Making of Lensha by Loocas Duber, Czech Republic (Europe)


Modeling

The modeling part was the most straight-forward on this project. I simply took all the references I had, the scene I prepared and started by placing a single polygonal object on the character’s lips from which I started extruding outer edges to form the full mesh. This sort of “wrapping” of the model around the references is usually called face-to-face modeling, which is my preferred way of modeling, especially heads or faces, therefore, there was no time spent deciding which way to go for the modeling. As fully and in-depth described on my first DVD, I was constantly referring not only to the actual photos of the subject, but also to numerous anatomical references found on the internet. It was very important to get the topology right because later I wanted to rig and animate the character and, as already mentioned, if you can get the right topology done from the anatomical refs. as well as from the photos, you’re simply there and the rigging process will take much less time and effort in order to get nice, realistic skin deformations in certain areas.



So, as I said, I firstly started from the mouth, then extruding the edges around the cheeks, to the eyes, forehead etc. until I formed a wrap around the entire head. I’d divide the head into certain, important and usually complex areas: mouth, nose, eyes, neck and ears, the rest is simply a fill in between certain elements. So, as you see on the images, I modeled the ear separately and attached it later to the head when it was done. This entire process of modeling the head was also clearly captured on my DVD, on which the videos were split into certain categories in which I was modeling certain areas on the head.









After all this was done, it was time to fine-tune the volume. Because, the correct topology is only half way there and is absolutely useless if the character doesn’t look good! Therefore I dedicated some time tweaking the volume of the head, not touching the topology or any of the features, but simply correcting shapes, getting closer to the actual reference. I didn’t use anything special here, just toyed with vol. selection and a bit of paint deformations was also used. Once the head was done, I modeled the additional objects, such as the eyes, the jumper, the skicap, the ski-pass band etc... It was pretty much straight forward. No wizardry here :-) I used the very same techniques with the help of Orionflame (www.orionflame.com), which is a totally cool modeling plug-in for 3ds Max, that speeds up your modeling by giving you access to a much wider set of modeling and selection tools.