Low-Poly Character

Trying to keep up with a "Post something every day" system at the moment; it's past midnight, so technically I've already messed that up. But no-one will know. Except you.

Next stop on Autodesk's set of tutorials is "Modelling a Low-Poly Character". The idea behind this is to create a character model that has as few faces as possible. The tutorial itself states the following:

"Conservatively speaking, a low-polygon character ranges between 500 and 2,500 faces, depending on the platform the game is aimed for, the game engine used, the number of characters onscreen simultaneously, the level of detail, and so on."

I find the idea of the tutorial fairly misleading, however. Modelling a "Low-Poly Chracter" and modelling a "High-Poly Character" is pretty much the same process, minus applying a smooth at the end. I believe the idea is to try and get the student to use as few faces as possible, but even when modelling an extremely detailed character that you might see in a Pixar film for example, it's always better to keep the face count as low as possible.

Now that my (most likely foolish) ranting is over, I'll talk a little bit about how I created the model. By the end, my model had approximately 1100 faces. I'd expect any other to be a little bit higher however, as I did not finish the facial modelling (due to my own frustration at the learning - or lack there of).

Creating the Model

The first step was, again, to set up Reference Planes. All the reference images used in the Autodesk tutorials are shipped with the software itself. Once the planes were set up, I started at the lowest point: the boot. Long story short, the entire lower body and torso was modelled from a small Box at the foot, converted into an Editable Poly and Extruded piece by piece upwards. Of course the positions had to be adjusted and scaling / rotating was required at for nearly each extrusion. It's worth mentioning that only the left side of the image was modelled - a Symmetry modifier was applied to form the other half, keeping everything symmetrical. (See-through mode is necessary to be able to follow along with the reference planes. It is easily toggled using the shortcut Alt-X.)

The arms were done in the same way, only starting with a Cylinder with a very low amount of sides (six). The hand was then added as a Box with several segments, converted and modelled as above.

The head had it's own Reference Planes to use, so I created it in a seperate project, and Imported it into the body scene later on. The head - again - started with a Box, converted to an Editable Poly. It was then literally a case of following exactly what the tutorial said, word for word, image for image. The different segments are adjusted, new ones Cut, as per the instructions in the tutorial. This was a very, very lengthy process.

Once the head was modelled and Imported into the body scene, the Smooth modifier was applied to each body part. Some parts worked better using the Autosmooth checkbox in the modifier parameters, others worked best with just a Smoothing Group.

My Thoughts on this Tutorial

It was around this time (I believe when modelling the mouth, to be precise) that I realised that following along with these tutorials were completely un-beneficial to me. In fact, I'd go as far as saying they were detrimental to my learning curve, as I lost any confidence in being able to carry out 3D modelling that I had, and it took me a while to get back on the horse.

Don't get me wrong, they are good tutorials, and I believe that there are a lot of people who would find them very useful. I just did not feel like I was actually improving my own skills. It got to a point where I realised all I was doing was following the tutorial bit by bit, while in the back of my head thinking "There's no way I could do this without the tutorial". It offered exact values for modifier properties to input, and at times just said "Adjust the vertex so that they match the templates nose". This would be fine if it wasn't for the handy little screenshots the tutorial provides for (nearly) each step. Apparently the author's idea of a nose is some form of abstract triangle. If I were doing this without the tutorial, I wouldn't have the numbers to input and I would probably created edges a bit more nose-like.

Writing this out has made me realised that it's not the tutorials that are to be faulted; it's myself. I took on an assumption from these tutorials that the models needed these exact instructions in order to look right or function, which is absolutely wrong. So, in a way, I'm glad I completed this tutorial, as it (along with several others I'll be discussing in upcoming posts) made me realise that I should be a lot less constrained when it comes to modelling. Not only is it supposed take some form of creativity, it's also not supposed to be perfect. I'm a beginner, and I should not be trying to learn how to create the absolute perfect nose without any kind of help.