Tuesday, 27 November 2012

Base Mesh

Once I had the idea of how the fly is going to move, I began modelling a base mesh.

For me a base mesh is very important aspect of the pipeline. a good base mesh will make my life easier later on when sculpting in Zbrush or rigging and animating.

For this base mesh I began with blocking out the major shapes (the proxy mesh I created earlier was very helpful at this stage as I could just copy some elements and work on them, rather than making everything from scratch). Once the shape was ready I started adding more subdivisions. I had to be very concious about where I was putting the edges to match my design so the model will deform better in the animation process. Also having good edge flow helps in Zbrush as I won't have to subdivide to crazy levels to get detail I want.

Another important thing to point out is that every single polygon is quad and there are no more than 5 edges coming to a single point. That makes a base mesh very clean and sorts out all the problems that would happen later on in Zbrush.

To keep good edge flow and everything quads was a big puzzle and took a long time to figure out. But in the end I really enjoy that aspect of modelling as it makes you use logic and trains your brain.

One more thing to point out is I tried to keep the polygons as square as possible, even if I had to add some extra edges. Having square faces really makes sculpting in Zbrush smooth.

Here is a turntable of the final base mesh:


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