I set up some planes of my character, the side view and front view to help me in getting the right positioning for my character. I started the main torso first, I decided early on I would model separate bits and stitch them together to help me model better and faster.
I made the body out of a cube and extruded it along and down to make the arm, torso and legs. The head I considered making out of a cube but it proved far too difficult so I made it out of a plane. This is my first time modelling a human character so I looked up a few tutorials online to help me and I found a very good one on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xls25e08sSg
The head began to take shape nicely. I added hair, which was another separate plane, I kept most bits separate for now so that if it needed changing it was easy to do so and I didn't have to worry about moving parts I didn't want too.
Once she took shape, I worked a lot in smooth mode so that I could see what she would look like finished, going back and forth between smoothed and unsmoothed so I could change vertices if needed.
This was when she was very close to completion. I had stitched her head, hands and feet to the main body, the tail, skirt and eyes I left separate. Once I had mirrored the geometry I would combine all the meshes to make one model. I tweaked her now and then until I was happy.
And this is the finished, untextured model. I'm really happy with how she turned out. This is the first time I've ever made a character in Maya, and I'm rather proud, I can see some imperfections here and there, but for my very first try I'm happy with the out come. I had to change her design a little. I was getting very close to the poly count limit and I was worried that I would go over so I decided against giving her a hood, for fear of going over the limit and to leave some polys free if I needed to alter her in anyway.
About half way through modelling I changed her hand. the hand on the left was my first attempt and in my opinion it was very poor, I really didn't like it, so I decided to try it again.
Originally I did a quick extrude from a cube to make the hand on the left. but it looked really poor and I couldn't alter it much so I went looking for information to properly model a hand.
I found another tutorial by the same person who did the face modelling earlier on in this post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1mExXURsWk
I found that tutorial the most helpful out of the ones I watched. and the hand on the right is the end result and is MUCH better than before, it looks more realistic and has more definition.
For my 3D print I had to decide what I wanted to print, originally I was going to print all of her out but after asking some friends for their opinions we thought it was best to not print her all out, she has very skinny arms and legs and probably wouldn't have survived the printing.
So seeing as she has no accessories it was best to do a bust of her. The image above is the model I made for printing, it took me AGES to stitch her together, her head was made from 3 separate parts so I had to painstakingly stitch her hair and eyes to her head so that there were no holes. That was a long night followed by a lot of wrist cramping :(
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