connect to other edges soon and they can be moved around then, so you shouldn’t need to touch them too much. (fig.55)

Fig.55

Same drill here…adds the red and gets rid of the yellow.Ah! Now we can see some benefits of all this tooling around the shoulder. You can see now how all the edges now come up from the arm, around and off the shoulder and start to form the breast. This is the exact sort of edge flow we’re looking for.

These new edges you should do some adjusting on to help give more form to the breast. The new edge is going to help get rid of that large flat side that we used to have. (fig.56)

Fig.56

Definitely something missing that needs to be added….the fold underneath the breast. Just add a new edge in, and then pull the new edge down a bit to create the fold.It’ll take some tweaking to get it to look right. While tweaking try Smoothing out the mesh (polygon – smooth) just to see how it looks when it’s all smoothed out. Undo the smooth to revert back to keep tooling, but keep using smooth to check to see if what you’re doing is working. (fig.57)

Fig.57

Let’s create another edge loop flowing off of the collar bone and into the breast.Delete the yellow highlighted edge, and then create two new edges…one coming from the top of the collar bone down into the breast, and then one coming off that same vertex, and going off to the edge of the mesh.

This is going help get rid of some of that pinching happening where the breast ends. Adjust these new edges accordingly. (fig.58)

Fig.58

The current mesh for the front of the chest….note how all of the edges flow smoothly now. This is going to great help when deforming the mesh latter on when we rig the whole thing. (fig.59)

Fig.59

Mark the median furrow while inserting these edges. After adding this edge, pull in the centre edges to make a very very slight indent. (fig.60)

Fig.60

Right, now this one can be a little tricky, not only are there a couple of new cuts to make and some edges to be deleted, but you need to do all this with the arm obscuring you. I deleted my arm so you could see it better, but you’re just going to have to work around it as best you can.Anyways, it’s the same here as it was before delete the yellow edges and adds in the red edges. What we are doing here is not only cleaning up some loose triangles that would normally get in the way, but we’re also adding the final edge loops around the shoulder to get the best deformation possible there.

These 2 new edges added are going to complete loops around the shoulder, one which wraps right around, and one which loops into the trapezius muscle.

With this…we have completed creating the necessary geometry for our body.

All that is left now is finishing our work. Moving verts and edges around until we’re happy with the final model.

Good tip here is to tumble your camera around a lot, shifting views of your model as often as possible. Quite often you’ll get it too look just perfect from one view, but it’ll look dead wrong from another. So move your camera around a lot since it will show off a lot of your mistakes right away.

Remember, if it looks wrong, it probably is…your anatomy book or some good human body references are going to be your best friend here. So don’t hesitate to spend a good couple of hours here simple pushing and pulling verts until you get something you’re happy with. (fig.61, fig.62 & fig.63)

Fig.61

Fig.62

Fig.63

A fantastic tool Maya has to help finesse your final model is the “Sculpt Polygon” Tool (edit poly – sculpt polygon too – option box). This too is like an artisan brush, and rather than work on one vertex at a time, with this you can work with many….much more like sculpting. Using either push, pull or smooth you can move a whole bunch of verts around at the same time.Best thing is this tool will work with a tablet if you have one, adding pressure sensitivity to its advantages. Now you can really sculpt with a tablet, by pushing your stylus harder you’ll create a harder indent, or smooth the mesh out more.

The flood function will apply the push, pull or smooth to every single vert in the mesh evenly. This is great if you want to evenly inflate or deflate the entire model, or simply smoothing the entire thing down. We’ll actually be using this function in a later section.

This tool is excellent for general smoothing. If you find you’ve got everything where you want it, but it’s all just a little too bumpy, use the smooth function in the Sculpt Poly Tool, with a low opacity setting and just go over the area’s that need smoothing. (fig.64, fig.65, fig.66, fig.67 & fig.68)

Fig.64

Fig.65

Fig.66

Fig.67

Fig.68

And there you have it! Section 1 is done….our body is complete. For the sake of these pictures, I have joined our two halves together already, but this will be covered in section 2 so you don’t have to worry about it now. It’s a good idea to delete the history again on her if you’re happy with what you have so far, and save your work.Remember you can always go back (in fact, I highly encourage it) and adjust parts of your body mesh. Modelling is a very organic process, and such no one part can every really be called “complete”. So never give up on it, and if something isn’t working, take a break for a bit and the go for it again.

The next section we shall be modeling the face, and then attaching it to the body.

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